Ever since she managed
to completely fool W. Earl Brown and Kim Dickens in an all too brief stint on Deadwood
there has been no actress who has had the power to be so good and being bad
as Kristen Bell. It astonishes me that nearly a full sixteen years after Veronica
Mars was first cancelled she spent the better part of the 2010s in what
were longer runs playing somewhat more corrupt bad girls in comedies. She was
the only good thing about the overblown Showtime series House of Lies and
her character was able to change the afterlife with the force of her
personality on the masterpiece The Good Place. Few actresses have been
better during the era of Peak TV then Bell
and with the exception of contemporaries such as Gina Rodriguez or Keri
Russell, fewer have gotten less recognition from awards shows such as the Emmys.
(The Emmys have a chance to make it up to Russell with The Diplomat.)
One of the better
jokes about Nobody Wants This the Netflix romantic comedy that has
commanded both audiences and awards shows the last few weeks is that all of the
people capable of disliking Bell are all apparently in this series. Bell plays
Joanne, the late-thirtyish Angeleno who has a podcast with her sister Morgan
(Justine Lupe) called Nobody Wants This. The podcast mostly deals with
Joanne and Morgan’s daily life and quite a bit of their sexual behavior, with
Joanne’s dating history being a prominent topic for the show. Joanne is the
kind of person charitably known as messy and she is very proudly an agnostic.
When the possibility for her podcast leads to syndication she ends up at a
dinner with her producer showing up in a very bold fur coat where she meets
Noah (Adam Brody.)
We actually meet Noah
before this and we know that he’s just gotten out of a relationship with the
definition of a very needy girlfriend who has decided they are going to get
married and have kids before he did. He very gently breaks up with her, something
that his family and notably her family refuse to accept. At the dinner they
have a conversation – and its there that Joanne learns Noah’s a rabbi.
I suspect the
immediate parallels went to the second season of Fleabag and Phoebe
Waller-Bridge’s relationship with Andrew Scott’s Hot Priest. It’s not quite as
taboo for priests to have relationship as it is rabbis but there is a bigger
obstacle: the woman must be Jewish which Joanne is not. The attraction between
the two is very clear as is the fact that Noah really is looking for a
loophole (“is there a possibility there’s some Judaism in your background?” he
keeps asking on their first meeting.) But both of them try to find a way to
forget each other. Of course because this is a romantic comedy, Joanne ends up
Noah’s doorstep; because this is a Netflix comedy, it’s at a temple where he’s
just finish presiding over Sabbath services.
I suspect that there
has been a lot of discussion whether so much of the Roklovs attitude upon
seeing Joanne is over the top (when his mother sees him she says “A shiksa!”
with all the force of Eleanor saying “What the fork?”) but as someone who has
more than his share of deeply religious friends, I can tell there isn’t much
of an exaggeration, particularly with everybody bringing their daughters to
meet the eligible Jewish bachelor and the parents behaving exactly like the
fact that Noah ended his relationship with Rebecca is just a phase. If anything
those of you were fond of the Weissman family during the extraordinary Marvelous
Mrs. Maisel will know that very little about Jewish families has changed in
seventy years: there’s very little difference between Tovah Feldshuh’s meddling
mother and Marin Hinkle’s extraordinary work on Maisel when it comes to
the despairing and hand-wringing attitude. The only real difference is that in
the latter show the woman was blamed for a marriage ended and in Nobody the
boyfriend is blamed for it. I guess that’s progress.
Joanne is actually
more burdened by this than Noah is in some ways: she has gotten out of
constantly horrible relationships and Morgan keeps pointing out this is a
pattern for her. One of the more interesting dynamics is that both Joanne and
Noah have equally complicated family dynamics. Lynn, Joanne’s mother is an
incredible oversharer of all things in her life and is still in love with her
ex-husband even though he left her because he was gay. She freely talks about
her UTIs and sexuality in a way that even children who do podcasts on “Dil-Dos
and Dil-Don’ts” start blushing when she
starts talking. Morgan is clearly the elder sister and takes the dynamic of
someone who is looking out for the family’s best interest, something that
Joanne has never done very well.
