The romantic comedy by Kristen Bell and Adam Brody

For many viewers, Netflix Nobody wants it It will be as entertaining as a conventional and often cute romantic comedy.

Sure, it’s extremely sitcom-y at every turn, but stars Kristen Bell and Adam Brody have an easy, instantly explosive chemistry that says, “In 2004, we were every smart TV fan’s favorite sarcastic high school couple, and now, 20 years later, we’re ready to be treated like adults and have everyone notice how well we’ve aged.” Bell and Brody are joined by a supporting cast of scene-stealing veterans, and creator Erin Foster has also given their story a specificity that sets it apart from the usual meet-cute about mismatched lovers.

Specificity, however, brings with it a certain amount of responsibility. It's not that I want to get stuck in an internal monologue of “is this good for the Jews?”, but if you're like me (and most of you, admittedly, aren't), it's inevitable. This is where you engage with Nobody wants it it becomes a more controversial thing.

As much as I am inclined and predisposed to appreciate any comedy in which the romantic male protagonist calls a love encounter “bashert,” in which celebrating the rituals of havdalah are treated as foreplay, in which jokes about gefilte fish abound, Nobody wants it It leans heavily on stereotypes and sitcom tropes. Sometimes it turns those all-too-familiar bits of representation on their head, but just as often it doesn’t.

While the series, which made an admirable effort to cast Jewish actors in most of its key roles, never actually gets anti-Semitic, it certainly excuses shades of anti-Semitism as amusing character quirks.

Based somewhat on Foster's real-life experiences, not the ones involving suddenly finding herself with Katharine McPhee as a stepmother, the romantic comedy stars Bell as Joanne, who alternates between going out with disastrous first dates and recounting those disastrous first dates to her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) on their podcast, Nobody wants it(That’s a bad title for a podcast, and a bad title for a TV show.) Those unfortunate outings are key to the success of their show, which Joanne insists is about empowerment but everyone else thinks is mostly about sex.

Nothing is worse for the podcast, then, than Joanne falling in love. But that’s exactly what she does when she meets Noah (Brody). He’s fresh out of his almost-engagement to Rebecca (Emily Arlook), realizing that the relationship was what she wanted and what her family wanted and what everyone expected of him, but not what he truly wanted.

Noah is funny and modest and generally super cool and definitely different from any man Joanne has dated before, because he's also a rabbi. But nothing is worse for a rabbi than falling in love with a shiksa, and Joanne certainly is one.

“Technically it’s a Yiddish slur that means you’re impure and detestable, but nowadays it just means you’re blonde, attractive, and non-Jewish,” Noah explains to Joanne.

“That’s actually a perfect description of me,” replies Joanne, who has no real spiritual system and, despite living in Los Angeles, has a rather striking indifference to all things Jewish.

Noah is a junior rabbi at what appears to be a fairly Reform congregation. The high-level position is within his reach, but dating a non-Jew might be a hurdle. At least, it seems like it will be a problem for his family, including his immigrant parents Bina (Tovah Feldshuh) and Ilan (Paul Ben-Victor). Noah’s goofy younger brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) has no objections, but Sasha’s wife Esther (Jackie Tohn), one of Rebecca’s best friends, is quite resentful of both of them.

Structurally, Nobody wants it does nothing special. There have been more than a few times where I've written, “Are they really doing THIS tired plot?” True, being on Netflix allows for a detour to a sex toy store to be more graphic than if it were on, say, CBS. But a flimsy farce is a flimsy farce, and this show is content to be that with some regularity. Expect a lot of misunderstandings and overly predictable misunderstandings.

First weekend getaway goes south? Checked! The female protagonist gets questionable advice to play hard to get and not leave the man she's starting to love behind her? Checked! First meetings with various family members go embarrassingly wrong? Double-checked! The dialogue has a nice crackle and there are some semi-fresh ideas: I liked “The Ick,” referring to that moment when a new love does something small but strange that permanently alters the way you see them. But this is generally a much more conventional take than recent revisionist romances like You are the worst OR Colin of Accounting.

