There have been three genuinely cute meet-cutes in my viewing life. One was when Harry met Sally (whatever he and she thought of it and each other at the time. You guys!). The second was the dog-injuring boob flash in Colin from Accounts (you really had to be there) two years ago. The third is between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody) in the new Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This.
Lemme tell you – everybody wants this. It’s the funniest, sweetest, most scabrous, most romantic, most real thing we’ve seen since – well, since Colin from Accounts. Bell plays a freewheeling thirtysomething woman who hosts an increasingly successful podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) about sex and relationships (latest episode – Dildo’s and Dildon’ts). She is as agnostic-pretty-much-atheist as the next thirtysomething gentile-about-town. Brody plays a rabbi who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend who, along with both their families, expected him to propose imminently. Noah is a progressive rabbi but one who still – “though I play up the Torah bad boy vibe” – is clear that he is “all in on this thing”. He and Joanne meet at a party and the attraction is instant, mutual and ever more difficult to resist. It is also that rarest thing – utterly convincing to the audience.
Brody and Bell have worked together before and are friends in real life, which surely helps, but their on-screen chemistry – in the romantic scenes, sure, but more importantly and even more potently in the bantering, teasing conversations in between – is something special and a joy to watch. “Can you have sex?” she asks him as he escorts her to her car. “Yes. That’s priests. We’re just normal people. And we’re trying to repopulate a people, you know?” A little later she tells him to: “Say something rabbinical.” He leans in towards her … “Fiddler on the roof.” “Don’t be funny,” she replies. “It’s not helping.” By this point I am already prepared to sacrifice my favourite pet to make sure these two end up together. Bell and Brody are accomplished comic and dramatic actors in their own rights but together they are even more than the sum of their parts.
And they are surrounded by a fantastic supporting cast. First among equals is Lupe – so understatedly wonderful as Willa in Succession – as Joanna’s slightly more jaded sister and co-presenter. The fact that it is the two of them against a terrible dating world and their parents (“Dad’s gay and Mom is still in love with him”) diminishes their truth-telling and bickering not a jot. “Joanne was a lesbian for a year,” Morgan tells potential podcast investors, sparking off another squabble. “That’s where she really thrived.” You would listen avidly to their podcast.
Noah has a brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons, a bear of a man with the nimblest imaginable comic timing) who has all of Noah’s warmth, less of his intellectualising and is happily married to – and equally happily terrorised by – his Jewish wife Esther (Jackie Tohn) and their children. Their deep, underlying marital harmony is as convincingly rendered as every other part of the show. It’s always refreshing to see a comedy that doesn’t feel the need to denigrate the settled state of affairs just because its protagonists are still at the initial, more obviously exciting stage.
Creator Erin Foster’s evident love for and care with her characters, alongside the fact that the show is born of her own experience of falling in love as a non-Jew with a Jewish man (not a rabbi, but she converted for him), plus a script touched by greatness, means she can get away with jokes that might otherwise seem to sail too close to the wind. A now-almost-traditional faux pas – the private text inadvertently broadcast over Bluetooth speakers in the car, this time from Morgan to Joanne about how Noah doesn’t look Jewish, while Sasha is “brutal” – detonates an explosion of comebacks from the delighted brothers. “There are some very attractive Jews! Ever seen a young Mandy Patinkin?” “Does my brother not look like he could control the media?” demands Sasha. “I apologise for my sister,” says Joanne, sitting in the passenger seat next to Morgan. “With whom I have since cut ties.”
Beneath it all, the emotional stakes feel real. The pair’s different cultures, the lack of faith versus religion as a guiding force, the disapproval of families, potential ostracism, the possible impact on Noah’s career, the circumscription of Joanne’s freedom if she did become a rabbi’s wife – these are genuine problems, obstacles to happiness with no obvious answers. But I shall be with them to what I hope will not be a bitter end. As do my pets.
• Nobody Wants This is on Netflix now
