At Netflix, always at the forefront of streaming, releasing entire seasons of television in which basically nothing happens is fast becoming an art. Other streamers may try, but nobody is doing it like the Tudum factory. Who else would have the nerve to come out with seasons upon seasons of Emily in Paris that always end up in the same place—with Emily at a romantic and professional crossroads, bien sûr—or the audacity to bestow viewers with a new season of one of its reality real-estate franchises in which no one manages to so much as sell a house? And so it’s disappointing but not shocking that this chutzpah has extended to Nobody Wants This, the rom-com series that just returned for a second season on Thursday. It’s an achievement in nothingness: Essentially zero happens over the course of 10 episodes.
The first season of the comedy, which told the story of a rabbi and a secular Los Angeles gal falling for each other, was a surprise hit for Netflix last fall, topping its most-watched list for weeks. Stars Adam Brody (as Noah, a rabbi) and Kristen Bell (as Joanne, a girl who has a podcast) proved powerful draws, especially for millennials who have been following them since their breakout roles in aughts teen shows The O.C. and Veronica Mars, respectively. At the end of the season, Noah and Joanne couldn’t agree about whether Joanne would convert to Judaism, so they almost broke up, but instead they reunited with a dramatic kiss and kicked the can to Season 2.
Season 2 picks up with the couple still at an impasse over whether Joanne will convert … and pretty much camps out there all season. The last episode, incredibly, retreads many of the elements of the first season’s finale, down to the couple almost breaking up during a party over the religion issue but then getting back together anyway, without having made a decision. How many times are we going to do this? Though I remain annoyed by its late-breaking cinematic ambitions, another recent romance-forward show, Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, could have been an instructive example here. There’s going to be a limit to how long you can keep a show with this sort of premise going—why not aim for a tight three or four seasons, with each one actually moving the story forward, and stick to it? We simply cannot spend another season on this nonsense, because it turns out the only thing more irritating than an extended love triangle might just be an extended will-they-or-won’t-they between a girl and a religion.
For a show that’s so centered on Judaism, Nobody Wants This also has a curious relationship to it and religion in general. Its first season was criticized, fairly in my view, for its depiction of Jewish women as overbearing and closed-minded. Season 2 softens the most obnoxious characters, Noah’s mother and sister-in-law, which is nice, I guess, but leaves even fewer meager plot scraps to be stretched across 10 episodes. I’m not saying it should bring back the casual antisemitism so we can at least have some conflict, but the thought did cross my mind.
The main thing I marvel at, though, is how frequently Nobody Wants This itself seems to forget entirely that it’s supposed to be about a rabbi. That’s how little it concerns itself with what that might actually entail. This makes some sense on a biographical level. The show was loosely based on the real-life experience of creator Erin Foster, who was a gentile when she fell for the husband she eventually converted for. (Foster was joined this season by new showrunners Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan.) But an important distinction: Her now-husband was just some Jewish guy, not a rabbi. Dramatization demands a certain upping of the stakes, it’s true, but there’s a huge difference between getting involved with a guy who happens to be Jewish and a guy who has organized his life around his faith, and this show never manages to convince me it’s given much thought to the latter.
If the show’s depiction of religion is wanting, maybe it’s something that it’s at least engaging me philosophically. I’m asking big questions. Does it matter how empty this all feels? Or does that make it even better background viewing for a phone-scrolling session? See you right back here for Season 3.
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