It seems obvious to say this, but romantic comedies live or die on the chemistry between the couple at the show or movie’s center. If you don’t feel the chemistry between the characters or the actors playing them, it’s very hard to start rooting for them to succeed. But in rare cases, a rom-com has enough going on around the central couple to give them time to mesh. That’s the case with a new Netflix romcom starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody.
Opening Shot: Scenes of Los Angeles. A woman dashes out of a restaurant and shakes her head slightly as she strides down the block, phone in hand.
The Gist: Joanne (Kristen Bell) has just walked out on another terrible first date, with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) there to pick her up. Joanne details just what made her flee, which was her date’s unnatural attachment to his grandmother.
The two of them have a podcast called Nobody Wants This, where they talk about dating and sex. During the episode after Joanne’s latest dating disaster, Morgan starts to wonder if Joanne even wants to find someone, given the fact that as soon as she finds a flaw, she bails.
In the meantime, we see Noah Roklov (Adam Brody) with his older brother Sasha (Timothy Simons); they go to Noah’s house, and Noah’s girlfriend Rebecca (Emily Arlook) is already there. When Noah notices that she’s wearing the engagement ring he had locked away in a desk, he takes offense that she just “assumed” they were getting engaged. Rebecca’s presumptuousness was the last straw for them, as far as he was concerned.
Joanne is invited to a dinner party by her friend Ashley (Sherry Cola), and among the roster of guys she says will be there, Ashley mentions a rabbi. When Joanne gets there, in an vintage chinchilla coat just to be showy, she thinks she knows which person is the rabbi and tries to avoid him. But she’s charmed by Noah, whom she meets while he struggles to uncork some wine. It’s not until they’re around the dinner table that she finds out that he‘s the rabbi Ashley was talking about.
There’s certainly something between them, as we see when Noah walks Joanne to her car. But Joanne is firmly agnostic, and besides, a rabbi dating a non-Jew is not a good look. But Noah wants to see more of Joanne, and invites her to watch him give a sermon at Friday night Shabbat services. It doesn’t seem to bother him that his whole family — his mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), father Ilan (Paul Ben-Victor), Sasha and his wife Esther (Jackie Tohn) — will be there. In the middle of another horrible date, Joanna finds herself going to Noah’s synagogue, just in time for that sermon.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Nobody Wants This is a pretty classic TV rom-com, along the lines of other shows about unlikely couples like Colin From Accounts or Starstruck.
Our Take: Created by Erin Foster loosely based on her own marriage — she didn’t marry a rabbi but did convert to Judaism to marry her husband — there’s a lot to like about Nobody Wants This. Even the title makes sense, and not just because it’s also the title of Joanna and Morgan’s podcast. Nobody wants this relationship between Noah and Joanna; his family doesn’t approve, and Morgan thinks her sister is just setting herself up for disappointment again.
But dammit, the two of them are going to be determined to make it, despite making it is really against the odds for them. Besides the family disapproval, the big aspect is their religious and spiritual differences. Noah may be all things modern in a young rabbi, but he’s devoted to his job and to Judaism. What Joanna is devoted to, on the other hand, is being open about her dating and sex lives, but she’s definitely not a believer in God or an organized religion.
Whether we believe these two can make or not will fully depend on the chemistry between Bell and Brody. Yes, supporting players like Simons, Lupe, Tohn and Feldshuh do their part to make the story funny and not just about the Joanna and Noah. But we have to believe in Noah and Joanna as a couple, and through the first two episodes, we’re not quite there yet.
Normally, we’re in the tank for Bell, playing her usual smart, quippy, down-to-earth and flawed characters. Joanna is certainly flawed and quippy, but much cooler in temperament than what we’ve seen from Bell in recent years. Brody’s Noah feels like he has the perfect line in response to everything Joanna says. He’s too smooth by half, despite Brody being able to provide the right level of vulnerability as a guy who is trying to open himself up.
There wasn’t that instant spark between Bell and Brody that we might have expected in a rom-com like this. However, by the end of the second episode, Bell and Brody had us believing in the two of them being together. It took some slight conflict, with Joanna having her doubts right at the start. Perhaps that’s better, given the fact that we have an entire season — perhaps multiple seasons — to see their relationship go through ups and downs.
What we do appreciate is that Foster doesn’t try to weigh Noah or his family down in stereotypes. There are a few nods to American Judaism here and there, especially in the person of Noah’s mom, who is fiercely protective of her younger son. But for the most part, the comedy coming from the Roklovs is more about who they are individually than what their culture or religion is.
Sex and Skin: There’s talk about sex on Joanna and Morgan’s podcast, but that’s about it.
Parting Shot: When Noah meets Joanna after his sermon, Esther asks, “Who the hell is that,” and Bina disgustedly spits out, “It’s a shiksa!”
Sleeper Star: Simons shows in the second episode that playing, big goofy awkward guys is his forte. Sasha is a different kind of awkward than Jonah Ryan on Veep was, but he’s awkward nevertheless.
Most Pilot-y Line: A scene where Joanna mishears Ashley and thinks that Noah is a divorcee is straight out of the school of sitcom misunderstandings and it doesn’t seem to fit the tone of this show.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Even though we don’t completely buy the chemistry between Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, Nobody Wants This is funny enough, and the supporting characters robust enough, to keep us watching to see if Bell and Brody’s characters mesh a little better.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.