It's the Jewish thing that gives Nobody wants it its limit, and I could easily go over the countless things the show does well, from an episode set in a Jewish summer camp to various throwaway jokes and details about religious underpinnings. When it comes to stereotypes, there's some good-natured poking fun at Noah's basketball team, the Matzah Ballers, and his interactions with his boss (the always great Stephen Tobolowsky).

But there’s far less warmth in the treatment of Bina, who remains stuck on a single note that I fear Feldshuh has played far too many times. No one will say that the “Jewish boys and their codependent relationships with their mothers” trope is devoid of occasional truth, but it’s disheartening to see it treated so brusquely in 2024, and in such predictable contrast to the show’s fondness for Ben-Victor’s Ilan.

The way Judaism plays into this couple's hands is, again, something that absolutely has some basis in reality, and specifically Foster's reality. After enough of these misadventures, though, they stop feeling like one person's actual experiences and more like the accumulated experiences of a writers' room.

The biggest victim of this excess is Joanne, whose general ignorance about all things Jewish quickly goes from seeming pleasantly insular to willfully ignorant. Like if you’re a podcast host dating a rabbi and he’s bothered to listen to your podcast about sex, but you haven’t even apparently Googled “What does a rabbi do?” the appeal diminishes. It’s one thing for her to not know what “shalom” means, and it’s another for her to not know what “shabbat” is (a week after, in the pilot, she attended a Shabbat service at her temple). Or bringing a beautifully curated charcuterie board to a family gathering, several weeks or maybe months into a relationship, without stopping to ask, “Is there pork in this?”

But all these things? Maybe he's not trying as hard as he should, but in all this time, how could he not be streaming Fiddler on the Roof out of pure curiosity? If this disinterest were a clear choice of characterization, I might even agree, but it is not.

Morgan might be worse, actually. While Joanne probably isn't aware of it on the page, Morgan might be actively anti-Semitic, cracking jokes about how Jews tend to look and having sex through the sheets. Because Lupe is just ridiculously funny, especially for anyone who can contrast her much more Jew-curious character in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel —and because she and Bell have such a great, sharp rapport, I laughed at some of these jokes, but I never stopped to think that there was a lot of charm-washing going on. The actresses in the cast are 10 percent less appealing than Bell and Lupe, and I’m pretty sure Joanne and Morgan are perceived as bad guys.

This goes both ways, mind you. A joke or two about Joanne being a shiksa? Funny and real! Ten or 15 jokes about Joanne being a shiksa? At that point, it’s a reminder that “shiksa” is, in fact, an insult, and bullying is very rarely, in and of itself, funny. You do better by digging deeper!

But if you don't dig deeper, you can just watch this as a love story in which one participant is sure of who they are and who they want to be and the other remains a work in progress. Simple stuff, but reliable. Stripped of concern for specificity, you can just enjoy watching Brody and Bell flirt for 10 half-hour episodes, which they do delightfully.

The back-and-forth between Sasha and Morgan, especially when they realize they’re both the “loser siblings” in their respective families, is also a reliable source of laughs, even if the narrative is quick to put the characters in what I only suggest should have been a third- or fourth-season position. As far as stealth MVPs go, Shiloh Bearman stands out because her character, Sasha and Esther’s bat mitzvah-aged daughter, has separate scenes with Joanne, Sasha, and Esther that humanize each character.

I wish the series had made more use of Sherry Cola as Joanne and Morgan's podcasting colleague, both as hilarious as Cola was in Joy Ride and because the podcasting part of the story is really, really small.

This plot is just one of many places Nobody wants it has room to grow into a second season that I would still like to see, despite my reservations. In response to the show's title, it's not that I don't want it. I actually want it a lot. But referencing a completely unrelated romantic comedy… that's tricky.