{"id":247267,"date":"2025-10-23T23:52:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T23:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/247267\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T23:52:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T23:52:14","slug":"nobody-wants-this-wants-feeling-jewish-to-be-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/247267\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Nobody Wants This\u2019 Wants Feeling Jewish to Be Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n Nobody Wants This doesn\u2019t need to find God to be good, but it ought to find something to fill the void at its core.
\n Photo: Netflix\n <\/p>\n

Spoilers ahead for \u201cWhen Noah Met Joanne,\u201d the season-two finale of Nobody Wants This.<\/p>\n

In the first few minutes of the season-one finale<\/a> of Nobody Wants This, Joanne (Kristen Bell) tells her friends that her sexy rabbi boyfriend, Noah (Adam Brody), \u201cdid ask me if I would ever consider converting, and I\u2019m kind of open to it.\u201d But by the episode\u2019s last act, Joanne has realized that Noah can\u2019t maintain his faith and be with her if she won\u2019t commit to conversion. \u201cYou can\u2019t have both, and I would never make you choose,\u201d she tells him tearfully over the din of his niece Miriam\u2019s bat mitzvah. And so she dumps him \u2014 it\u2019s the most painless way to move forward \u2014 until the episode\u2019s final two minutes, when the pair run back into each other\u2019s arms once more. \u201cYou\u2019re right,\u201d Noah agrees. \u201cI can\u2019t have both.\u201d They smooch, all but wordlessly cementing that, if forced to choose, he chooses her.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the classic rom-com ending and a touching conclusion to an otherwise uneven season of television, which is perhaps why season two<\/a> concludes the exact same way. Once again, Joanne and Noah are at a formal family event, Joanne\u2019s sister Morgan\u2019s (Justine Lupe) engagement party, and once again, the issue of conversion hangs over their heads. But this time it looms much larger: Joanne\u2019s mother, Lynn (Stephanie Faracy), realized at a Purim party that she is Jewish deep down (classic thing to happen at Purim festivities) and wants to take classes to pursue conversion. If her mom can do it, why not Joanne? \u201cI don\u2019t want to be the person who\u2019s asking you to be someone different,\u201d Noah tells Joanne, initiating the conversation this time around. Once again, they make a cordial decision to separate and walk away tearfully. Once again, they reunite in the episode\u2019s final minutes (Joanne runs into Noah\u2019s arms this time). Once again, Noah recants that which he just said. \u201cNone of it matters,\u201d he says. \u201cYou are my soulmate.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would be one thing if Nobody Wants This did the same thing twice as a comment on the corny predictability of modern rom-coms. But Noah\u2019s realization in the finale follows season two\u2019s most baffling scene: a long post-breakup conversation in which his sister-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn) tells Joanne that she already \u201cfeels Jewish\u201d to her. What does \u201cfeeling\u201d Jewish mean? \u201cWarm and cozy,\u201d according to Esther. It\u2019s \u201calways wanting to chat about everything.\u201d Esther even says that Joanne would be a \u201cpretty good get\u201d for Jews, as if to suggest there is a dearth of warmth and yapping in their world that Joanne could fill. It\u2019s an odd counterpoint to Noah\u2019s own journey this season, wherein he realizes how much being Jewish \u2014 in a traditional, observant way \u2014 actually means to him. When his synagogue passes him over for the lead rabbi position in favor of \u201cBig Noah,\u201d played by an underutilized Alex Karpovsky, (little) Noah has something of an existential crisis. He gets a new job at a much more relaxed synagogue (led by Seth Rogen and Kate Berlant, playing the world\u2019s only carefree Jews) where he thinks he might be happy, but he isn\u2019t. Traditions matter to him. That aspect of Judaism is important. To him, it\u2019s about not just feeling Jewish but having a literal, tangible practice.<\/p>\n

