Erin Foster’s smash Netflix hit, Nobody Wants This, is a romcom about an unlikely relationship between a sexy rabbi and an even sexier non-Jewish podcaster, both leading glossy lives in Los Angeles. On paper, there’s a lot to love, and to this end the show has been feted by critics and audiences alike. But it has left me, and every Jewish woman I’ve canvassed on the subject, cringed out.
For this Netflix show does not depict a progressive love story, it is the Madonna-whore complex updated for our age.
Identified by Freud, the psychoanalytical theory splits female sexuality into two parts: women can either be lust-free and virtuous mothers or, well, whores. Such a binary division might have made sense in the Victorian times, when life options for the gentler sex were limited, but to see it given credence on a major viewing platform in 2024 is unpalatable.
The first Jewish woman we meet is Rebecca, long-term girlfriend of long-suffering Rabbi Noah and Mrs Head Rabbi in wating. We see her shimmy about the kitchen preparing shabbat dinner -- wearing an engagement ring she found while snooping through Noah’s locked draws. When the ever-so-reasonable rabbi, played by Adam Brody, confronts her, she’s confused why he’s upset. They are obviously going to marry so why not “speed things up”?
Foster, who converted to Judaism before marrying her Jewish music agent husband, has said in previous interviews that she hasn't mined her biography for fear of, “airing all our dirty laundry on a TV show”. And, oy vey, you can tell because the scene is wincingly implausible.
Eager to run away from his now sort-of fiancée, Noah finds himself at a non-Jewish dinner party where he smokes pot and falls into the arms of good-time gal, Joanne. Blonde and beautiful, Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, co-hosts a Millennial sex podcast with her sister, Morgan, which the show compares to Call Her Daddy.
Rooting for this enlightened career woman might be possible were it not for the fact that she’s also a brittle mess who puts up with all manner of nonsense.
During their first encounter Noah assumes the mantle of a modern-day Gladstone figure and lectures Joanne for being "complicated". He then psychoanalyses her sartorial tastes, condescendingly assuming she, “walks into a party with a big-ass fur coat because you’re scared of not being seen as special or different. Sorry babe, you vulnerable.”
Instead of running for the hills as fast as possible while wearing a massive fur coat, Joanna simpers and is turned on by the rabbi telling her off.
As the show progresses, it becomes clear that both Joanne and her sister serve as little more than vehicles of temptation for the male Jewish characters. One side plot sees Morgan developing a friendship with Noah’s brother, Sasha, which the audience is informed needs to be kept under wraps from his nagging wife, Esther, as she "wouldn’t understand".
By the last episode Morgan and Sasha are flirting by the bar at his daughter’s bat mitzvah, while Esther looks on in disgust. Yet, this is not framed as inappropriate, but as further evidence of the Jewish wife’s unreasonableness.
The implication is that Jewish women have no sexual agency of their own, and are lucky to find a Jewish guy with a strong sense of familial duty who deigns to marry them. As Jessica Radloff observes in her review for Glamour, no one would come away from watching this show thinking: “I really want to date a Jewish girl!”
What a shame Nobody Wants This fails so miserably when it comes to female representation, that it fails Jewish and shiksas (yes, the word is used throughout) alike. Nobody wants this, surely.
