Nobody Wants This: Kristen Bell And Adam Brody Bring Big Chemistry to An L.A. Love Story
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B
What if you took a rom com with all its tropes and moves and snappy dialogue and, instead of the average movie length of about 90 minutes, turned it into a 10-episode TV series?
Nobody Wants This answers the question: Thanks to the right mix of good writing and terrific casting, it’s pretty charming. A good amount of that is due to its talented and charismatic leads, Kristen Bell and Adam Brody.
Bell plays Joanne, a sharp, smart, single woman in Los Angeles looking for love, for both personal and professional reasons. She and her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) have a podcast called Nobody Wants This, where they talk bluntly about the search for a relationship, gents that Joanne has dated, and other things related to love and sex. Joanne’s lack of success at dating is working for them, at least professionally.
They’re both gorgeous and seem successful. They have an agent, the wry Ashley (Sherry Cola), and she has interest from a big podcast company that could open doors to more projects that would build the sisters’ brand. Even still, love is elusive.
It’s at a dinner party thrown by Ashley that Joanne meets the newly single Noah (Brody) in the requisite “meet cute.” From the start, the two have chemistry to burn. And it’s not just first-look chemistry that flares up then dies. There’s something more going on here.
Noah is a rabbi. He’s a wry, modern guy who loves his job and the community. He’s steady, and the kind of person who lives from his heart. He’s also very cute: the teenage girls in the congregation call him Hot Rabbi.
Joanne is agnostic and not Jewish. Neither she nor Noah care about that. But of course, that difference is going to be one of the glitches they’ll have to face down.
The series is created by Erin Foster, daughter of music superstar David Foster, and it’s based on her own life. She’s now married to a rabbi, and says the process of finding love transformed her from someone who felt cynical to someone who appreciated the joy of a healthy relationship.
That’s so wholesome! But in a comedy, that could be a liability. And yet, hat-tip to Foster and her writers. Without skimping on the kind of humour that adds the right amount of edge to the story of two people falling in love, this team has written funny, clever, sharp dialogue, and a story with enough jeopardy and tension to keep us engaged.
Every rom com needs a couple of second bananas and an eccentric family member or two. And those roles are wonderfully cast. Tovah Feldshuh plays Noah’s tough mom, Bina. Timothy Simons from Veep plays Noah’s brother Sasha, who forms a weird alliance with Joanne’s sister Morgan, who isn’t sure to make of what’s happening to her former fussy sister and is skeptical and suspicious.
The series does have a few issues. Because it’s following a rom-com formula stretched over 10 episodes, the rhythm can feel off. For instance, comic asides that would land in a movie or be punctuated by a laugh in a sitcom are in danger of getting lost.
Watching Joanne and Noah fall deeper in love and seeing Joanne's defences begin to crumble is fun. And no matter what the series is doing, at the centre are these two charismatic leads playing smart, open, vulnerable, people navigating the potential of finding elusive true love.
And this likely won’t be the last we see of them. The ending tells us they’ve already plotted out Season 2.
Nobody Wants This. Created by Erin Foster. Starring Kristin Bell, Adam Brody, Timothy Simons, Justine Lupe, and Tovah Feldshuh. On Netflix starting September 26.