Everybody wants more of "Nobody Wants This"

Ah, the beloved rom-com.

It waxes and wanes, and there are charmingly simple and formulaic ones, was well as delightfully innovative and complex versions. And Netflix's latest blockbuster series Nobody Wants This is a beautiful synthesis of both those descriptions. Season two of the series featuring the "hot rabbi," played poetically by Adam Brody, and the "sappy shiksah," played by a charming Kristen Bell, returned last night, and the show made a strong case for dismissing the sophomore slump and picking up where the energy left off while also daringly subverting the momentum from the season one finale.

Lili Loofbourow of the Washington Post weighed in on the season premiere with a thoughtful and nuanced look at the show that viewers just can't get enough of: 

The rom-com has been overdue for a resurrection. Many have tried. Few have succeeded. There’s something about the format, which whimsically (and paradoxically) elevates one particular love story as both exceptional and representative, that feels anachronistic. Tropes that used to work fall flat in the modern era. Maybe the issue is that we’re so steeped in relationship discourse that patterns have become wearily, rather than charmingly, recognizable.

Still, sometimes you want something frothy. Something that brings back a little of that cosmic love stuff. Enter “Nobody Wants This,” Netflix’s ratings-busting extended rom-com. Now in its second season, the Los Angeles-based comedy stars Adam Brody as Noah, a soulful, open-minded rabbi who falls for Kristen Bell’s Joanne, an agnostic, Instagram-savvy, stylish sex-and-relationships podcaster. No one in Noah’s family — or synagogue — wants them together (hence the name), and much of the series deals with his agonized desire for Joanne to convert to Judaism so they can have a future that doesn’t cost him his calling or his career.

The first season ended with one of those epiphanic, nonsensical endings rom-coms so often deliver, with one character delivering a wholly uncharacteristic speech and suddenly — in what we have been taught to regard as a romantic gesture — waving away everything that was previously important to them. There’s even a chase after leaving a party. The feel-goodery is insubstantial and unpersuasive; it’s a badly executed capitulation to older rom-com conventions.

To its credit, the second season starts by highlighting, italicizing and bolding exactly how unsustainable that resolution was. The first episode, “Dinner Party,” is an obvious wink to the legendary episode of “The Office.” And while it’s not quite as disastrous (or funny), it’s close: Noah and Joanne discover that they interpreted the terms of their reconciliation in the finale quite differently. The misunderstanding isn’t an especially logical one, but it does reflect how people tend to hear what they want to — and perhaps forget exactly what they said in the heat of the moment.