Noah has an older
brother Sasha (Timothy Simons finally gets to play a sympathetic character) a
man who is clearly not his parent’s favorite and probably not even his wife’s,
given their relationship. The moment Noah and Joanne run off to get drunk in
Morgan’s car, he instantly hitches a ride and Morgan assumes he’s flirting with
her until he points out the wedding ring he’s wearing. Esther is Rebecca’s best
friend and she believes her relationship with Rebecca should take priority over
his relationship with her. The brilliant character actors Tovah Feldshuh and
Paul Ben-Victor play the Roklov parents and as generally the case these days,
the mother is the one no one dares cross while the father is more empathetic to
his son’s desires. (Of course, he makes it very clear that his wife should
never know about this fact.)
I suspect the reason
that Nobody Wants This is not a network show is because of the heavy
issues of Judaism involved rather than anything else. As you’d expect there’s a
fair amount of talk about sex in adult terms but in three episodes I have yet
to see any and there has real been very little in the way of profanity either. One
is reminded of the joke as to why David Chase couldn’t get The Sopranos sold
to network television: the problem was so much the mob violence but the
psychiatry that was too much for CBS.
Because this series,
developed by Erion Foster and executive produced by such comedy legends as
Steven Levitan, could very well play on a network like ABC and only have to
slightly tame its language. What they would have a bigger problem with is the
discussion of religion and morality
which, as in Bell’s previous masterpiece The Good Place, is front and center as much as the jokes
Bell makes about the kiss being so good it got her pregnant. Joanne, like
Eleanor, is questioning whether she’s a good enough person to date a man of God
and considering that her own family doesn’t think much of her morality its
something she knows is an issue. Noah is wrestling with two struggles: whether
he can be true to God or his heart or whether his will should be less important
then his families. (One of the reasons you know Noah is Jewish is because the second
is a far more pressing priority to him then the first.)
Bell is, surprise,
surprise, superb. Brody is somewhat more of shock. Like Bell, he is a child
star who has been acting in TV for the last quarter of a century, breaking
through in The O.C and having been acting in TV ever since, sometimes in
small roles and mostly in failed series.
He was, for one thing, the male lead in Billy and Billie a Neal Labute
TV series where he gets in a relationship that is if anything far more taboo
then this one. (He even had an arc on House of Lies.) Most of the series
he’s worked in have been darker and edgier than this which is in part why his
work as Noah is a revelation because he’s playing someone who is so basically
good and with more of a moral compass.
It’s hardly a shock
that Brody and Bell were nominated both Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards
for their performances in this series. But honestly the entire cast is at their
level. Feldshuh has been one of the premiere character actresses in TV since
the days of Law & Order and she basically played a only slightly
less parodic version of this kind of character in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Justine Lupe was best known for playing what amounted to the trophy girlfriend
and wife of Connor on Succession and was probably the only actor in the
entire cast who never got an Emmy nomination for her work on the show during
its run. She gets to play a far warmer and more likable character here. And Simons,
who known for being the butt of every horrible joke on Veep during its
seven year run, finally gets to play someone we laugh far more with than we do
at. He’s a nebbish but a good-hearted one.
I’m not surprised this
series was quickly renewed for a second season though I remain unsure whether
it will continue in its current form or an anthology. (After showrunner Erin
Foster left at the end of the season, its unclear.) It continues the tradition
started with Ted Lasso about us laughing with the follies of its
characters rather than at their misfortunes. If it is not yet at the level of
such masterpieces as Hacks, Shrinking or the recently departed Somebody
Somewhere, it more than has the potential to be. To quote a cliché, we all
want this show. Hell, we need it.
My score: 4.25 stars.
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