Everybody Wants This (except me)

OK I’m going to be the mitnagged who craps all over this romcom involving a young hot rabbi (Adam Brody) who dates a shiksa (Kristen Bell) that everyone is fawning over at the moment.

It’s not that I hate the show that much… I more so hate the seemingly universal uncritical adulation of what I would call a shallow and inauthentic “Fiddler on the Roof,” fine to watch as mind candy and to feel like I’m “in” on some of the references, but come on. This thing is about as artistic as Candy Crush.

So I’m going to go all the way to the other side and write an overly brutal takedown. Remember, it’s not the show I hate so much, it’s the fandom.

***SPOILERS AHEAD for the Netflix series “Nobody Wants This”***

Romcom Genre

“Yay!  Finally a feel-good rom-com for 2024 / We miss rom-coms / Make America Rom-Com Again.”  I’m over the whole pedestalization of the rom-com genre and nostalgia for its 80s-90s heyday. I enjoy Notting Hill as much as the next guy, but, as a heterosexual woman who grew up during the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts era, romcoms are toxic. Romcoms teach women that they are worthless unless a guy loves them in this all-encompassing idiotic way, either by falling in love with them at first sight or perhaps over a gradual build involving contrived adversarial status or friendship. The girl is always strikingly beautiful (sometimes this is hidden under thick glasses at first) but flawed in some silly and quirky and lovable way. After some dramatic parting the guy always makes some unexpected sweeping romantic gesture for them showing once and for all that this girl is more important than anything else in his life. Postmodern romcoms, including this one, seem even worse to me because they pretend to empower women while still reinforcing the insidious “true love conquers all” storyline, over and over, with various subcultural flavors, tricking girls into thinking, being worshiped in this manner is a basic human right, perhaps also tricking boys into thinking they are worthless if an absurd romantic gesture fails to win over the girl they happen to worship. I think it tricks adults in perfectly content mature relationships into thinking there’s something more out there for them, or that their relationship is trash.

What happened to, romance is a valid life path but not the only valid life path? Many meaningful life paths don’t involve true love, and in fact are incompatible with it, though these movies would really want you to believe that true love is a component of all meaningful lives. This type of love is one valid type of love but not the only type of love, contrary to this rabbi character’s “Rebecca, I don’t think it is” line. It’s a type of love that can last but the way that most of these couples get together in rom-coms, I’d predict it often doesn’t, because chemical compatibility is only one among many factors that predicts whether you can stand to spend an entire lifetime with another human. I much prefer the ending to “Barbie.” There’s a reason why Romeo and Juliet ends with them both dead…

Jewish stereotypes

“What a refreshing positive portrayal of Jewish life!” 

Oy, where do I begin with this one? I’m sure there are some pro-Jewish portrayals wedged in there somewhere but I barely noticed them among all the cringe.

• The mother in law gobbles pork out of the trash can.
• The Jewish guys suck at basketball but take it very seriously.
• The bat mitzvah portrayal is stiflingly materialistic. Not exactly surprising, but as mom of an almost-eleven-year old girl whose non-Jewish friends expect this of Judaism… aggggh.
• The surface-level prayers, spoken and not chanted.
• Seinfeld already tried to reclaim “shiksa,” and did a better job of it.
• The rabbi goes to a bar after Friday night services but apparently doesn’t turn his phone on until after three stars are out Saturday night?
• The rabbi literally engages in preemptive negative bonding by talking trash about someone he doesn’t know to people he doesn’t know, and tells them to then “dish,” just to impress his new girlfriend… then later refuses to listen to actual legitimate information from his brother to clear up a misunderstanding, yelling “lashon hara!” (This latter scene is a pretty horrific distortion of the actual laws on negative speech, but arguably would have, absent the prior scene, a forgivable one since that term is so poorly understood.)
• There are at least two instances where unapologetic emotional or financial blackmail of a hypocritically-behaving Jew advances the protagonist’s plotline.
• The other Jewish women hate Kristin Bell’s character at first but are immediately won over when she flatters their vanity and then gets them drunk.
• The characters describe Judaism as a religion while portraying it as a culture through stereotypes. The most insidious example of this is the implication that there’s something inauthentic about a nonreligious gentile converting because of a marriage as opposed to truly wanting to be Jewish. (In my view, and some would argue in spite of my own  background, people who convert to be part of a Jewish family make a lot more sense to me than people who just want to be Jewish for solely religious / spiritual reasons. So not only does this rom-com misrepresent “true love” between two people, it similarly misrepresents the Jewish relationship with G-d too, while giving perfunctory lip service to the whole ‘wrestling with G-d bit.”)

I much prefer Adam-Sandler-style dipping hummus in sunglasses; it’s cartoonish but so obviously so that I don’t worry people will come away thinking that hummus obsession is the essence of Jewish life.

Characters

“These characters make you want to root for love!” / “Brody / Bell’s chemistry is amazing!”  

I’m sorry, I absolutely hate the main characters, and most of the side characters as well, though not nearly as much as the main characters.

My favorites are the rather negatively-portrayed Esther and Rebecca who wind up getting shat on by the other characters for having set aside their own individualistic desires for the values of the collective. But even these characters eventually begin to fall for the glorified self-centeredness that this storyline promotes, in keeping with the worst of the genre.

Near the end, Esther apparently learns her lesson for having allowed her mother-in-law to select the theme of the bat mitzvah she paid for, manifesting in helping her bat mitzvah daughter chop up a modest dress so it’s short enough and admitting that a New York theme is “lame” and bonding with her daughter by acknowledging “this is your day.”

Adam Brody is nicknamed “hot rabbi” in this series but I think “cardboard rabbi” fits better. Perhaps his romantic chemistry is good, but his spiritual chemistry sucks. In the very few moments when he’s shown in a pulpit or otherwise serving as a rabbi, apparently his dream since childhood, he’s not inspiring at all. Of course, he effectively admits at one point that he took on that dream because he was an incel. So – he became a rabbi because he was insecure as a kid and couldn’t get any chicks into his canopy bed his mom picked out. But then he grew up and became the hottie of Jewish summer camp… Then once he finds that magic love, perhaps he doesn’t need to be a head rabbi anymore, implies the last three minutes of the series.

Meanwhile Kristen Bell–whom I actually generally do like as an actor–spends the entire series bragging about how likable she is, winning people over through charm (I find it particularly gross how much the tween girls immediately fall all over themselves because she’s ‘so f*** cool’ – quote from actual tween character). If charm doesn’t work, manipulation. If manipulation doesn’t work, she literally gets them drunk.  

Why don’t either of these characters seem to care at all about how hurtful it is to everyone to parade a brand new love in front of a family who had gotten attached to your stable-appearing previous relationship? If you’re going to be this selfish, at least be somewhat discreet?  The passage of time in this series is not particularly clear, but the insensitivity to the ex and the family members who had gotten reasonably attached to a particular future is stunning.

And… much like some of of the problems with 90s comedies, glamorizing being a crappy and inconsiderate person, hiding it under witty banter… these are the aspects of those shows that don’t age well.

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Alrighty then. Glad that’s out of my system – now go and enjoy your rom-coms, Jewish and otherwise, in appropriate moderation.