Kristen Bell’s New Show ‘Nobody Wants This’ Lives Up to Its Title

The conventional wisdom about romantic comedy on TV is that, for the most part, it doesn’t belong there.

Maybe weaving a prominent will-they-or-won’t-they subplot into a sitcom can give viewers the warm-blanket feelings of The Philadelphia Story or You’ve Got Mail. But shows designed primarily as romantic comedies have been so ill-fated that they seem to work best when chronicling particularly toxic or unconventional attempts at coupling, as seen in Netflix’s Love or You’re the Worst.

At the same time, the creative successes of those shows illustrate just what TV rom-coms can be good for: dissecting the developments that follow the traditional happily-ever-afters of their movie counterparts. The spark of perpetual romance may be difficult on TV, but digging into ongoing relationships is the format's specialty.

Nobody Wants This feels like an attempt to craft a lighter, less bracing version of shows like Love or, especially, You’re the Worst; its title even sounds like an off-brand knockoff of the latter. Premiering Sept. 26 on Netflix, it’s a rom-com of seemingly mismatched partners: sincere, confident rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) and sardonic, extremely non-religious podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell). Noah has just ended a long-term relationship after realizing that he was coasting toward marriage on autopilot; Joanne has rejected countless suitors before even giving them a real chance, preferring to turn them into fodder for the podcast she co-hosts with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe).

The way that Nobody Wants This presents its podcast—comfy couch recording sessions, constant sisterly banter, a kind of affected "who, us?" anti-professionalism—feels similar to the usual movie versions of this stuff, which tend to rely on studio-style setups where the characters look more like professional DJs. The casual vibe is a mixed blessing. It more accurately reflects how many shows start out homemade; it also generates suspicion that the show-within-the-show is shoddily built up from someone’s rambling, self-amused hobby.

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Technically speaking, there isn’t a real-life Nobody Wants This (that’s the name of the podcast in the show, too)—nothing touted in the press releases or cited in the credits as source material. But series creator Erin Foster does host a show with her sister called The World’s First Podcast.

The sisters also made the short-lived VH1 reality-show spoof Barely Famous, and Foster has sitcom experience from a staff job at a Ryan Murphy show from a decade ago. In spite of those credits, Nobody Wants This feels very much like it was created by a podcaster, for Netflix—uniting two popular formats under their shared goal of stringing stories out shamelessly.

One episode takes place entirely in the aftermath of the couple’s first kiss, as Joanne nervously waits for a return text and Noah gets distracted by a problem with his ex. In another episode, they run an errand together and must survive a mild embarrassment. A show like Seinfeld could surely spin this stuff into 22 hilarious minutes, but Nobody Wants This never even hints at a Seinfeld-like command of wacky minutiae.

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Instead, it turns its attention to the pointless mastery of canned banter and stock phrases—the podcast-y sounds (“I like that for you,” “I don’t hate that”) of people who have heard funny dialogue before but can only recreate the tone of it, not the actual jokes. Weirder still, the central conflict that eventually emerges between Noah and Joanne is a potentially weighty one having to do with religious and social mores, which throws the nothingness of the show’s comedy further out of balance.

The way Nobody Wants This fumbles through the streaming-era process of actually producing workable episodes is especially strange given how much talent it draws from touchstones of 2000s TV: Bell and Brody both came up in distinctive teen dramedies, while one of the staff writers has the unbeatable resume of Futurama, Arrested Development, and 30 Rock. There’s more: Episode directors include comic pros like Greg Mottola (Superbad) and Karen Maine (the more recent Yes, God, Yes), while Veep’s Timothy Simons has a major supporting role as Noah’s sibling (though they seem much more like bros than actual brothers). This is pretty close to an all-star production.

The real question is why all these stars, on both sides of the camera, agreed to do this show in the first place; it seems like a lot of work just to approximate a cutesier version of You’re the Worst. Nobody Wants This benefits from that work, to be sure. Bell and Brody, in particular, are easy to watch and could have starred in a perfectly decent 90-minute formula rom-com with no sweat. But that doesn’t make this show better so much as it makes clear that, with less likable stars, it could have been even worse. Nobody Wants This seems to think that it’s exploring the complex ins and outs of a modern relationship; really, it’s a lot of well-off people making wan jokes while gazing at their navels.

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