Nobody Wants This Season 2 Review: The Series is Even More Millennial-Friendly!
Nobody Wants This Season 2, the romantic series starring Adam Brody and Kristen Bell, returned to Netflix. Available with 10 new episodes from October 23rd, this title, after the enormous success of the first chapter, was once again able to win us over from start to finish with its fun, profound, and frank story of love in the days of Millennials. Nobody Wants This. This is incredible to title the romcom series made in the image and likeness of millennials (and not only) that had warmed our hearts last year by putting together an explosive couple (on the screen) like Adam Brody and Kristen Bell. Yet none of those who gravitate towards the two protagonists, Noah and Joanne, wanted them to get together. They defied all odds, like two modern Romeo and Juliet.
Now they return with the second season, still streaming on Netflix, and author Erin Foster raises the bar by increasing not only the difficulties the protagonists have to overcome, but also the parade of guest stars who once again wink at Generation Y. The perfect entertainment for the incurable romantics is back. There are romantic comedies that play in lightness and others that, beneath the glossy surface, delve into human frailties. Nobody Wants This, back on Netflix with its second season, belongs to both categories. Created by Erin Foster and now entrusted to Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan (both from Girls), the series continues to chronicle the impossible love between Joanne (Kristen Bell), a self-absorbed and disarming podcaster, and Noah (Adam Brody), a charming rabbi struggling with the weight of his own contradictions. Between equivocations, spirituality, and sharp jokes, the series explores that uncertain terrain in which faith meets love, and where intimacy is measured by the fear of truly changing.
Nobody Wants This Season 2 Review: The Story Plot
The second season resumes after that bittersweet ending that left us in suspense. Noah had decided to choose Joanne over his own career as chief rabbi… or so it seemed. This is what emerges at the first dinner organized by them as a couple, when everyone thought they would break up forever. A dinner that becomes a typical comedy of errors, and who tries to resume the threads of what happened previously. Including the closeness of the respective “loser brothers” of the two protagonists, Morgan (Justine Lupe), who would like to find a stable relationship like Joanne, and Sasha (Timothy Simons), who has to manage his wife Ester (Jackie Tohn), who bosses him around. We can’t help but cheer even more for this unlikely and bizarre couple next to the main one. Their respective parents also try to move forward and accept this impossible relationship, which has to face the biggest dilemma of all: how can they get married if she doesn’t want to convert?
Nobody Wants This Season 2 Review and Analysis
In this second season, the show smooths out the excesses of the previous one, and it attempts to transform itself from a frivolous rom-com to a more mature and self-critical tale. Esther and Bina, once simply caricatural figures, acquire unexpected nuances: Esther, for the first time, shows real doubts about her marriage while Bina retreats into the background, partially losing the role of the “dominant mother-in-law”. Noah stops being the perfect man and starts wanting everyone to like him, which makes him decidedly vulnerable. In this new balance, Nobody Wants This finds its best voice: light but not superficial, ironic but capable of allowing itself some reflection. The second season addresses the theme of faith with a more intimate and less provocative look compared to the previous one. The question about Joanne’s possible conversion remains open, but it stops being a narrative pretext to become a personal path, made up of hesitations, curiosity, and fear of never feeling “enough”. Nobody Wants This does not talk about religion in the theological sense, but uses spiritual experience as a key to recounting the human need to belong and, at the same time, to preserve one’s individuality.
The difference between the rational and disenchanted world of Joanne and the idealistic world of Noah thus becomes a metaphor for affective relationships in general: the precarious balance between the desire to unite and that of remaining oneself. Comedy, in this context, not only serves to play down but to create bridges, because it is precisely in the jokes, in the small misunderstandings, and in the mutual ironies that the series manages to speak, lightly, about the complexity of truly understanding each other. Despite having found a more mature tone, Nobody Wants This remains an openly television comedy, designed to entertain and not to revolutionize the genre. Some dynamics between Joanne and Noah reproduce the patterns of the first season, and certain secondary plots only end up weighing down the rhythm rather than enriching it. However, when the narrative returns to focus on the protagonist couple, the series recovers its brilliance: dialogue flows naturally, irony is woven into moments of genuine vulnerability, and the complicity between Kristen Bell and Adam Brody continues to be the most believable driver in the story.
