While there is plenty of romance in Nobody Wants This Season 2, the platonic relationships — from Joanne and Morgan’s sisterly highs and lows to Esther’s budding friendship with the pair to Joanne and Esther’s tumultuous connection to Bina — help create an even fuller picture of what it means to blend families.
After keeping her distance in Season 1, Esther seems to be coming around to Morgan and Joanne in the latest episodes, which Tohn says is yet another manifestation of Esther’s journey to understand herself better and let loose a little.
“In Season 1, she especially dislikes Joanne because her very best friend in the world was engaged to [her] brother-in-law, and now [her] best friend’s out of the mix. This fearsome foursome is gone. This random blonde is here, and now the sister of the random blonde is flirting with my husband,” Tohn tells Deadline. “So it’s no mystery why she was like, ‘Get these girls away.’”
That being said, in Season 2, once Esther sets some boundaries around Morgan’s friendship with Sasha — and begins to realize that maybe she’s been too rigid in the past, on many fronts — “she’s softening,” Tohn adds.
On the Sasha and Morgan front, for what it’s worth, Lupe thinks her character handled that “pretty poorly.”
“I mean, she asks for a lot of permission, and that’s kind of as far as she’ll go. [She’s] like, ‘Can I please talk to him? Can you please come outside?’ There’s not a lot of fleshing it out on her behalf,” Lupe says.
Lupe considers both Morgan and Joanne to be a little inept when it comes to dealing with close female friendships, explaining “they don’t have the tools to maybe deal with it in the most emotionally evolved way.”
“Honestly, I was surprised by the way it all tracks and the way they come through for each other at the end of it all,” the actress said of the finale, when Joanne ultimately encourages Morgan to break things off with Dr. Andy and, similarly, Morgan supports Joanne’s struggles with Noah.
“There’s clearly a lot of love there. There’s clearly a lot of goodwill, and and I just love the different ebbs and flows. It feels really authentic to me, the way that sister dynamics and family dynamics and friendship dynamics play out,” she concluded.
As for Esther and Joanne, the jury is still out on whether they will ever truly be friends, but at the very least they are coming to understand each other much better.
“I think she’s just trying to become a more open, easygoing person,” Tohn said of Esther. “I mean, I would say she gets a 100th of the way there, but she’s trying.”