Kirsten Bell returned to the small screen for a 2024 TV premiere that flew right under a lot of people's radars in recent months, and even I was barely aware of its existence before it hit Netflix's TV schedule. But now that it's fully out and available for everyone to stream, her romantic comedy Nobody Wants This has been an undeniably popular and acclaimed hit so far.
Of couse, just because a TV show is able to landa. high score on Rotten Tomatoes doesn't mean it's automatically free from critical opinions and blowback from certain viewers. Let's dive into both the good and the not-so-good news coming out of the new series from creator Erin Foster.
Kristen Bell's Return To TV Is A Critically Acclaimed Hit On Rotten Tomatoes
It's true that a TV show or movie landing a stellar score on Rotten Tomatoes isn't necessarily the most accurate indicator of a project's quality, it's fairly rare for projects that are Certified Fresh to be widely considered as pure crap. And Nobody Wants This certain isn't on the low end of the quality spectrum, having earned a whopping 93% score (at the time of writing); of the 29 reviews compiled, only two outlets gave the show a Rotten rating.
In my personal opinion, Nobody Wants This is largely deserving of the praise being thrown its way, even if I was irked by the ending living up to the title. The comedy is on point, the romance is mostly on point, even if it takes a mild suspension of disbelief to buy into Bell's Joanne and Adam Brody's hot rabbi Noah falling so hard so quickly.
But it's not even just about the core romance. Nobody Wants This also delves into complicated but largely rewarding sibling relationships, both between Joanne and Justine Lupe's Morgan, and between Noah and Timothy Simons' Sasha. And for the most part, it avoids many of the groan-worthy tropes that plague lower-tier romantic comedies. But not all viewers were in agreement that Netflix series eschewed ALL stereotypes.
Creator Erin Foster Defended Nobody Wants This For Audience Complaints About Jewish Stereotypes
Series creator and showrunner Erin Foster based many elements of Joanne's journey from her own life. Five years or so prior to the Netflix show's debut, she went through a ten-week course at the American Jewish University in West Los Angeles, having also fallen for a Jewish man — current hubby Simon Tikhman — who was resolute about his significant other sharing his faith system.
But for the most part, it's not Joanne and Noah's relationship specifically that's gotten flak, but rather the Jewish women in Noah's life who present as highly judgmental, overly controlling, and not the most open to meeting new people. (Not that different from mothers of any and all beliefs, at least in my experience.) Glamour's Jessica Radloff penned perhaps the most widespread critical assessment of Nobody Wants This' depiction of Jewish women, but Foster defended it by saying everyone's experiences are different, and that crafting characters who avoided all stereotypes would have been criticized as inauthentic. As she put it to the L.A. Times:
I think we need positive Jewish stories right now. I think it’s interesting when people focus on, 'Oh, this is a stereotype of Jewish people,' when you have a rabbi as the lead. A hot, cool, young rabbi who smokes weed. That’s the antithesis of how people view a Jewish rabbi, right? If I made the Jewish parents, like, two granola hippies on a farm, then someone would write, 'I’ve never met a Jewish person like that before. You clearly don’t know how to write Jewish people, you don’t know what you’re doing, and that doesn’t represent us well.'
A fair enough explanation, even with its shortcomings. Going too far in any direction is going to ruffle someone's feathers, and sometimes it's easier to fall back on what's more familiar and then build off of that.
As far as the specific complaints about Noah's mom Bina (Tovah Feldshuh) and daughter-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn), Erin Foster shared that she didn't exactly go through that with her own in-laws, who were far more open to outsiders, but that the nature of television narratives influenced the move to make Bina so strict about her son's choices. According to the showrunner:
But in a TV show, you have to have conflict. It’s important that I had Noah’s parents in the show be immigrants because immigrant culture is very different than American Jewish culture. Simon’s parents fled the Soviet Union because they were Jewish. That is a very different experience than someone who grew up in L.A., not being exposed to the kind of antisemitism that they were exposed to. It means something different. It’s a much more sensitive topic, and it’s much closer to their hearts. That is why I don’t feel that the parents are stereotypes as much. Immigrant culture can be very insular and fearful of outsiders, and there’s a good reason for that.
From a story perspective, it gave Noah and Joanne another cultural hurdle to conquer and leap past in order to keep their realtionship going strong. Of course, by the end, Brody's rabbi seems to be throwing his entire career and lifepath out to sea in order to stick with Joanne, but we'll have to wait and see how that plays out in a potential second season.
The easiest way to make that happen is to tell all your friends with Netflix subscriptions to check this show out posthaste!