There is an age when finding love is particularly difficult. And it is that moment in life when you are no longer very young but not too adult either. Being able to find love in the age group from 30 to 40, when almost everyone seems to have already found it, is rather complicated – except for strokes of luck – and it is precisely this period of life that “Nobody Wants This” chooses to tell, establishing itself as a perfect series for “Millennials”. The beauty of “Nobody Wants This” is that it doesn’t feature perfect characters, who always do the right thing or are politically correct; in fact, quite the opposite. The protagonist of the series herself, played to perfection by Kristen Bell (who is herself a very strong reference for the Millennial generation who knew her as Veronica Mars), has a very difficult, resentful, envious, judgmental character, and also delusions of grandeur. Put like this, she might seem like the worst possible protagonist, but who, in life, has never been a little touchy, gossipy, distrustful, envious of others?
A bit of everyone and it is precisely because of this honesty that “Nobody Wants This” manages to have a great hold on the public: it allows them to reflect themselves in an imperfect model of woman, man, girlfriend, sister, mother, normalizing some behaviors that, nowadays, or in any case for the new generations, they are defined as “wrong” or to be avoided. And if we also add a bit of irony, lightness, and even a mystical background to a romantic and incorrect story, the result can only be a winning mix. And it is precisely what happens with this series that can be watched so easily that you can no longer do without it. Consisting of short episodes, lasting about twenty minutes each, “Nobody Wants This” is a perfect comfort watch ideal for the autumn season, where, with the first cold weather, you just want to sit on the sofa, under a blanket, watching TV series.
And this second season of the series, which arrives a year after its first chapter, does not disappoint expectations at all, confirming itself as a worthy continuation of a romantic series that we like to define as “perfect”. Engaging, realistic, romantic without being cloying, “Nobody Wants This” is a series that can tell all the phases of love, and you can only fall in love with this, especially if you were born between 1980 and 1994. Not happy to have created the perfect torque for Generation Y, Erin Foster decides to bet again on the strengths of the Netflix comedy. In reality, Adam Brody, the former Seth Cohen of The OC, is married to Leighton Meester, the former Blair Waldorf of Gossip Girl Erotic Kristen Bell was the voiceover narrator. Meester herself appears in this second season in the role of Abby: one reunion crazy for the three performers, which will entertain the audience of enthusiasts quite a bit.
Just like what happened in the first season with Ryan Hansen and D’Arcy Carden, Bell’s former colleagues in his previous series. That’s not all: they also arrive Seth Rogen and Kate Berlant as two mysterious characters we won’t reveal to you who promise guaranteed laughter. Rogen, now on the crest of the wave thanks to The Studio, started right in seriality with Freaks and Geeks – niche teen drama always for spectral – and he’s no stranger to romcom after two seasons of Platonic. Between guest stars, there is no shortage of Arian Moayed in the role of Doctor Andy, and Alex Karpovsky in that of Big Noah, two characters who will give their respective protagonists a hard time. The showrunner, together with all the performers, succeeded for a second time in a small miracle. Despite some redundancy and repetition, it intertwines the archetypes and stylistic features of romcom with those of ooze.
I won’t touch it slowly, anyone who reads me knows that I hardly do: Midway through the season, I literally wanted to slap Kristen Bell’s Joanne, a character that has become unbearable to say the least. Spoiled, selfish, envious beyond measure: the boring and untruthful stereotype of millennials looking for great love. A fickle and unpleasant little girl, who taps her feet every time something doesn’t go as she would like, who always wants to be the center of attention, regardless of the feelings of others. Starting from those of Noah, who became the charming and patient rabbi that he was, an insecure and characterless boy, at the mercy of his girlfriend. Cheesy, suffocating, bigoted: Noah has lost all the spontaneity that the script had given us at the beginning of the story, closing himself in a role that is not very credible and of a disconcerting banality, especially in the short monologues he plays at the end of some episodes, in which he dwells in sermons full of clichés and rhetorical phrases.
