“Nobody Wants That” Review: The Netflix series is fun

Millennial hearts, be still. Adam Brody returns to television in Netflix's new romantic comedy series “Nobody Wants This” as a lovable Jewish man, Noah, who loves a very non-Jewish woman, Joanne (Kristen Bell).

The premise of the show is as simple as the title makes it sound. Noah, a junior rabbi, and Bell, a podcasting shiksa (a Yiddish insult that essentially means “hot, blonde, non-Jew”) meet at a dinner party. They are immediately attracted to each other, but “no one” wants them to be together.

Over the course of the season's ten half-hour episodes, Noah and Joanne try to figure out whether their relationship is a realistic possibility in a world where he is supposed to find a good Jewish woman to play the role of a rabbi's wife, and she is supposed to be dating material collect for the relationship podcast that she hosts together with her sister.

The “Don’t they want this and should they even bother” premise that drives “Nobody Wants This” is fun from the start and helps the series find its balance as both a romance and a comedy. a balance rarely achieved in most rom-com series. However, it's not the humor or swoon that sets the Netflix show apart. Instead, what really shines in the romantic comedy is its cast. From lead actors Brody and Bell to their siblings Sasha (Timothy Simmons, of “Veep” fame) and Morgan (Justine Lupa, of “Succession” fame), the cast is a tableau of millennial fan favorites.

Having grown up watching both The OC and Veronica Mars, the teen dramas that catapulted the careers of Brody and Bell, I can also admit that I am undoubtedly the target audience for this series. I'll be watching Brody play a Jewish man with a bagel in a kitchen who exudes a certain kind of Seth Cohen-style sincerity all day long. At the same time, I really appreciate the joy of seeing Bell return to her roots as a snarky character trying to navigate life outside of a community. And while it's fun in their scenes alone, seeing the chemistry between Brody and Bell's two characters together is pure millennial magic.

This magic is so strong that it was enough to make up for the show's weaknesses. Do we really need another Los Angeles story about older millennials struggling with what they should be doing and balancing their needs with their family's expectations of their adult life? Probably not. Is the series full of tropes like the overbearing Jewish mother and the eye-rolling eccentric single mother? Absolutely. Does the show tell us that Joanne is a bad person so often that we believe it, even if she never does anything that bad? Yes. Are there any inconsistencies in the plot that don't add up? Definitely. Are Brody, Bell, Simmons and Lupa's performances dramatically different from some of their most popular roles? Not really.

Did these things interest me as I watched? No.

The show is a romantic comedy. It's supposed to be funny and graphic and the kind of thing I'll want to text my friends about while we all stream it from our separate couches while our kids sleep the night it comes out. “Nobody Wants This” delivers that experience. Plus, for Millennial viewers like me, the back and forth between Bell and Brody's characters is both new and nostalgic, making the film extremely entertaining.

From watching Joanne cross herself in a synagogue to Noah setting her ice cream sundaes on the sidewalk so they can kiss, the show strings together moments that are, at their core, pleasant, even if the surrounding scenes, characters, or… Dialogues don't work. I felt this most clearly in many scenes involving Noah and Joanne's families and Joanne's larger group of friends, where the tropes and predictable dialogue are most exaggerated.

However, there are also tropes that feel less trope and are better realized, such as Sasha struggling to raise his teenage daughter Miriam (Shiloh Bearman) and Miriam's bat mitzvah with a terrible theme. There's also some drama with Noah's ex-girlfriend that isn't as predictable as it first seems.

Despite the tropes, characters, and dialogue not always working, I still ended up watching because I couldn't wait to see the next moment between Noah and Joanne. I also looked forward to the interactions with her siblings, and that is where the success of the series lies. It's new and original content that focuses on the dynamics and chemistry of the four main characters, playing on millennial nostalgia in a way that only reboots and sequels have managed to do before.

At the end of the tenth and final episode, I was just as shocked as I was when the trailer for the series was released. Then it was because I couldn't believe Brody and Bell were opposite each other in a romantic comedy. At the end of the last episode, it was because I wasn't expecting the final exchange to so clearly announce a second season, and my Millennial heart is already waiting for the Netflix announcement.

“Nobody Wants This” is streaming on Netflix.