Adam Brody and Kristen Bell in Nobody Wants This. Photo by Stefania Rosini/Netflix

By Mira Fox October 11, 2024

Apparently everybody wanted Netflix’s hot rabbi rom-com Nobody Wants This; the show has already been watched by millions and renewed for a second season less than one month after its debut.

Viewers swooned over Adam Brody as the rabbi dating a non-Jewish woman, and his chemistry with Kristen Bell, who plays the girlfriend, Joanne. Jews, however, had complaints. 

The rabbi, though hot and charming, is framed as an anomaly in a religion otherwise portrayed as strange and off-putting. The Jewish women in the show are nagging shrews who serve as foils to set off the hot, fun, very blonde shiksas — a pejorative term the show deploys liberally — to whom the Jewish men are inexorably drawn. Just to name a few of the tropes at play.

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When The Los Angeles Times asked the show’s creator, Erin Foster, about her unflattering portrayal of Jews, she said that, having already made her rabbi a hot guy who smokes weed — “that’s the antithesis of how people view a Jewish rabbi, right?”— she wanted to avoid criticism for inaccuracies.

I know plenty of rabbis who smoke weed. And as a fun (and blonde!) Jewish woman, I don’t think Foster’s heavily stereotyped Jewish women were very accurate. But since we are getting more of Nobody Wants This anyway, let me offer a few more suggestions for next season, which Foster has said she hopes will focus on the conversion process.

Let’s see Joanne put in some effort 

I actually think that Joanne’s decision not to convert for Noah at the end of the last season is one of the better moments in the show; she explains that she doesn’t want to just convert to keep her relationship, because Judaism is more than a hobby to join because your boyfriend is into it. I agree!

But other than that insight, we see Joanne put very little effort into understanding Judaism — she still doesn’t know what shalom means, crosses herself at synagogue and goes to Shabbat camp with Noah without Googling what Shabbat is.

So if Joanne indeed begins to consider conversion, let’s see her actually, you know, consider it. In fact, I’d love to see her, at least briefly, become more observant than Noah. It’s actually fairly common for converts to end up feeling closer to Judaism than those born into it, who can take it for granted. 

For example, I’d love to watch Joanne decide to stop driving on Shabbat in LA, a famously unwalkable city. Maybe she ends up hiking along the edge of a highway to get to Noah’s house, or gets lost in her own neighborhood without the assistance of Google Maps. Or she accidentally turns off a light switch by reflex and then, newly zealous about keeping Shabbat, staggers around in the dark for the rest of the night.

But I hope the show would also avoid cheap jokes about Shabbat elevators. Instead, this could be an opportunity to add nuance, like a conversation between Joanne and her sister about how practices others might find strange hold beauty in the way they force you to take a step outside the vicissitudes of modern life.

Tell us about Noah’s parents’ immigrant experience

There’s a lot of damage that’s already been done with the character of Rabbi Noah’s mother, played by Tovah Feldshuh as a cruel hypocrite who shames Joanne for bringing prosciutto to Shabbat lunch, then later eats cured pork out of the trash.

It’s next to impossible to totally walk that back, but the show could give us a deeper understanding of why the character is so prickly. Besides, Tovah Feldshuh is amazing; give her more to work with!

We already learned that Noah’s parents immigrated from the Soviet Union, where Jews often had to hide their Jewishness; Noah’s parents’ observance, and their desire for their children to marry Jewish women, is probably a reaction to their inability to practice freely in their own youth.

Let’s hear Feldshuh talk about her character’s upbringing, which could inform viewers about the trials of the Jewish diaspora. And it could also tie in the prosciutto incident; many Soviet Jews actually ate pork. Perhaps she and Joanne can bond over their shared guilty pleasure: bacon.

Get into the interfaith thing more

Though the first season of Nobody Wants This made a lot of drama over Noah and Joanne’s interfaith relationship, including frequently remarking how it just couldn’t possibly work, a lot — and I mean a lot — of Jews are in successful interfaith relationships. 

Reform rabbis, which Noah presumably is, are allowed to officiate interfaith marriages; several denominations allow their rabbis to be intermarried themselves.

It’s probably true that, as a rabbi, Noah might face some pushback about his relationship from older clergy and synagogue members. But the younger generation would probably feel really seen and included if their rabbi was in an interfaith relationship himself. I’d love to see some synagogue members come up to Noah and Joanne and get excited about being represented on the bimah.

Let’s fix the Jewish women

Esther, Noah’s sister-in-law, gets utterly shafted by the writing in the show. She’s sort of funny, but she’s also a huge nag and openly nasty to Joanne, calling her “whore #1” and Joanne’s sister “whore #2.”

The only time we see her being truly caring is at her daughter Miriam’s bat mitzvah. In season two, I want to see more of Esther with her daughter, figuring out how to raise Miriam Jewish in a way she finds meaningful.

And, as far as Rebecca, Noah’s ex-girlfriend, it’s not really clear why she’s in the show except to look crazy, but since she’s here, let’s work with it. In the first season, Rebecca talks about how much she wanted to be a rabbi’s wife — maybe in season two she realizes that what she really wanted was to be a rabbi herself! 

Let’s see Rebecca go to rabbinical school and realize she doesn’t need a man to achieve her dreams. Plus she and Joanne can bond over all the Jewish fun facts they’re learning through their parallel Jewish journeys as Joanne converts and Rebecca pursues ordination.

Besides, the ex and the current girlfriend having an enemies-to-lovers arc is perfect romcom fodder. See? Taking Judaism seriously doesn’t mean the show has to be a drag. Let’s hope Nobody Wants That realizes that in season two.

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