Nobody Wants This season three is gaslighting us into believing this problematic couple is a romantic ideal

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

The good news is that the new season of Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This is much better than its previous one.

For some people, it’ll be a return to form to that charming and funny debut season. After a whole sophomore year spent repeating the same story, emotional and thematic beats with arguments and scenes we’ve seen before, at least the show is moving forward.

The bad news is, season three is enraging, and a lot of it has to do with how the show treated its central couple last year.

It often feels as if the filmmakers are gaslighting the audience, trying to sell us on a problematic romance just because it mirrors the real-life choices made by the show’s creator, Erin Foster.

To quickly recap, Nobody Wants This is primarily about Joanne (Kristen Bell), a sex podcaster from an Anglo-Saxon background, and Noah (Adam Brody), a rabbi, who meet at a dinner party.

The show is about how the two of them navigate the culture clash between someone of deep faith and someone who believes more in having a good time than a monotheistic deity.

The first two seasons saw Joanne and Noah meet and break-up, get back together and break up, the main conflict being that Noah says he can’t be with anyone who isn’t Jewish.

At the end of the previous season, Joanne has an epiphany that she already “feels” Jewish and has decided to convert to the faith. He, ostensibly, says he no longer cares if she does or doesn’t, because he’ll always “choose” her.

That might’ve been a swoon-worthy moment but, rabbi or not, all that earlier demanding Joanne convert to a whole new religion is a deal-breaker, and the show doesn’t do enough to bring him back from that.

This is not a guy to hold up as a romantic ideal. Ick.

So, when the third season starts, you still kind of hate him, and no amount of cutesy declarations of “we live together” or the actually great chemistry between Bell and Brody can surmount the fact that you just don’t want these two people to be a couple. Why are we wasting our time here?

The season unfolds largely as you’d expect, deploying a lot of genre tropes such as a new frenemy (Andrew Rannells), an ex-boyfriend, conflict with in-laws, the usual.

It’s meant to be an exploration of how Joanne and Noah litigate their differences, but in almost every instance, it works out in his favour. Noah gets what he wants, and even that earlier sacrifice he made for love (his perfect job), comes back around again. What a lucky boy.

So, she’s always the one who eventually bends to him, as if she’s subsuming his life into his, which is a very bizarre choice for a modern rom-com.

Later in the season, there’s a Christmas episode. It’s Joanne’s last Christmas because, apparently, after she converts, she will no longer be able to take part in any Santa-themed festivities.

Never mind that for many, many people, Christmas is a secular holiday that represents family, friends and togetherness, not some manger myth about a miracle baby.

Noah spends the whole day trying to make sure Joanne has the best last Christmas ever, and we’re supposed to see this as sweet. You know what would’ve been more romantic? Not making your partner give up Christmas. Simples.

What happened to Chrismukkah? Adam Brody as Seth Cohen in The OC coined that, he’s standing right there!

At the end of that episode, Joanne explains to Noah that she always loved Christmas so much because for her, no matter what else was going on her life, if everything else was falling apart, Christmas made her feel loved and comforted.

This next part is what’s really galling – she turns to him and tells him that it’s OK, because she no longer needs Christmas because she has him for that.

Ah, yes, because we all know that tying your happiness solely to another person is super emotionally healthy. That will definitely end well.

Joanne says she’s converting not for or because of Noah, but then lists a bunch of reasons that are all about him.

Of course we should have flawed characters in fiction, they should not be perfect and behave exactly as we want. That’s not the issue. The problem with Nobody Wants This is it presents this coupling as aspirational, as ideal, as romantic.

Obviously, this is the trajectory of Foster’s life – she married a Jewish man and chose to convert for him. So, this show is, in a way, her justification of her life.

You see this in another story point this season in a subplot involving Esther (Jackie Tohn), Noah’s former sister-in-law, who starts dating a new guy.

She is canonically 38 years old, and her new beau, Julian, is played by Steven Weber, who is 65 years old – and no one mentions this large age gap at all except for one throwaway joke by a minor character in the season finale.

There is even a set-up when Esther thinks Julian is seeing someone else and she is horrified to discover this person is older. “Does he have an old woman fetish?!” she distressingly asks. Um, no, that woman is just his age, you are not.

Not for nothing, Foster’s dad, music producer David Foster, is married to Katherine McPhee, 34 years his junior. It starts to feel as if all of Nobody Wants This is Foster normalising her family’s oddities as aspirational romance.

There is a way to watch Nobody Wants This without reading “too much” into it, and it is an easy watch (especially Timothy Simons’ portrayal of Noah’s brother, Sasha), but can we have a frothy-rom that isn’t laden with regressive tropes of a woman basically submitting to a male partner?

Is that really too much to ask for?

Nobody Wants This season three is streaming on Netflix