Nobody Wants This season 3 review: Erin Foster’s romantic show Nobody Wants This went astray in Season 2, just like its lead characters — Noah (Adam Brody) and Joanne (Kristen Bell) — who “merge their lives and blend their friends”. But the second instalment served more as a placeholder than a season with a distinct identity of its own. It paid the price to showcase that rites-of-passage phase in any relationship when it lets more people in, instead of the two who kicked it off. The real resolution of that season, like life, comes much later in the third season, when the couple realises that at some point, they need to stop making their relationship palatable to others, and focus on consolidating and building on their bond. In the process, Foster also tightens his grip on the show and reinforces its identity as a green flag, if it were a profile on a dating app.
International setting, desi issues
Nobody Wants This is a fairly relatable show for Indians as it explores familiar desi themes such as family approval, religious conversion, and most crucially, the wave of feminism reshaping households today — for the better. Noah is a rabbi, as steeped in faith and tradition as it gets, but he’s also the too-good-to-be-true idealistic modern man who insists on his partner retaining her identity and choices as she navigates a new family, a new life, and even a new faith. It’s a struggle Indian families are encountering every day today, as women continue to hold their own instead of bowing down to their in-laws and a patriarchal society’s diktats like in the old days. But for them to be able to do that sans guilt yet with authority, they need a man like Noah who steps in to intervene gently as well as firmly, without severing ties with either party.
But they don’t make men like Noah. They never have. In season 3, as he and Joanne begin living together, he even takes in stride sharing space with a woman who asks, “Should I put this bread in with the plastic cover into the toaster?” Every step of the way, more than Joanne, it’s Noah’s unending patience that tests the audience’s patience — when will this man push back? What will it take for him to assert his dominance? Is the fact that she’s converting for him good enough for him to take everything else lying down? To make matters worse, like any daily soap, his mother also keeps tightening her grip on their relationship.
Spoiler alert As soon as he pops the question after organising a dream proposal, both Noah and Joanne begin to lose control of their relationship. Their parents start dictating not only the duration of their courtship, but also the scale, location, and vibe of their wedding. “I want a Julia Roberts wedding,” Joanne keeps manifesting, till she gives in to his family’s wish to keep the nuptials in their ancestral backyard. But Noah wins her over not by letting his family corner her, but by standing firmly by her side, till she realises on her own that he wants it as much as his family does. In that case, instead of being a pushover, he establishes his brand of romance on the lines of Shah Rukh Khan’s Raj from Aditya Chopra’s 1995 seminal romantic comedy Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge — he wants to win his girl over, but not at the cost of disrupting patriarchy like a violent man. He wants to bowl over patriarchy with his charm, even though it comes at the price of standing up to his own family.
Getting back on track
It’s not just their parents Noah and Joanne have to contend with while planning their wedding, it’s also their siblings. For starters, Joanne starts to feel she’s losing traction as a podcaster to her sister Morgan, whose new philosophy of “make them” fetches her not only thousands of new followers, but also a book offer (a smashing cameo by Poorna Jagannathan as her potential editor Eleanor) and a spot on What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. Professional envy aside, personal territories are breached too, as Morgan ends up sleeping with Noah’s newly separated brother Sasha. The show spends a good amount of time steering their romance in a predictable and clichéd direction. But by the end, it vehemently refuses to tie that loose end.
Because, like its lead couple, Nobody Wants This also realises — whether by design or otherwise — how it started and where it should be going. Their decision to hard-launch their relationship in Season 2 was not to seek approval of their family and friends, but to test whether they’re secure enough about their relationship, whether they can fight both individually and as a team to protect their equation, and whether their own inherent conflicts about their dynamic can avoid getting reinforced by external opinions. But that doesn’t mean they set out on a path of ensuring their siblings, parents, and even distant cousins are on board with the idea of how, why, when, and with whom they tie the knot. In a standard rom-com, the climactic scene of skeletons tumbling out of everyone’s closets and them confronting each other over built-up tension would’ve resulted in the couple working overtime to sustain peace at their pre-wedding ceremony.
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But like the show, Noah and Joanne also end up dismissing what’s not important — seeking validation from those too tied up by their own issues — to focus on what’s most important — making their wedding a memorable milestone. From where she started, Joanne comes a long way when she attributes her conversion to a desire to understand what makes Noah see the world the way he does. That’s all it takes for him to do something he would normally hesitate to do — disrupt tradition, not even seek her consent, and announce that he’d like to get married on the spot. “It’d be a controversial decision,” he admits, but doesn’t mind risking it because, at the end of the day, it just feels right. At the risk of sounding filmy, that’s the moment when Noah lets go of his own hand and tells himself, “Jaa Noah Jaa, jee le apni zindagi.”