Even the secondary characters, from Morgan to Sasha, sister and brother of the central couple, have lost bite, prisoners of the stereotype in which their roles have been pigeonholed, incapable of expressing what they would have to say, probably more than the protagonists. For the rest, ten half-hour episodes in which little or nothing happens, in which we witness crises and reconciliations of the couple, with cheesy skits and little in line with the first season, more introspective and with a distinctly indie style that we had liked so much. Special mention for Esther, Sasha’s wife, the only one with a three-dimensional and non-flat character, the only one with something to tell. On the rest, it’s better to move on to something else, perhaps to a series where they don’t try to make us believe that to support themselves and live in Los Angeles, it’s enough to record a weekly podcast, and indeed, suddenly interrupt it for a ridiculous quarrel between sisters.
Nobody Wants This represents, in a plastic way, how a second season shouldn’t be made. I will not stand here and offer a contrary opinion. The TV series seems to suffer from the same problems as a couple: after the initial courtship phase the monotony ends up taking over. And like a couple who fall in love only for one characteristic in common, a TV series built only on one detail, bringing it to exhaustion, risks being repetitive. The millennial romance fairy tale, following the wave of fan bases and social demands, is totally divorced from reality and experienced in a parallel universe where everything is possible and only they are the center of the world. This absence of realism presents global audiences with those stereotypes about love and the United States that helped build the dream imagery of that country. It is no coincidence that Esther is the truest, most mature character who evolves beyond the figurines that surround her. A shame and a great waste, for one series that cannot live only on “ah, how many memories with Veronica Mars and The OC” of eternally adolescent millennials on Instagram.
Now that Noah and Joanne’s lives are even more connected, their families are even more present – and they don’t fail to interfere. This creates the comfort show perfect for autumn, to watch snuggled up with a cover and hot chocolate. Both alone and in company. Like a warm and affectionate hug. Nobody Wants This Season 2 manages to tell the second phase of a relationship. Not only defects but also mutual annoyances and, above all, apparently insurmountable difficulties are starting to appear. The comedy analyzes what they mean by family, religion, sex for today’s thirty-forty-year-olds, going in depth but without exaggerating, always through the filter of comedy. How willing are we to change ourselves for our significant other, and is it right to do so? All we have to do is enjoy the new episodes and clamor for season 3.
Nobody Wants This Season 2 Review: The Last Words
Nobody Wants This Season 2 is the perfect and coherent sequel to the dazzling first season, which, despite some setbacks and repetitions, offers a functional and renewed formula for telling a romantic comedy today. Now that Noah and Joanne want to give each other a real chance as a couple, they must face not only everyone they think would be better off apart but also the big existential questions. Starting from religion, which for better or worse, will inevitably characterize their relationship. In the now consolidated cast – we can’t help but cheer for the “loser brothers” – there are guest stars always intended for millennials like Leighton Meester and Seth Rogen. In a word: unmissable. Nobody Wants This Season 2 is one of those series that does not seek the surprise effect, but emotional coherence. The writing is more balanced, the characters more nuanced, and the direction takes the time to breathe. The chemistry between Kristen Bell and Adam Brody remains the driving element: ironic, fragile, full of subtexts. Guest stars, like Leighton Meester, add color without distorting the tone. Not everything is perfect – some subplots remain light, almost accessory – but the series finds the courage to tell the normality of feelings, and this makes it truer than many glossy rom-coms.
Cast: Kristen Bell, Adam Brody, Leighton Meester, Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons
Created By: Erin Foster
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
