Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A rabbi and a raunchy sex podcaster walk into a bar. Such is the premise of Netflix‘s romantic comedy Nobody Wants This, starring Adam Brody and Kristen Bell as ill-fated lovers from wildly different worlds. Back for a second season, the pair once again tries to “make it work” — this time, under the heavier weight of consequence.
The story picks up where it left off. Noah Roklov (Brody), passed over for the senior rabbi position he’d been chasing for years, begins to grasp the professional and spiritual ramifications of dating outside his faith. Joanne (Bell), still brash but disarmingly sincere, doubles down on her search for meaning — not just for love’s sake, but for a genuine connection to Judaism. Their chemistry remains irresistible; these two could make any petty argument sound like foreplay. Yet the series wisely treats conversion not as a perfunctory hurdle toward marriage but as a profound life decision. That sensitivity likely stems from creator Erin Foster, who converted to Judaism and clearly understands the gravity behind that choice.
One of the sharpest sequences unfolds midway through the season at a Purim party, during which Joanne’s mother (Stephanie Faracy), inspired by Noah’s explanation of “the Jewish soul” and Mount Sinai, announces that she, too, is Jewish and has “always been.” The moment crystallizes Joanne’s frustration: Her yearning to feel this same spark is sincere, but her connection to faith still feels elusive. What makes her so compelling is precisely this contradiction — the way she juggles her love for Noah with an honest, sometimes desperate, desire to feel the flicker, which she refuses to fake, that would justify conversion classes.
The show also continues to mine humor from the cultural dissonance between Joanne’s and Noah’s families. The Rokolovs never miss a Friday night Shabbat dinner, while Joanne’s idea of familial devotion is texting her mother “happy birthday” sometime on the evening of. The cultural contrast remains one of the show’s richest comedic facets.
Season Two also zooms in on the siblings. Noah’s brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), the goofball confidant of Season One, emerges as a surprisingly affecting character. His wife, Esther (Jackie Tohn), is adrift in a midlife crisis, fantasizing about being “empty nesters” who can “try new drugs, live in cool neighborhoods, and stay in bed all Sunday” instead of having a second child. Sasha, ever the conduit for others’ venting, finds himself ignored when he finally needs to speak.
Not all of the show’s religious humor lands smoothly. A midseason interview scene features Noah meeting a new temple’s rabbi (a cameo by Seth Rogen), who somehow confuses Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, with Tu B’Shevat, the birthday of the trees. One would hope that with all the modern talk of representation and sensitivity, Netflix might hire one Orthodox Jewish consultant who actually knows the difference. Instead, Nobody Wants This occasionally drifts into the kind of broad, secular Jewishness — defined by bagels, neuroses, and Woody Allen references — that undermines and diminishes its more prescient themes of faith.
That irony deepens when Noah, after losing his promotion, joins this new Reform congregation. Under Rabbi Neil’s laissez-faire guidance, Noah is encouraged to ditch the kippah, skip Shabbat, and swap Torah study for Marvel movie premieres. The satire of “feel-good spirituality” is glaringly manifested in these watered-down, hippie deconstructions of faith that strip away precisely the meaning they pretend to preserve. It’s here that Noah begins to sense fault in progressive paradise and reclaim his vocation.
Foster also uses the season to examine modern relationship neuroses. There’s a brilliantly awkward scene in which Noah admits to having “dated someone pretty casually” before conceding he once bought her birthday flowers, visited her mother in the hospital, and took her to a family wedding. (“I don’t know why she was surprised when I broke up with her right after the wedding,” he says, baffled.) Morgan, Joanne’s sister and podcast cohost, fares no better: Her attempt to “catch up” romantically with her sister ends in a toxic liaison with her therapist.
Some critics have dismissed Season Two as a retread, even noting that it ends identically to the first. However, such cynics overlook the characters’ clear development. Noah rediscovers the seriousness of his calling; Joanne learns that faith rarely arrives as a lightning-bolt epiphany but instead in a series of smaller, deliberate steps. Its depiction of Judaism may lean toward the symbolic — more about challah and phone-free family dinners than Talmudic discourse — but expecting a sitcom meditation on rabbinical law is probably asking too much. (That, after all, would make the title literal: Nobody Wants This.)
In its best moments, Nobody Wants This captures the slow, ordinary miracle of learning to believe in something, someone, or perhaps both. By the end of the season, its lesson feels earned: Love may be impulsive, but faith is learned one Shabbat dinner at a time.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.