REVIEW: ‘Nobody Wants This’ Season 2 Understands Relationships Well

Erin Foster’s Netflix Original series Nobody Wants This Season 2 picks up right where the previous season left off, with Rabbi Noah Raklov (Adam Brody) hopeful he’ll become the senior rabbi of Temple Chai and his girlfriend, Joanne (Kristen Bell), wrestling with whether she connects with Judaism enough to convert. While the season thrives in its side characters and their stories, it sometimes struggles to make its main characters feel like real people evenly throughout the season.

Adam and Joanne are at a crossroads, together and separately. They’re both encountering challenging personal moments, and those encounters challenge their relationship in turn. Most of the time, they communicate, they work through it, and they come out stronger for it. Often, these conversations feel contrived. They feel like they were written in a TV show for a hot young rabbi to tell his girlfriend.

The show does confront this directly, though, to be fair. It often moves on quickly, with the lessons short and pithy. Every episode feels like a somewhat repetitive lesson from on high. They’re lessons well-thought-out, though. Adam Brody is generally charming, and Noah speaks well in his regular sermon-like speeches to whatever crowd is around him. But they feel like platitudes when there is only so much authentic growth from episode to episode.

Nobody Wants This Season 2 does well showing what it’s like to blend lives in a relationship.

There is progress through. Nobody Wants This Season 2 is, ultimately, a show about communication. It’s about two people from very different backgrounds falling in love and learning how to blend their worlds. While the show is imperfect at pacing this journey, it is a stunning example of how difficult this process is in real life. Relationships require work, and Joanne and Noah are constantly putting in the work.

The entirety of Nobody Wants This Season 2 benefits from an excellent supporting cast, whose problems and journeys are actually more exciting and well-developed than those of the main couple. The first season struggled heavily with its Jewish women characters.

They were depicted as shrewd, unpleasant, and judgmental, especially compared to Joanne and her sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), who often became the voices of reason in most scenarios, despite being more outwardly vapid blonde podcasters.

The secondary characters are the best part of Nobody Wants This Season 2.

In Nobody Wants This Season 2, Noah’s mother, Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), and his sister-in-law, Esther (Jackie Tohn), are some of the best characters. They both experience immense challenge and growth of their own, dealing with their respect for Joanne and her relationship with Noah, and otherwise.

Noah’s brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), also enjoys a glow-up, evolving beyond the “dumb brother” alongside Morgan. They both get to feel like even more full people than they did in the first season because they’re no longer the butt of joke after joke. Sasha’s relationships with both Esther and Morgan are more rooted in his being a genuinely good and caring partner and friend. Morgan is still comically aloof, but she’s also shown as a truly thoughtful person, too.

The show thrives on the interconnected relationships between Noah and Joanne’s family and friends. Just like in real life, blending your worlds is hard, but it also helps everyone involved grow. It’s a beautiful thing to watch happen this season as it brings the characters closer together while helping them investigate their own personal lives more deeply.

It’s fascinating the way Nobody Wants This Season 2 does such a great job of instilling strong rabbinic lessons about life, love, and partnership, even if Noah isn’t always actually the best rabbi or source of that wisdom. He’s a human and fallible person like any of us.

Perhaps too much so, too often being the source of tension and frustration with his bad ideas and lack of a growth mindset. It gets old quickly. Thankfully, the charm endures regardless, thanks to truly lovable characters and how deeply they try to be good for one another.

The show is also very good at exploring what it does and doesn’t mean to be Jewish. Where the first seasons, and most similar stories, have a very prescribed approach to depicting what is and isn’t Jewish. The season is imperfect, especially in its slightly underdeveloped depiction of the show’s new progressive Jewish community.

Nobody Wants This Season 2 explores what being Jewish means to different people.

Nonetheless, Nobody Wants This Season 2 does well exploring what being Jewish means to its different characters and how those experiences don’t have to be mutually exclusive. One character’s vision for Judaism or a Jewish life doesn’t have to invalidate another’s, and there’s an increasingly beautiful interconnectedness between these experiences as the season goes on.

Nobody Wants This Season 2 isn’t paced perfectly, and its main characters are often less interesting than the rest of the cast because of their constant circle around the same conversations, but that’s also life. And the show knows it and works through that mess as well as any show can.

Nobody Wants This Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix.