Nobody Wants This — the widely watched Netflix rom-com that explored the question “If a hot rabbi and Kristen Bell walked into a bar, would they eventually make out?†(thankfully, yes) — has been renewed for a second season.
With the renewal, Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria added a twist: Two alumni of Girls, writer Bruce Eric Kaplan and Jenni Konner, who was co-showrunner of the HBO comedy alongside Lena Dunham, are joining Nobody Wants This as its new showrunners and executive producers. (Series creator Erin Foster and Craig DiGregorio were the showrunners in season one; according to the Wrap, Foster will remain onboard as an executive producer.) The two have already set up a season-two writers’ room and started working on the new episodes, which will presumably explore where the relationship between Noah (Adam Brody, a.k.a. the hot rabbi) and Joanne (petite shiksa goddess Kristen Bell) goes next — and also hopefully contain more scenes in which Timothy Simons gets high in front of his teenage daughter.
Given the involvement of Konner and Kaplan, will Nobody Wants This adopt more of a Girls vibe? Will Bell start saying things like “I think that I may be the podcaster of my generation. Or at least, a podcaster of a generation� I would argue that Nobody Wants This already has some Girls ingredients in its recipe and that giving Konner and Kaplan this assignment is simply meeting the series where it already lives.
All the WAGs who are friends with Esther (Jackie Tohn) and Noah’s ex-girlfriend Rebecca (Emily Arlook) are either Marnies (privileged, pretty), Shoshannas (lovably neurotic), or some combination of the two. Joanne and her sister and podcast co-host, Morgan (Justine Lupe), are mostly Jessas — free-spirited, pretty blondes — but Joanne also has some Hannah Horvath sprinkled on her in that she’s kind of an uninhibited mess (but in a less annoying way).
Simon’s Sasha, Noah’s brother, is the Adam of Nobody Wants This: extremely tall and seemingly weird until you get to know him, at which point he becomes your low-key favorite character on the show. As for Noah, so far he does not really have a clear Girls counterpart, but I feel confident that there is a video of him singing “What I Am†buried in his past that will somehow emerge in season two. Konner, Kaplan, and the rest of the NWT writers’ room: Please, make this so.