Worth seeing: | as an astute examination of cross-cultural relationships that ends up slipping into lazy tropes and exacerbating the prejudices it seeks to quash |
Featuring: | Adam Brody, Kristen Bell, D'Arcy Carden, Emily Arlook, Jackie Tohn, Justine Lupe, Leslie Grossman, Michael Hitchcock, Paul Ben-Victor, Sherry Cola, Shiloh Bearman, Stephanie Faracy, Stephen Tobolowsky, Timothy Simons, Tovah Feldshuh |
Key crew: | Greg Mottola, Hannah Fidell, Karen Maine, Lawrence Trilling, Oz Rodriguez, Erin Foster, Barbie Adler, Craig DiGregorio, Jane Becker, Lindsay Golder, Neel Shah, Niki Schwartz-Wright, Noelle Valdivia, Pat Regan, Ron Weiner, Ryann Werner |
Channel: | Netflix |
Length: | 26 minutes |
Episodes: | 10 |
Broadcast date: | 26th September 2024 |
Country: | US |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Joanne (Kristen Bell) and her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) present a popular podcast about sex and relationships.
At a party, Joanne meets and falls for Noah (Adam Brody), an attractive, charming – rabbi.
He’s just come out of a relationship with a “nice Jewish girl,” Rebecca; his parents are forcefully urging him to get back together with her. But his brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) is perfectly happy for Noah to go with the flow – even though he’s married to Rebecca’s best friend.
If it’s hard for an observant Jewish guy to have a relationship with a non-Jewish girl; it’s a hundred times harder if you’re a rabbi – and you’re in line for a promotion.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Nobody Wants This. – the punctuated title of Joanne and Morgan’s podcast – gets off to a very encouraging start; likeable leads, a Hollywood-style meet-cute that’s just on the right side of arch and a quandary faced by many as they find themselves tempted by a relationship with someone outside their own community.
There are gently humorous misunderstandings as a range of entertaining supporting characters are introduced – chiefly Joanne’s self-important, misanthropic sister Morgan and Noah’s henpecked nebbish of a brother Sasha – with a warm, witty and charming narrative unfolding at a cracking pace.
But suddenly, about halfway through the series, it gets complacent – starting to push credibility to its limits as intelligent characters increasingly do stupid things to drive a plot which begins to shudder with absurdity as it strives for narrative expedience.
The idea that highly articulate media personalities in Los Angeles would never have heard the word Shalom in the context of Jewish people – or would not know that many Jewish people avoid eating pigs just stretches credulity – as does the idea that a woman, desperate to impress her boyfriend’s parents, would not listen to his advice about what gifts to bring. And in reality, an orthodox rabbi simply wouldn’t find himself in this situation in the first place, while a liberal rabbi wouldn’t struggle with pursuing such a relationship in this way.
By the end, characters just turn up in unlikely places, say and do ridiculous things and seem surprised when things don’t turn out as planned.
It remains likeable enough, but what starts as a promising premise, with astute observations about the early stages of relationships and cultural differences, deteriorates into lazy sitcom tropes. It even starts re-using jokes and scenarios, centring them on different characters, as if they hope you won’t notice they’re recycling material.
Perhaps worse is that a show inspired by the creator’s own experience of falling for a Jewish man – in her case not a rabbi – ends up painting traditional Jews as exactly the kind of uncompromising stereotypes that cause much of the damage to community relations in the first place.
It gets dangerously close to the level where the review could simply be the show’s title – it clearly doesn’t quite reach that level, as a second season has been commissioned.