Nobody Wants This season two review: Joanne and Noah no longer seduces

With a title like Nobody Wants This, you’re poking the bear.

Flop and you become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Defy expectations and the headlines become “Everybody wants this!”.

Nobody Wants This stormed onto screens a year ago to rapturous adoration and weeks spent on Netflix’s top 10 most watched list around the world. Memes, thought pieces and awards nominations (and a win) followed. It was a sensation.

It was frothy and sexy, and relatable, the story of a chill young rabbi, Noah (Adam Brody), and a definitely not-Jewish podcaster, Joanne (Kristen Bell), who meet cute at a dinner party and then fall for each other, navigating cultural differences, their families, and his need for her, at least at some point, to convert to Judaism.

The chemistry between Bell and Brody were cracking, and, especially among millennials, triggered nostalgia for era-defining teen shows Veronica Mars and The OC. She’s a marshmallow and he invented Chrismukkah, and now they’re making smoochy faces at each other.

The world couldn’t get enough of it, even if stories came out about the considerable behind-the-scenes dysfunction that plagued the production and saw, at one point, filming suspended, and experienced producers including Steven Levitan (Modern Family, Just Shoot Me) and Jack Burditt (30 Rock, The Mindy Project) head for the doors.

By all accounts, season two was a much more harmonious experience with Girls producers Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan brought in to help series creator Erin Foster, who had drawn the characters of Joanne and Noah from herself and her husband.

But you have to wonder if the zaniness and conflicts behind season one was maybe the spark that propelled that excellent introduction to this world. In the natural world, the process of creating diamonds requires tension and pressure.

This season feels more settled, and the characters are deepened, particularly Jackie Tohn as Esther, Noah’s sister-in-law, but it’s also, less sparkly and less compulsive. It doesn’t have the same force that pushes you onto the next episode and the next. You probably won’t binge the whole thing in one sitting.

Nobody Wants This largely picks up where it left off, after Joanne released Noah so that her not yet converting to Judaism won’t stand in the way of his career ambitions, and he chases her down and says he wants to be with her anyway.

As they return, they’re still in the honeymoon phase, and the question that hangs over them, as it does the whole season, is when will Joanne convert.

She feels as if she’s not ready, and doing it for someone else rather than for herself, is not something she’s OK with.

Meanwhile, Noah’s career does take a backward step because of Joanne’s presence in her life – and gives Konner the opportunity to bring on Girls alum Alex Karpovsky for a great guest spot – and his mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh) hasn’t dropped her resistance to the match.

The Joanne and Noah storyline feels like it’s re-treading similar steps as the previous season, and there’s only so much you can go over the same ground before it gets boring, and frustrating. Although it becomes less will-she-won’t-she and more when-will-she.

Knowing that Foster, who based the character on herself, converted for her husband, kind of deflates the dramatic tension. It feels like we’re careering towards an inevitability, and the show still hasn’t made a persuasive argument as to why Joanne must take on a new religion for someone else.

The central question isn’t around whether she should have to, and why that might actually be a weird and regressive requirement to be in a relationship with someone, but when she’ll genuinely feel like it’s the right time.

It also punctures the bubble around Noah as this, if not perfect, then at least as close-to, boyfriend who once cupped her face and told Joanne he could handle her, just as she is, when he can’t build a life with a woman who isn’t Jewish. Even if he is a rabbi.

It certainly takes the shine off their love story when it’s waving a gazillion red flags. It makes it hard to root for them when he’s imposing his faith on her.

By the time it gets to the end of the season (no spoilers), you just want it to be done, in both senses. The final five minutes is genuinely worthy of the eye-roll, perhaps even the vomit, emoji.

What may surprise then is that the sneaky MVPs of this season are Tohn’s Esther and Timothy Simons’ Sasha. The textures of their long-term relationship, and the ups-and-downs of a couple that are drifting (apart, back and somewhere in between) stealthily becomes the most interesting aspect of the show.

And there’s a great addition in the form of Arian Moayed, Justine Lupe’s Succession co-star, who joins the cast as a love interest for Morgan.

Nobody Wants This is still charming and generally a fun hang-out show where the most important propulsive element is how people feel rather than what they’re doing, and there is so much value in that.

But it’s hard to escape the fact that the Joanne-Noah romance is no longer seductive.

Nobody Wants This is streaming on Netflix