Thursday, December 19, 2024

Better Late Than Never: Nobody Wants This

 

 

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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