Nobody Wants This Review – Kristen Bell and Adam Brody’s Joyous Romantic Comedy Is As Funny As When Harry Met Sally | Television

There are three really cute encounters in my life as a viewer. One of them was when Harry met Sally (whatever he and she thought about her and each other at that time. You guys!). The second was the flash of boobs hurting a dog in Colin from Accounts (you really had to be there) two years ago. The third takes place between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody) in the new Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This.

Let me tell you: everyone wants this. It’s the funniest, sweetest, sleaziest, most romantic, real thing we’ve seen since – well, since Colin from Accounts. Bell plays a freewheeling thirty-something woman who hosts an increasingly successful podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) about sex and relationships (latest episode – Dildos and Dildos). She’s as agnostic, about as atheist, as the next nice thirty-something in town. Brody plays a rabbi who has just broken up with his longtime girlfriend who, along with both of their families, expected him to propose imminently. Noah is a progressive rabbi, but one who – “even though I play the Torah bad boy vibe” – is clear that he’s “all in on this thing.” He and Joanne meet at a party and the attraction is instant, mutual and increasingly difficult to resist. It’s also the rarest thing: absolutely convincing for the audience.

Brody and Bell have worked together before and are friends in real life, which surely helps, but their on-screen chemistry – in the romantic scenes, of course, but more importantly and even more powerful in the pleasant, teasing conversations between both – is something. special and a joy to watch. “Can you have sex?” she asks him as he escorts her to her car. “Yes. They’re priests. We’re just normal people. And we’re trying to repopulate a people, you know? A little later, she says to him, ‘Say something rabbinic.’ He leans toward her…” Fiddler on the Roof.” “Don’t be funny,” she replies. “At this point, I’m already willing to sacrifice my favorite animal to make sure these two end up together.” .Bell and Brody are accomplished comedic and dramatic actors in their own right, but together they are even more than the sum of their parts.

And they’re surrounded by a fantastic supporting cast. First among equals is Lupe – as quietly wonderful as Willa in Succession – as Joanna’s slightly more jaded sister and co-presenter. The fact that they’re both against a terrible dating world and against their parents (“Daddy’s gay and Mommy’s still in love with him”) doesn’t diminish their truth and their bickering. “Joanne was a lesbian for a year,” Morgan told potential investors on podcast, sparking another feud. “That’s where she really thrived.” You would avidly listen to their podcast.

Noah has a brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons, a bear of a man with the most nimble comic timing imaginable) who has all of Noah’s warmth, minus his intellectualism and is married to – and just as happily terrorized by – his Jewish wife Esther ( Jackie Tohn) and their children. Their deep, underlying marital harmony is rendered as convincingly as any other part of the series. It’s always refreshing to see a comedy that doesn’t feel the need to denigrate the current situation simply because its protagonists are still in the initial, obviously more exciting stage.

Creator Erin Foster’s obvious love and care for her characters, alongside the fact that the series grew out of her own experience of falling in love as a non-Jew with a Jewish man (not a rabbi, but she converted for him), plus a script touched by grandeur, allows him to get away with jokes that might otherwise seem to be sailing too close to the wind. A now almost traditional faux pas – the private text inadvertently played over the car’s Bluetooth speakers, this time from Morgan to Joanne about how Noah doesn’t look Jewish, while Sasha is ‘brutal’ – triggers an explosion of feedback from the public. delighted brothers. “There are some very attractive Jews!” Have you ever seen a young Mandy Patinkin? “Doesn’t my brother look like he can control the media? Sasha asks. “I apologize for my sister,” Joanne said, sitting in the passenger seat next to Morgan. “With whom I have since severed ties.”

Behind it all, the emotional stakes seem real. The couple’s different cultures, lack of faith versus religion as a guiding force, families’ disapproval, potential ostracism, possible impact on Noah’s career, restriction of Joanne’s freedom if she became the wife of a rabbi – these are real problems, obstacles. to happiness without obvious answers. But I will be with them until what I hope will not be a bitter end. Just like my pets.