'Nobody Wants This' Review: TV's First Great Podcast Rom-com
By Nicholas Quah, a Vulture critic who covers podcasts, television, and pop culture
The occupation of print journalist used to be enough to conjure a patina of glamour around rom-com protagonists caught up in some charming adventure: Julia Roberts was a feared restaurant critic in My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Kate Hudson tried to scam Matthew McConaughey in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days because she needed copy. But these days it makes more sense for contemporary iterations of these characters to be a YouTuber, a TikTok creator, or dare I say, a podcaster. Hollywood hasn’t yet created enduring examples of the first two, but when it comes to the latter, you could argue we have one major figure in Carrie Bradshaw, who traded her Sex and the City newspaper column for a microphone in sequel series And Just Like That … Bradshaw is an iffy choice, though, because while the series takes place squarely in the present, it very much retains the franchise’s turn-of-the-millennium soul, from its jokes and pacing right down to its retro take on its heroine’s digital vocation. They might call what she does a podcast, but really, it’s a radio show.
All of which is to say that And Just Like That … isn’t quite the modern take on the glamorous media rom-com protagonist you — or I, at least — have been pining for. But you know what comes pretty close? Nobody Wants This, the compulsively watchable new Netflix rom-com series featuring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody as the duo in the central rom. Bell plays Joanne, a perennially single podcaster who meets Noah, an exceedingly chill rabbi fresh off a long engagement, played by Adam Brody. The two flirt and develop an attraction, but as you would expect, a major hurdle prevents these very attractive individuals from immediately getting their happily ever after: Noah might be a chill rabbi, but since Joanne is what you’d call a gentile, the pairing encounters resistance from his mother and interferes with his synagogue duties. Complications and consternation ensue as the two try to figure out a future — or if a future together is even possible.
As constructed by series creator Erin Foster, who converted to Judaism through her own marriage, Nobody Wants This is an intriguing if somewhat insubstantial spin on the interethnic love story. In theory, the show codes a little more like Look Who’s Coming to Dinner than My Big Fat Greek Wedding in that there is a distinct clash between Joanne’s atheist worldview and Noah’s religious one, but that tension is played more like a broader cultural difference than anything specific pertaining to Noah’s Judaism. Indeed, the series doesn’t really engage with Noah’s beliefs much at all, which is peculiar, since the dude is literally a rabbi. It feels like what you’d get if you took Fleabag’s sexual tension with the Hot Priest and totally Netflix’d the thing: Strip out the spikiness, sand down the details, and wrap the entire package in the grease of a gourmet cheeseburger.
This is not criticism, by the way. Nobody Wants This means to serve up a good time, and that’s precisely what it delivers. There’s a real frisson to the way the show goes down so smoothly. Bell and Brody possess chemistry that’s simply bursting at the seams, and the show honors the fantasy of its genre by keeping the interpersonal conflict to an absolute minimum. Joanne and Noah scarcely clash, and even a midseason episode where Joanne’s attraction to Noah is threatened by his eagerness to please her parents barely registers as a stumbling block.
Nobody Wants This also has the distinction of being the first show without a murder in it to extract genuine narrative utility from its protagonist being a podcaster. Together with her sister Morgan, played by Justine Lupe, Joanne hosts a chatcast in the public-confessional mold of early Call Her Daddy. (It’s based, in part, on Foster’s own podcast that she similarly hosts with her sister, The World’s First Podcast.) This setup gives Nobody Wants This a nice texture and a solid framework for episode-by-episode material: The series starts out with the two sisters gunning for some big Spotify deal, Joanne lugs Noah along to a sex toy shop to pick up a vibrator for a host-read ad, and eventually, the podcast becomes a point of tension between the sisters, as Morgan accuses Joanne of lacking juicy material to talk about once her relationship with Noah grows comfortable. (Those familiar with Kristen Bell’s personal life will probably get a kick out of the meta-layer at play: Her real-life husband is Dax Shepard, host of the wildly popular Armchair Expert podcast.) There’s probably an even more episodic sitcom to be designed around the confessional chatcaster, but Nobody Wants This nevertheless illustrates how well the archetype plugs into the rhythms of an easy, low-stakes world.
Lupe, by the way, is truly excellent as Morgan, who balances out Bell’s natural bubbliness with a wry, chaotic sensibility that feels like an expansion of Willa, her character in Succession. In a stroke of genius, Nobody Wants This pairs her quite a bit with the ever-reliable Timothy Simons, who appears as Noah’s married brother Sasha. The two produce an endearingly odd dynamic that only feints in the direction of a more dramatic situation, but it’s enough to make you wonder what this show would be like with these two actors in the lead instead.
As much as Lupe and Simons occasionally threaten to run away with Nobody Wants This, though, it is Brody who emerges as the unimpeachable highlight. It’s been a tough road for Brody-heads of late, as the actor hasn’t had many roles that have made good use of his specific charisma. He’s had a decent run in recent years playing a little slimy, stealing scenes as a cad in Fleishman Is in Trouble and drawing out pathos as a doubting son of a murderous family in the 2019 horror-comedy Ready or Not. But there’s a reason he broke out as The OC’s sweet and nerdy Seth Cohen, a character who always seemed to be a 40-year-old man in a teenager’s body. Now that he’s in his mid-40s, it’s prime time for Brody. In the same way You’s Joe Goldberg gave Penn Badgley a vessel to realize the natural cerebral energy already present in the character he played on an iconic teen drama (that would be Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey), Noah gives Brody an opportunity to fully lean into his gifts as a charming, chummy, and naturally effervescent presence.
There is an argument to be made that the exceptional smoothness of Nobody Wants This is worth some deeper interrogation. The show is set in an utterly effortless Los Angeles where warm sunlight is forever bathing the city, parking spots are infinite, and Haim is a permanent fixture on the soundtrack. Everybody is well-off (Noah comes from a wealthy real-estate family, Joanne seems to live in a nice house), nobody is in real material need, and so the crises they suffer are purely existential. More pointedly, the season resolves by punting on the opportunity to actually say something about its core tension. Then again, there was little space for such tensions and bigger ideas in the classic rom-coms on which Nobody Wants This models its fantasy world. After all, what’s more fantastical than a glamorous podcaster?
