In its third season, Nobody Wants This gives up on Judaism.
The Netflix show, starring Adam Brody as the ultimate nice Jewish boy, Rabbi Noah Roklov, and Kristen Bell as Joanne, his shiksa — the show’s preferred term — girlfriend, has been accused, repeatedly, of doing Jews wrong. Its creator, Erin Foster, a fellow blonde who converted for her husband, has just as regularly defended her show as good for the Jews, a positive representation in a time of antisemitism, and has basically implied that anyone who didn’t like it just couldn’t take a joke.
But the complaints have been about more than jokes. Some of the issues were one-offs, like cheesy puns about a bad Jewish basketball team, the Matzo Ballers, that leaned into a stereotype of Jewish men being unathletic. Others pointed to bigger concerns, like when Noah’s mom, who is ostensibly observant, ate pork out of the trash when she thought no one was looking — was the show painting Jews as dishonest liars?
Or there was the time the show mixed up Tu B’Shvat — a holiday celebrating the birthday of trees — and Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning the destruction of the Temple. This sparked debates about whether the writers’ room had done enough to ensure basic cultural competency; the show’s Judaism seemed to rely on shallow signifiers, like a room full of menorahs, to shore up its identity. Foster may have claimed that she made the show to spread “positive Jewish stories,” but the writing has never engaged particularly deeply with Judaism.
Really, though, the biggest complaint across the first two seasons of Nobody Wants This was the Jewish women. Jewish men have often been presented as nebbishy or neurotic in the media, something Foster set out to change, but Jewish women have long gotten the short end of the stick, stereotype-wise, and the show not only doesn’t rehab that image, it worsens it. The Jewish mothers are critical and overbearing and too obsessed with their kids. The Jewish wives are simultaneously overbearing nags and prissy princesses. The non-Jewish women are somehow always cooler, more beautiful, crazy in a fun and quirky way instead of a shrewish one. Non-Jewish women might thirst after Jewish men and vice versa, but no one lusts after a Jewish woman.
Given that the entire concept of Nobody Wants This is a hot rabbi dating a shiksa, it should not surprise any readers that the issue of Jewish women is not solved in the third season. Yes, yes, the characters are all better developed; Esther, Noah’s sister-in-law (Jackie Tohn), who was once mean, is sort of endearingly cranky and wry, and they’ve started putting her in much better outfits. Noah’s mom, Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), is as overbearing as ever — in fact she actually acts even crazier than ever before — but she is much nicer to Joanne. But the Jewish women are still not good enough for the Jewish men. And this season, Joanne is converting, so she can even beat Jewish women at their own game.
Putting all that aside, however, the new season of Nobody Wants This is kind of delightful. And that was, in part, thanks to making this season far less Jewish, or at least less overtly focused on it.
That’s not to say it has no Jewish elements; Noah is still a rabbi, Joanne is, as mentioned earlier, converting in a class led by Sarah Silverman, who nails the role — unsurprisingly, given that her real-life sister Susan is a rabbi. But the conversion class is as focused on work drama than what everyone is learning about Judaism. Noah and Joanne have moved in together and have a housewarming party where they hang a mezuzah on their door frame, but the episode is more about Joanne’s ex who lives next-door. The couple tries out a tech-free Shabbat, but they spend it smoking weed, not walking to synagogue or otherwise doing anything particularly Jewish.
That turns out to be the season’s strength. It isn’t trying to demonstrate specifically Jewish family dynamics, nor does it shoehorn Jewish traditions into each episode. Instead, one plot line focuses on Noah’s attempt to navigate between his mom’s vision for his life, Joanne’s and his own — a universal topic, since parents across cultures feel deeply personally engaged in their kids’ major life events. Another storyline takes on dating, reinventing and moving on after a breakup, as Esther and Sascha, Noah’s brother, try to figure out coparenting, new hairstyles and what they really want out of life. (Though it feels odd, and like a bit of a plot hole, that Esther doesn’t seem to care about dating Jewish, even though she was very hostile to Noah dating a non-Jew in season one.)
Though Nobody Wants This has occasionally managed nice little sermonizing moments on the deeper meaning of various holidays or ideas, it has stumbled when it has tried to make Jewish Representation the show’s identity. Besides, Jews are diverse, both in religious observance level and cultural background. The show was doomed from the start if it was meant to be some sort of ur-text to represent American Jewish life in the 2020s; Jews aren’t a monolith, and design for everyone is bad design. A Syrian Jew was never going to feel seen, nor was a Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi.
In its third season, the show’s Judaism is about exactly what it is: a Reform L.A. rabbi and a woman who is (finally) converting for him. There’s an episode about Joanne’s last Christmas and her attachment to the holiday; Noah tries to make her final celebration of it the most festive one ever, and it’s a deeply sweet episode despite its total dearth of Jewish content. That’s a story worth telling, and something many converts likely feel, and a rabbi celebrating Christmas is also not the average Jewish experience.
There are, still, to be fair, plenty of issues. Noah cops to drinking coffee on Yom Kippur, which I think a lot of people will be upset about — a rabbi unable to properly observe the most holy day of the year? What’s wrong with these people? But now that the show doesn’t feel as though it’s trying to represent American Jews to the rest of the world, that seems less harmful.
Besides, the best Jewish TV has always been TV about Jews who are doing other things — Seinfeld or Broad City are no less Jewish for focusing on the general misadventures of young people living in New York. Jews live life outside of Judaism. In this season, Nobody Wants This hits its stride by giving up on clunky explanations of Judaism for the wider world; we barely see Noah at the bima. Instead of Jewish holidays, we see Christmas. Nobody Wants This was always, truly, a sweet rom-com about a guy who happens to be Jewish, and his girlfriend who happens to be converting. Nobody wanted a spokesperson in the form of a Netflix show anyway.
The post ‘Nobody Wants This’ is getting less and less Jewish appeared first on The Forward.