Overall, the second season of Nobody Wants This is less focused on how all Jews are crazy<\/a> and more concerned with rules and traditions, in both love and religion, mostly to its benefit. For Noah, this plays out in his story line with the too-chill synagogue; for Joanne, it\u2019s through her irritation that Noah doesn\u2019t adhere to arbitrary relationship rules, like not getting her the same gift he got his ex for Valentine\u2019s Day. (He probably shouldn\u2019t do that, but also, a show about people dating in their 40s should not care so much about Valentine\u2019s Day.) Part of what initially drew Joanne and Noah to each other was how their courtship seemed to break all the rules they once held dear. Now that they\u2019ve forged ahead, creating new traditions with each other, the show abandons that completely in the finale. Noah changing his mind about Joanne for a second time is particularly egregious after he spent the whole season discovering how much having guidelines for how to live matters to him.<\/p>\n

Of course, Noah never says any of this to Joanne in the finale. He has what amounts to a silent realization that she is his soulmate, but he does not in any way reckon with why her conversion mattered (matters?) so much to him. Would he be satisfied with Joanne simply feeling Jewish? And why does Esther get to be the arbiter of Jewishness during a crucial moment? That scene, too, is strangely out of character: In response to criticisms of antisemitism in the show\u2019s first season, all of Esther\u2019s edges have been worn down. It\u2019s probably good that she\u2019s no longer shrewish and spiteful, but at least she was funny when she was mean. Now the show has demoted her to a B- or C-plot sitcom character, lacking in sharpness and a consistent point of view. She has a crisis about whether or not she wants more children. She gets bangs. She gives an inspirational speech about how being Jewish can be anything \u2014 cue the America Ferrara Barbie speech here.<\/p>\n

But can being Jewish be anything? If so, why is Nobody Wants This about being Jewish in the first place? Given that the show is based on Erin Foster\u2019s life and that Foster herself did convert, it\u2019s weird that the show repeatedly skirts around the seriousness of doing such a thing. Converting to a new religion is a strange and intense process for any person to go through, especially for a nonbeliever doing it for marriage or love or something in between, but the show displays only a superficial interest in that. The second season gets close to grappling with the weight of conversion when it comes to Joanne\u2019s mother, whose decision to become Jewish feels borderline magical. The show doesn\u2019t have to take her newfound faith seriously, but it chooses to; meanwhile, Joanne is left waiting \u2014 thinking, perhaps, that the same \u201caha!\u201d moment will come for her. But it doesn\u2019t. Does that mean she can\u2019t convert? Characters in Nobody Wants This are constantly explaining Judaism to Joanne \u2014 during their climactic conversation, Esther has to define yenta for her \u2014 but we never see Joanne process that information. We have no idea what, if anything, any of this means to her. And now that the show has backed down from cultural differences between Jews and goys, there\u2019s nothing left to talk about \u2014\u00a0or at least nothing worth ending a whole season on.<\/p>\n

There are some bright spots dappled throughout the second season in scenes that mostly have nothing to do with religion whatsoever. Lupe remains the show\u2019s strongest selling point \u2014 a deft comedic performer lending great pathos and charm to Morgan, who ought to be otherwise unbearable. Her romance with Dr. Andy (played by fellow Succession alum Arian Moayed) is played for laughs until it\u2019s not. Isn\u2019t it so funny and crazy that Morgan is dating her therapist? Maybe, but the show treats it the same as when Joanne started dating Noah: Everyone thinks this is bad, but maybe it\u2019s good. That\u2019s the ethos of the show, right? But it\u2019s Morgan who winds up alone in the finale, and her whole arc feels strangely cruel in retrospect.<\/p>\n

At its best, Nobody Wants This evokes You\u2019re the Worst or even Happy Endings, shows about people who know and date each other and who all behave in varying degrees of weird to each other. You\u2019re the Worst was similarly populated with shallow, depressed characters striving for purpose and love in a mean-spirited world, but it took these characters at their word \u2014 what they said and felt meant something. If being Jewish matters to Noah, we ought to know what that means. If \u201cfeeling Jewish\u201d is suddenly a new metric for being Jewish, we ought to have a sense of where that comes from for Esther. It\u2019s fine if Nobody Wants This wants to pivot away from being a story about conversion, but it needs to be brave enough to actually do so. Watching Joanne and Noah quite literally retrace their steps from the first finale makes all that happens in the second season feel that much more redundant. Nobody Wants This doesn\u2019t need to find God to be good, but it ought to find something to fill the void at its core.<\/p>\n

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