‘Nobody Wants This’ Season 3 Netflix Review: Kristen Bell and Adam Brody’s Rom-Com Still Trades in Jewish-Family Clichés

When a series or movie deals with an area or subject you know reasonably well, things can get complicated. Mainly because you can smell the clichés from a mile away: the familiar tropes, the conventions, the things that exist more in mythology than in reality. I suppose doctors, lawyers and plenty of other professionals must feel the same way when they see their jobs portrayed on screen in ways that bear little resemblance to the real thing. Journalists go through it all the time when movies and TV shows depict what we do. And those of us who are Jewish have a similar problem with shows like Nobody Wants This, which are built around rather corny or overly traditional ideas about Jewish life.

Obviously, there are as many different ways of being Jewish as there are people who practice the religion, and there are surely plenty who can identify with what this comedy shows and tells. Still, putting aside the exaggeration that comes with the genre, my feeling every time I return to the series is that it remains attached to formulas and behaviors that seem to belong to a world 40 years behind the times. While it tries to present itself as a modern show in terms of its characters’ lifestyles, habits and customs, Nobody Wants This depicts its Jewish families as if they were still living in 1986.

That said, this isn’t the show’s main problem. By now, you pretty much know what you’re getting on that front. And in that respect, the third season sticks to the same formulas and oppositions, now amplified by the fact that Noah (Adam Brody) and Joanne (Kristen Bell) have moved in together and behave in their shared life pretty much as you’d expect them to: he’s neat, organized and obsessive; she’s chaos personified, with the attention span of a butterfly. That’s the basic mechanism behind most of the situations here: the appearance of one of her exes, who happens to be their new neighbor; Noah’s attempts to return to his job as a rabbi at his former congregation; and, above all, Joanne’s somewhat half-hearted efforts to convert to Judaism, along with all the problems that brings with it.

No, my problem with the series is that most of its characters strike me as pretty insufferable: petty, jealous, trivial, even needlessly cruel. It’s hard to believe that the show’s creator is particularly fond of her alter ego, Joanne, since she portrays her as an essentially selfish person who thinks mostly about her own interests, to the point of being annoyed even by the accomplishments of the people closest to her. Something similar happens with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe), although she has less screen time and therefore doesn’t quite wear us down. And don’t even get me started on the four parents of the «happy couple,» whose behavior piles up more Jewish-family clichés than a dozen sitcoms from the 1970s or a Yiddish play from the 1960s.

The show works better when it focuses on Noah and his brother Sasha (Timothy Simons), although only slightly. Everything involving the sisters’ podcast is almost unbearably annoying, and Joanne’s problems with her fellow members of the «conversion class» (the presence of Sarah Silverman and Andrew Rannells doesn’t exactly save things) aren’t much better. There is more tension and chemistry in the triangle involving Sasha, his ex Esther (Jackie Tohn) and Morgan, but the series gives them too little time to develop it. Outside of that, between the old-fashioned comic premise of «I moved in with a rabbi and now his mother is unbearable» and the exhausting self-absorption of most of these characters, I still have a hard time connecting with the show—or even understanding its success.

Maybe I should step back and give it another look. Or maybe I should just stop giving myself tzures and walk away from it.