The second season of the romantic comedy series Nobody Wants This maintains the winning humour of its inaugural outing and still displays outstanding chemistry between the show’s magnetically paired leads, but the perspective and tonal shift brings creator Erin Foster’s concept into new and refreshing territory. Picking up where the first season left off, Nobody Wants This places its characters into situations that are more in line with those experienced by people in long term, somewhat uncertain relationships. The overall sense of swooning romance might not be as central to this season, but the show and the people within it remain likeable, relatable, and effortlessly funny.
After patching things up and deciding to make a real go of it as a couple, budding Jewish rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) and successful shiksa podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) are still facing resistance in their relationship, both from within and from their extended families and conflicting religious circumstances. Noah feels pressure from his boss (Stephen Tobolowsky) to confirm whether or not Joanne is willing to convert to Judaism, something that would make his transition into a new role as senior rabbi a lot easier to swallow for the synagogue’s community at large. Noah bluffs and believes Joanne will absolutely convert, while she insists such a conversation never fully happened, and she remains skeptical on the issue. And while Joanne has a much healthier relationship with Noah’s cuttingly sarcastic sister-in-law, Esther (Jackie Tohn), her standing with mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh) is as icy and fraught as ever. Noah is also experiencing his own crisis of faith, one that might find him taking a job at a more loosey-goosey, new-agey synagogue (run by guest star Seth Rogen), and everything is compounded by Joanne deciding to go public with their relationship on her podcast, opening him up to more scrutiny.
Season two of Nobody Wants This depicts a couple that’s at the end of their “honeymoon phase,” the point where everyone needs to decide if there’s enough love to get through the struggles of everyday life. After the grand romantic gesture that ended season one, the spark has fully turned into a fire, and now the story becomes about maintaining that passion and consistency. Nobody Wants This has become a less traditionally romantic series by design, but that doesn’t mean the show is lacking in warmth, tenderness, and affection. From the main storyline involving Bell and Brody, to subplots about Esther’s rocky marriage to her man-child husband, Sasha (Timothy Simons), and Joanne’s co-host sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), suddenly taking up with her therapist (Arian Moayed), there’s still a lot of love to go around. It just doesn’t always lead to the same expected places.
Nobody Wants This continues to do a fine job of elevating the traditional sitcom formula. Each episode revolves predominantly around a single setting and situation that brings the bulk of the characters together: a dinner party that goes off the rails the second guests start arriving, an engagement party where everyone feels supremely unhappy, another trip to the local rec centre gym for one of Noah and Sasha’s basketball games, and a Purim set instalment that offers plenty of great banter and zingers. There’s a formula to the show, but the characters themselves never feel beholden to a set of guiding rules and principles. Their attitudes and opinions change over time, and sometimes those feelings clash with those held by loved ones. Whether they decide to sit on these feelings or act on them gives Nobody Wants This all of its entertaining power.
Bell and Brody once again make for a perfect on screen pair, enhancing the dramatic and comedic give and take that made the first season such a success. This season of Nobody Wants This also brings its supporting characters further into the spotlight, with Lupe getting some added space to further explain Morgan’s commitment issues, and the tandem act of Tohn and Simons furthering their complicated dynamic as a seemingly mismatched wife and husband. Tohn in particular gets some tremendous material to work from, with her character wrestling with the notion and pressure of potentially having another child with a man she might not want to stay married to in the long term. The primary storyline with Bell and Brody commands most of the attention, but Tohn’s work in this season is equally exemplary.
But it isn’t all perfect. At times, Nobody Wants This feels like it has to manufacture conflict to keep things going at a ten episode pace. The flip-flopping and underhandedly cruel scheming of Noah’s mom never finds a satisfying and consistent tone, almost as if the writers have deemed it necessary for the show to have a firmly unifying villain. It injects a kind of meanness and malevolence that crosses the line between being believably catty and narratively contrived, all without pulling the trigger on having it go anywhere interesting. Sometimes Bina doubles down on her dislike for Joanne, and at other moments they seem to have a common understanding, only for it all to be revealed as a ruse. It’s a character that feels rooted in identifiable motherly fears, but goes off course thanks to inconsistent writing.
But mostly everything else here is solid, provided that the audience can get used to characters who’re more comfortable in sharing their feelings in more restrained and intimate situations than in showcasing big romantic swings. The comedy remains a strong point for Nobody Wants This, but the more serious matters of the heart help to solidify the series’ status as the premiere romance of the moment. There are a finite number of other places Foster’s series can go from here, but the on and off screen creatives approach Nobody Wants This with a great deal of confidence and assurance in their depiction of a spiritually fraught relationship.
Season two of Nobody Wants This streams on Netflix starting Thursday, October 23, 2025.
