Nobody Wants This stars Adam Brody as Noah and Kristen Bell as Joanne. It’s a rom-com about an interfaith relationship between a Rabbi and an Atheist talk-show podcaster. As someone who grew up with a Jewish father and vaguely-Christian mother, I went into watching the show open to the idea that I might find familiarity in the story. I was a by-product, after all, of a very similar plotline.
For the duration of my childhood, my mother wore a chain around her neck that bore two pendants: one of a crucified Christ splayed out the cross and the other a Star of David with an emerald in the middle. The long gold chain placed the religious symbols prominently on her sternum. Frequently, people would stop to ask my mother what wearing the star and the cross together meant. Was she Jewish? Christian? Something else? I’d shrink beside her as she explained herself, usually never to the satisfaction of the person inquiring. Sometimes, it felt like my mother was being complicated for the sake of being complicated. That’s how it felt to watch Season 2 of Nobody Wants This.
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Maybe it was naive to believe I’d see a vein of my own cultural tug-of-war represented on screen. But then nothing else, across all 20 episodes, spoke to me, either. The second season of Nobody Wants This released in a batch on Netflix in September 2025—designed to be quickly digested in the binge-watching era. In its goes-down-easy approach, it felt completely untethered from reality. The styling of Joanne and her sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe) often felt more like watching the women from Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Meanwhile, the sets of each character’s home are reminiscent of Crate & Barrel catalogues and Architectural Digest videos. The whole atmosphere of the second season felt sterile from the jump. Set against that sterility was an ostensible love story that really stretched credulity.
In Season 2, Episode 1, a hopeful Joanne and Noah host a dinner party joining their two friend groups; that’s a potential huge step in a relationship. For a rom-com, it’s also an opportunity to introduce some classic tropes of the genre. On this front, through both seasons, the show always succeeds. There’s miscommunication between Noah and Joanne that builds up the second season’s primary conflict. Then there’s a tense love triangle-esque confrontation referencing drama from the first season between Noah’s brother Sasha (an always funny Timothy Simons), his wife Esther (Jackie Tohn), and Morgan. There are the inevitable awkward interactions between two very different friend groups.
Even as the show expertly navigates these hallmarks of the genre it occupies, it still feels stale. If Nobody Wants This was a movie, the tug of war between the two main characters’ differences—which extend far beyond their religions and define every aspect of their lives—could be reconciled into a happy ending but not here. The streaming train rolls on, even if it’s obvious the main characters are incompatible.
Joanne and Morgan have a podcast where she speaks candidly about sex and dating with listeners. The sisters have a “drunk lunch” Valentine’s Day tradition and don’t always celebrate family traditions. Joanne likes to open her gifts before she reads the card.
Noah, meanwhile, doesn’t seem too interested in who Joanne actually is. This is evidenced by his Valentine’s Day gift, which is nothing close to what she wants: he books a Valentine’s Day lunch that includes very little alcohol and convinces Joanna to both tandem bike and take a bubble bath. Later, when prepping for a big moment in his life, Noah needs to take “a night off” from Joanne.
These season two divides often resolve through the course of an episode. But their continual head-butting comes off as two people making a ton of concessions so they can stay together, not a love story. The first season, which aired in September 2024, was more enjoyable—it certainly felt less detrimental that Noah and Joanne were so misaligned.
But there was a major point of critical contention with Season One. As Esther Zuckerman wrote for Time Magazine at the time, “The series seems to loathe Jewish women, who are portrayed as nags, harpies and the ultimate villains of this story.” By the second season, this issue didn’t resolve itself for me and Zuckerman’s concern remains, even with the addition of Jewish Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan as showrunners. The pair were added to balance out the viewpoint helmed by the show’s creator and executive producer Erin Foster, who also served as showrunner for Season 1 and married into Judaism.
The central tension of the show—that Noah is Jewish and Joanne is Atheist—remains, but by the second season it no longer seems like the couple’s biggest concern. Even with the chemistry that Bell and Brody managed to share on screen, watching a season-long break-up felt tedious after the fourth episode.
‘Nobody Wants This’ season two had brief moments of humor, brief moments of romance, but it just didn’t have a lot of heart for a rom-com. These two should have called it quits in 2024.