You’re pretty smooth for a rabbi.
These words, spoken by Kristen Bell’s Joanne as she lingers by her car after a dinner party where she’s met Adam Brody’s Noah, are thrilling.
“You’re not, by chance, wrestling with your faith, are you? Considering throwing it all away? Cause with all the ‘fucks’ and the flirting, you really don’t feel like a rabbi.”
“I play up the Torah bad-boy vibe,” Brody responds, “but I’m all in on this thing.”
And just like that, Netflix’s Nobody Wants This manages to do what no mainstream TV show or movie in recent memory has done: portray a Jewish protagonist who is sexy and confident, and whose Jewish identity isn’t an afterthought but what animates him.
It’s a refreshing and powerful narrative choice. Brody’s Rabbi Roklov—and this entire series—is exactly what Jewish and gentile viewers deserve. For Jews especially, this light-hearted and loving show is also a salve amidst rising antisemitism and a horrific war in Israel and Gaza.
Nobody Wants This, which arrives Sep. 26 on Netflix, was created by Erin Foster and inspired by her experience meeting her husband and converting to Judaism. “This show is based on the only good decision I ever made: falling for a nice Jewish boy,” Foster said in an interview. “But I realized that being happy is way harder than being miserable—there’s nothing to complain about. So, I created this show based on all the ways that finding the right person can be so hard.”
The show has all the ingredients that make for good TV. It has the classic rom-com trope of two people from extremely different worlds falling for each other. Kristen Bell—beloved by millennials as Veronica Mars, by their children as the voice of Anna in Frozen, and by their parents as Eleanor in The Good Place—plays the role of shiksa goddess Joanne to perfection, even if it’s a bit surprising that someone who lives in L.A. could know so little about Judaism. Adam Brody, seared into the hearts of thirtysomethings everywhere as the adorably nerdy teenager Seth Cohen from the early-aughts TV hit The O.C., feels cosmically pre-ordained to play Noah Roklov, or “hot rabbi,” as he is known to the adolescent girls at the summer camp where he works part-time.
It’s a will-they-won’t-they romance with some very new and very old stakes: She’s shopping her popular sex-positive podcast to Spotify, and he’s up for the senior rabbi job at Temple Chai. There are hilarious meddling families, populated by the perfect supporting characters: Succession’s Justine Lupe as Joanne’s sassy and even-blonder sister Morgan, the legendary Tovah Feldshuh as Noah’s overbearing Soviet Jewish mother Bina, Veep’s Timothy Simons as Noah’s oafish older brother Sasha, and G.L.O.W.’s Jackie Tohn as Sasha’s not unopinionated wife, Esther.
But what really sets Nobody Wants This apart is the tenderness of its portrayal of Jewish life, and the degree to which Noah’s love of his work as a rabbi is taken seriously. Even the requisite Jewish story about his terrible basketball team, the Matzoh Ballers, feels like it comes from a place of love. Though it may seem like a low bar, this kind of care in depicting contemporary Jewish life is depressingly rare in Hollywood these days.
Plus, the show gets the Jewish stuff right—the Hebrew correct, the synagogue scenes accurate, the portrayal of family dynamics amped-up but spot-on. The gentilic Timothy Simons somehow nails the line “It’s Sunday, he’s at the schvitz all day,” and Esther’s kitchen counter is stacked with Adeena Sussman cookbooks. Noted L.A. rabbi Steve Leder is credited as a consultant, but the totally random and fun Jewish details in the script must have come from a writer’s room full of experiences.
But the most important thing about the show is that it’s not just really Jewish. It’s also really funny. Take the early scene between Bell and Brody, in which Joanne asks Rabbi Roklov, “Can you have sex?”
“Right now?” he replies.
“In general…”
“That’s priests. We’re people.”
The dialogue is so quick and spirited that I binged the entire season in two sittings. It proves that a show can front its characters’ Jewishness—even setting an episode at a Jewish summer camp in Ojai, Cal., a nod to the real-life Camp Ramah there—and still be fun and entertaining. As it turns out, grounding a story in a proud identity and not apologizing for it makes for incredibly compelling television. It’s high time Jewish writers and producers remembered this valuable Hollywood lesson.
Nobody Wants This manages to do what no mainstream TV show or movie in recent memory has done: portray a foundationally Jewish protagonist who is sexy and confident, and whose Jewish identity is what animates him and draws others in.
Nobody Wants This is a younger cousin of sorts to the lovable 2000 movie Keeping the Faith, with its clergy love triangle of Ben Stiller as the cool rabbi, Ed Norton as the buttoned-up priest and best buddy, and Jenna Elfman as their very beautiful, very blonde childhood pal newly back in the picture. Stiller’s Jake Schram is the kind of rabbi who brings in the Harlem Gospel Choir to sing “Ein Keloheinu,” a legendary move that Brody’s Noah would have definitely heard about in rabbinical school.
Keeping The Faith showed that a movie could take seriously the idea of young people navigating their religious lives alongside their dating lives, without condescending to the characters or making a mockery of anybody’s religious identity. It’s notable how many recent movies and television shows have failed here, with the biggest offender being Jonah Hill’s cringeworthy 2023 rom-com You People, which played to the basest Jewish stereotypes under the guise of satire.
At the end of the first episode of Nobody Wants This, when Noah gets tapped to give the Friday night sermon, he speaks from the heart, telling the crowd that God gives us chances to change our lives. When he finishes his speech, his beautiful new friend walks into the sanctuary in a bright red dress, shaking up both of their worlds.
How much Noah and Joanne end up changing for each other is the question of the series, but the answer seems less relevant than the grappling, gabbing, and growing along the way. It’s a tale as old as time, with an innovative twist: a smart and sexy story where Jews are the plotline, not the punchline.