The night before I meet Erin Foster, the American creator of the hilarious new Netflix show Nobody Wants This, she was getting a “mom massage”. Do you have kids, she asks, before proceeding to explain exactly what she means. “When you have kids and you’re a mother, literally, your entire upper body just is, like, f***ed. And so I was in so much pain from, like, constantly doing this.” Over Zoom, she demonstrates a hunched position, a consequence presumably of lugging kids and their paraphernalia around.
Next door, her husband Simon was watching the first four episodes of Nobody Wants This. It was his first chance to see what Foster has been working on all this time. “I’m listening to him in the other room watching the show, laughing, and I’m in my massage thinking, ‘What’s he laughing at? What does he think is funny? Like, I want to know.’ And I came out and I was like, ‘What were you laughing at?’ He goes, ‘I don’t remember.’” How typical of a man, some might think. But did he enjoy it? “He didn’t think it was that great,” Foster quips, lightning quick. “No, he loved it!”
So he should. Foster took inspiration from her time with her Jewish husband for this story of an agnostic podcaster named Joanne (played in the show by Kristen Bell) who ends up romancing a handsome rabbi named Noah (Adam Brody). It was something of an about turn, she admits. “When I met my husband, I had been a writer for a long time, and I always wrote cynical love stories, really, just basing it off of my cynical love life at the time. Really, it was always about a girl not figuring it out. It was always about a girl self-sabotaging.”
Kristen Bell as Joanne and Adam Brody as Rabbi Noah in Nobody Wants This. (Photo: Netflix)[Missing Credit]
A jobbing actress on shows like House and Gilmore Girls, Foster has plied her trade as a writer, notably on sitcom The New Normal. But finding happiness in her personal life concerned her. “I was with someone who was healthy and well-adjusted. I just thought, ‘I don’t really know what’s funny about this.’ You know you’re scared to get happy because you think that you’re not gonna have anything to write about anymore.” For three years, she hit a creative slump. “It was really hard,” she says, admitting she came to the age-old realisation: write what you know. “The truth is that there actually was a lot of interesting things happening in our dynamic that I decided to pull from.”
Among them, Foster converted to the Jewish faith before marrying. “I told my producing partner how fascinating the conversion process was, because there were 23 people in the conversion class, and only three of us were converting for marriage. So there were all these really fascinating stories of people who had had bad experiences growing up Catholic or with Christian parents, and they just wanted to be Jewish. They always felt connected to being Jewish. And there were so many interesting stories that I just told him. And he was like, ‘We should do a show about this.’”
Raised in Los Angeles, the daughter of Canadian record mogul David Foster, the 42-year-old had a lot of Jewish friends growing up but her understanding of the faith was “surface level”, she says. “My mom was married to someone Jewish when we were kids, and so we celebrated some of the holidays. Went to Temple.” She also imbibed Jewish humour over the years. “Listen, I have had stomach issues my whole life. I’ve had anxiety my whole life. I’m self-deprecating. I think that I’ve been Jewish the whole time. I just finally got it on paper!”
Still, it was after meeting her spouse that she became more embedded in Judaism, although Foster stopped short of running the scripts for Nobody Wants This past him. “I’m aware he’s a private person,” she says. “He doesn’t want me airing all of our dirty laundry on a TV show, which is why I made an effort to make so many of the characters different than the real life people. Because I needed to take creative license. So he doesn’t fact check on the scripts, but he knows that I'm not really writing about him.”
Nobody Wants This. (Photo: Netflix)[Missing Credit]
Nevertheless, Foster checked in with others, including a rabbi named Steve Leder, who acted as the show’s consultant. “He helped to make sure things were accurate.” Quite whether he’s as attractive as Brody is another matter. Foster loved the idea of casting Brody, the Jewish former star from popular show The OC, but wanted to do her due diligence first. “We auditioned every single Jewish actor from here to New Zealand. And I mean literally, I was thinking like, ‘Should we discover someone? Should it be someone unexpected?’ And the truth is, there was not one single person we auditioned who felt right, and then Adam was the one who felt right.”
