There's a meet-the-parents scene in the new Netflix series "Nobody Wants This" where Adam Brody's Noah arrives at his girlfriend Joanne's house (played by Kristen Bell), wearing a sports coat and carrying an oversized bouquet of sunflowers. Joanne is so appalled by his efforts that she decides they need to break up.
Before she can end things, Noah confronts Joanne and says he's not going to apologize for wanting to make a good impression with her parents.
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“You can self-sabotage all you want but, honestly I think you should get over it,” Noah says to a shocked Joanne.
Erin Foster, the show's creator and showrunner, says when she met her husband, Simon Tikhman, in 2018, she realized “finding the right person can be hard.
“When you’re with the wrong person, everything is their fault," said Foster. “You pick someone who’s cheating and lying and disrespecting you and it’s like you’re perfect. When someone shows up who is healthy and accountable, you start to realize all the things that you do that’s bad in a relationship.”
In “Nobody Wants This,” Joanne is a single woman who hosts a podcast with her sister (Justine Lupe). Their schtick is to talk candidly about their dating and breakup stories. Even a bad date is good fodder for the sisters to discuss.
When Joanne meets Noah, sparks immediately fly between the two. Noah's life goal is to be named head rabbi at his synagogue. He is aware that getting serious with Joanne would be a major issue but ignores it for the time being. In the meantime, Joanne identifies as non-denominational and their religious differences seem like no big deal.
Over time as Noah's family and the synagogue begins to pressure him over his relationship, he asks Joanne if she would be willing to convert.
“Erin Foster has created a dynamic where these characters — the world does not want them together. And what does that mean if they want to be together,” said Bell, who does not practice religion. “There’s like endless storyline to mine about the interpersonal relationship between two people who probably shouldn’t be together if the world were to have its say.”
Foster argues that when a couple meets when they’re more settled in their own lives, sometimes they both need to adjust. “I don’t think it’s responsible to show women in 2024 that, 'All you have to do to find your perfect person is to change everything about yourself.' That’s not the message I want to send. But I also want you to look at the idea that it is OK sometimes to change some things about yourself, to fit a person who’s also going to change things about themselves."
To write about Judaism accurately, Foster enlisted the help of her own rabbi, who “read every script," she said. "Listen, ... I’m sure some Reddit forum could find things that we did wrong if they want to. You have to let a few small things go because it's TV.”
Brody, who grew up Jewish but defines himself as agnostic, says it was “interesting and a fun avenue" to explore someone who is different from himself and deeply committed to their religion.
“Noah is a spiritual person who spent the majority of his life studying this subject. That’s who he is. I got excited about that, actually,” he said.
Foster recalls Brody saying, ‘"It’s important to me if I play a rabbi that he is not like me. He has got to be all in. He is a believer. He is not like, a one foot in, one foot out kind of person...' When he said it, I thought that would be such a great characteristic, because it’s cool to say to a girl you’re flirting with who doesn’t believe in God, 'Yeah, maybe I do, maybe I don’t.' But he doesn’t do that. He’s like, ‘No. This is who I am.’"
Production on the series was underway on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants launched a massive deadly attack on Israel. Foster said there was a conscious decision not to write that into the show.
“After Oct. 7, there were questions like, ‘Are we going to bring this up? Are we going to acknowledge it?’ And the truth is, I always felt very confident that this is not the show to try to solve any issues that are happening in the world. I’m not the right person to tell that story because I don’t live in Israel and I didn’t grow up Jewish. It’s not responsible for me to pretend like I know what that experience would be like.” Instead, she's happy to tell a positive Jewish story especially at a time when people feel overlooked and not seen.
Added Bell, who is also an executive producer, “I didn’t think we needed to put it in the show because the subject matter could be replaced with any label of people who shouldn’t be together. The importance of it wasn’t necessarily their individual labels, but the fact that their labels conflicted.”