Nobody Wanted More of This

If anyone is wondering what to do on Saturday night once it’s dark and you have an hour extra sleep, perhaps hang out with friends, go out to a movie (maybe Deliver Me From Nowhere?), or finish a craft project. Do not, whatever you do, waste five hours of your life watching the annoying Rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) and Veronica Mars/Joanne (Kristen Bell) in Nobody Wants This, season 2.

In the new season of Nobody Wants This, the grotesque caricatures of narcissistic Angelenos and the borderline antisemitic portrayals of Jews and Judaism — who was it that so hurt showrunner Erin Foster? — thankfully relent. But, in trying to save the show from being simply hateful, the production team tacks rapidly to banal.

Instead of a singularly nasty show where the one gag — hot rabbi dates a non Jew — is milked to death, this time around, characters are “humanized,” back stories are “explored,” and we end up with standard streaming pablum but with Jewish-sprinkles. There’s a Purim episode with fancy dresses (where we might find our “hidden inner selves”) which provokes more gag-reflexes than gags. And that sets off a Valentine’s Day episode where each relationship’s set of rituals is challenged. It’s a love festival, get it? Instead of obsessively hate-watching it like season 1, I was barely able to stay awake for the season 2 I said I would review.

Apart from ending up with a show that was just plain tedious, the decision to make NWT boring-real instead of bad-cartoon meant that many of the less important errors from the whole concept came to the fore. I guess music is a question of taste, but ending the season on the worst part of Mega Simone’s sped up kitsch was just a nail-on-chalkboard reminder of how badly the whole season was scored. And, again, though it’s less bad than portraying women as monsters and Jews as idiots, using the Roth-Portnoy Caslon font for the titles? What next, play an accordion when a French person walks in?

Then there are the cruel tricks the crew plays on the unsuspecting cast. Timothy Simons (Sasha Rocklov) has created a fascinating man-boy character, but he’s not ever convincing as Noah’s brother, let alone Bina (Tovah Feldshuh) and Ilan’s (Paul Ben-Victor) son. Maybe, since the series is about embodying different cultures, there’s a hidden joke about how Sasha was adopted. It would be a cute plot surprise if, heaven forbid, they make a Season 3, because it would make sense of how Jonah Ryan turns up as a Roklov while looking and feeling like a totally different species from his entire family.

Thank goodness the crass misogyny of the first series is largely gone. Maybe that’s because Feldshuh demurred from all but a couple of cameos, in protest. Maybe she just realized what she’d gotten into after starting shooting the second season since she just drops out of the plot like a stone. In the first couple of episodes, dressed as a mob boss, she makes threats on which she, and the show, fail to deliver. Which is both a shame and a relief.

As for Jackie Tohn who plays Esther (Sasha’s wife) and who was also the victim of vindictive writing in season 1, she should get double pay since, in season 2, she has to entirely re-create her character. Mid-season, there’s a “remark point” — which is like a plot point that people remark upon, but entirely without substance — when Esther grows bangs. It’s supposed to be emblematic of a transition the character is going through, but really Esther is transforming into a Jewish Ally McBeal from a Joseph Goebbels Cruella de Vil.

By the end, NWT feels like an exercise from TV Writing 101, with each lead getting explicit foils. Joanne gets other people wanting to marry or become Jewish. And the cool, hot rabbi who is (arguably inappropriately) dating a blonde non-Jew also gets two mirror characters — a cool rabbi who turns out to be insufferable (maybe they spent the Feldshuh money on Seth Rogen?); and an inappropriate mature, bearded counselor for another blonde non-Jew. It’s so formulaic that maybe the over-busy writers brought in to fix the show just used AI and ran with the suggestions.

Will our delightful tentpole rabbi be shown up by these foil characters or will he learn from them and surpass the expectations that they manage? I hope I’m not leaving you on tenterhooks.