Kristen Bell and Adam Brody star in a Netflix series whose familiar rhythms and punchlines are exactly the point.
Recent high-profile attempts by streamers to resuscitate the feature-length romantic comedy with brand-name performers like Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman and Brooke Shields have all had the same problem: They were awful. The dead touch of cringey mediocrity could be felt immediately. You could hear the flatline alarm in the background.
Primed for disappointment by those films, you feel the difference right away with the new Netflix romantic comedy series “Nobody Wants This”: It’s not bad. The jokes land. The story hums along. The people in it are real-ish — they may do cartoonish things, but they are not cartoons. Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, who play the central couple, are charming and work well together. Care has been taken in the depiction of a swoony, twilight Los Angeles that calls back to an indeterminate earlier era of the rom-com — the ’70s, the ’90s, somewhere in there.
Created by Erin Foster, an actress and writer and a daughter of the music-business titan David Foster, “Nobody Wants This” (premiering Thursday) succeeds by keeping faith with its genre. It is not a nostalgic curio — the characters and the rhythms of their interactions feel up-to-date, at least by mainstream Hollywood standards — but there is a comforting continuity with things you have seen and liked before. Familiar moves are executed with confidence and a certain amount of style.
In “Nobody Wants This,” Kristen Bell and Adam Brody play the components of a romance no one else supports.Credit
That smooth rom-com fluency, and the feeling it inspires that here is something we have been missing, is the most notable thing about “Nobody Wants This.” The story, inspired by Foster’s own experiences as a podcaster and as a participant in the Los Angeles dating scene, is serviceable, largely rom-com standard but with a few wrinkles.
Bell plays Joanne, who works a bad-girl, more-sarcastic-than-thou persona while apparently making a living doing a sex-and-relationships podcast with her sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe). At a dinner party, Joanne, who is not in any way religious, meets cute with her temperamental opposite, Brody’s Noah, a serious, soulful, inordinately considerate guy who happens to be a rabbi. (He is sometimes called the hot rabbi, reminiscent of Andrew Scott’s hot priest in “Fleabag.”)
They are completely wrong for each other, as everyone else in the show loudly and insistently tells them (hence the title). Morgan, a serial dater herself, is anti-Noah because she is afraid of losing her sister, not to mention being one-upped by her; adding a layer of complication, Morgan is also convinced that if Joanne finds happiness, it will ruin their podcast.
On Noah’s side, meanwhile, family and congregation array themselves to do battle with the woman who threatens to steal their golden boy, led by a gimlet-eyed Tovah Feldshuh as his mother, Bina. Much of the show’s comedy is in this familiar shiksa-terror mode, ably executed by Feldshuh; Paul Ben-Victor as Noah’s more sympathetic father; Jackie Tohn of “GLOW” as his terrifying sister-in-law; and the great Stephen Tobolowsky as his boss, the head rabbi. (Tobolowsky brings a calm sanity to the head rabbi’s explanation that Noah’s marrying a gentile would inevitably lead to the extinction of the Jews.)
Across 10 half-hour episodes, the story meanders a bit, without the constant-crisis propulsion typical of rom-com films, but the constituent parts are nearly always amusing. As Joanne and Noah are alternately pushed together and pulled apart by the external pressures, as well as by their own differences, we are treated to scenes like the embarrassing visit to the sex-toy store and the clueless bringing of pork to the Jewish mother’s brunch — nothing new, but somehow comforting in their familiarity.
Lupe and Timothy Simons, as Noah’s married brother, are good as the requisite rom-com second bananas. (Simons plays a more likable version of his abrasive Jonah from “Veep.”) And Bell and Brody, who have both done this kind of thing before, are a marvelous pair. You root for Joanne and Noah as the pressure on the relationship builds to a season-ending peak, with one or the other needing to make a life-changing decision to keep things going.
The knock on “Nobody Wants This,” and it is a legitimate one, is that it’s paper thin — you laugh, you get a couple really good “aww” moments, and you move on. But that’s a constituent part of the rom-com DNA, too. You take gossamer where you can find it.
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