Rabbi Noah In 'Nobody Wants This' Is The Non-Toxic Rom-Com Lead We've Been Waiting For
The rom-coms that have stolen our hearts of late — Normal People, One Day, Emily in Paris, And Just Like That — have left us wanting. They've shattered our hearts into smithereens as we've commiserated lost fictional connections, splintered experiences and mourned all that was left in the unsaid. So it felt like breathing fresher air to spend a blissful, peaceful five hours inhaling all 10 episodes of Netflix's newest rom-com, Nobody Wants This this week.
Nobody Wants This centres on the unlikely relationship between sex podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Rabbi Noah (Adam Brody), who meet at a mutual friend's dinner party. The series' creator and executive producer, Erin Foster, has called the series a 'love letter' to her marriage, with the story of Joanne and Noah loosely based on her experience of falling for her now-husband, who is the son of Jewish Russian émigrés.
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It'll leave you snorting with laughter before making you clutch your hands to your chest as your innards turn to mush. But the best thing about Nobody Wants This that transcends its humour and heart? At the heart of the story is a male romantic lead who is not uncommunicative (Connell in Normal People), arrogant (Dexter in One Day) nor a commitment-phobe (Gabriel in Emily in Paris). Finally, TV is breaking the mould with a capable and communicative male lead in a rom-com.
Yes, Nobody Wants This' appeal might have something to do with Adam Brody just existing (oh, Adam Brody); but more seriously, this is a series that bucks the trend of televised rom-coms leaving us gasping for air as the on-screen relationships falter due, in large part, to generally rather toxic male leads. You could almost hear the hearts shatter around the world when Rabbi Noah admitted to Joanne during the series' first episode that yes, she does scare him. 'Oh, you’re terrifying. You’re an unfiltered, complicated, vulnerable, beautiful woman,' he says, before admitting that his car was actually parked in front of the house, and he just wanted to walk with her in the opposite direction.
True to real-life relationships – the course of true love never does run smooth, after all – Rabbi Noah and Joanne's relationship is nuanced. It reflects what it is to fall in love as a real adult with a fully-formed life and stakes that at times feel vertiginous. It reflects the way that our brains will try to deter us from allowing ourselves to get hurt by flooding our bodies with messages about 'the ick'. It tells the story of how difficult it can be when two people come together from different worlds and try to blend their existences into one.
But rather than Joanne chasing Rabbi Noah like Carrie so haplessly did with Mr. Big in Sex and the City; or Joanne replicated the heavy, bloated silences Dexter and Emma basked in in One Day, Nobody Wants This reflects the very real experience of falling in love. In all of its true and unfiltered glory, and at the heart of that is Rabbi Noah's ability to be truthful, honest and intentional about his feelings for Joanne. That's not to say that he's perfect – there are moments in which, as humans do, he stumbles and struggles – but he eventually comes back to her. To watch Nobody Wants This is to watch a true depiction of the very human journey of a person allowing themselves to fall in love, and embracing all of the honesty and vulnerability that comes with that.
There's a Yiddish word that's used in the show that I kept coming back to: beshert. It means 'destiny', and is often used in Jewish culture to refer to a person's soulmate. While news on season two – and the continuation of Joanne and Rabbi Noah's love story – is yet to be confirmed, one thing that is beshert about Nobody Wants This is that finally audiences have found a male romantic lead they can unashamedly fall head-over-heels for. That alone is worth celebrating.
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