With the show based around the natural differences between Joanne and Noah’s worldviews, surely, Brody will now get called ‘the hot rabbi’, I suggest, in a nod to Andrew Scott’s character, colloquially known as ‘the hot priest’, who appeared in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s cult British sitcom Fleabag. “I love Fleabag,” smiles Foster. “And he’s already been called ‘the hot rabbi’. I mean, we call him ‘the hot rabbi’, actually, in the series.”
She recalls reading online reader comments under an article about the show in trade publication Variety. “I saw them being like, ‘This is just the Jewish Fleabag Season 2.’ And I honestly haven't really made that connection, because the truth is, it was based off of me falling for my husband, but we had to up the stakes and just being Jewish in L.A. wasn’t enough of a conflict, and so being a rabbi was gonna make it more interesting. And it’s obviously different, because rabbis can date women and priests cannot.”
Kristen Bell as Joanne and Adam Brody as Rabbi Noah in Nobody Wants This. (Photo: Netflix)[Missing Credit]
As for Bell, the actress best known for The Good Place, Foster admits that when she wrote the show, it was with a view to casting herself in the lead. “And then when we sold it to Netflix, they very much wanted Kristen in the role. And as soon as they mentioned her, I was like, ‘Listen, if you can get Kristen, by all means, please go do that instead of me.’ Because at that point, I was 40 years old, and I was trying to become a mom, and it was not the place I was at in my life. I was so excited be able to give my all behind camera and let a professional take over.”
Joanne is also a thirty-something looking for love, putting her in a different position to Foster. “I’m not trying to create some girl who has smeared eyeliner and she’s waking up from a hangover and a one-night stand. I don’t think that’s a really great depiction of women in their thirties who haven’t figured it out. I think that she’s a woman who is accomplished and ambitious and has her shit together in a lot of areas, but she just has some abandonment issues that make her choose the wrong people, and she gets in her own way.”
There were other personal inspirations too. In the show, Joanne and her sister Sasha (Succession’s Justine Lupe) run a podcast, as do Foster and her own sister Sara (called ‘The World’s First Podcast’). “Joanne says that her podcast is about sex and relationships in the modern world. And my sister and I’s podcast isn’t focused on anything like that in particular. We have a lot of experts come on who teach us a lot of things about health and wellness and emotional stuff…and then we do a little talk about sex and relationships too.”
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Kristen Bell stars as Joanne in new Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This. (Photo: Netflix)[Missing Credit]
While its not sex-obsessed (Foster says it’s not her humour to get “gratuitous”), some of the best moments of Nobody Wants This centre around the subject of amour, not least the accidental date that Joanne and Noah find themselves on at an adult store, when she is picking up a vibrator called ‘The Obliterator’.
“It’s not from personal experience,” promises Foster, when I politely enquire where that idea came from. “Sometimes you have to come up with ridiculous comedic things to get to people to be honest with each other.”
When I suggest that Foster’s show feels like Sex and the City, the iconic series starring Sarah Jessica Parker as New York columnist Carrie Bradshaw, she immediately beams. “I haven’t [heard anyone make that comparison], but I really like that!” she says. “As a writer in this genre, you really want to capture a moment in time as accurately as possible. And so I think Sex and the City really captures that moment in time so well. And I’m really trying to capture this moment in time in an accurate way based on what I’ve experienced.”
While SATC lasted six seasons and two movies, Foster isn’t thinking that far ahead, although she and Netflix have “definitely had the conversations” about taking the show further. “If we were to get a season two, I would just want to pick up where we leave off. Season 1 moves really slow, and I think it works that way, because it feels organic to how a relationship evolves. And so I would really want to do the same for our season two and not get too ahead of ourselves.” From the sounds of it, Foster has it all figured out.
Nobody Wants This is available on Netflix from 26 September.
