‘Nobody Wants This’ Exec Producers Address Comedy’s Success & Cultural Impact: “This Story, Hands Down, Is Good For Jewish People”
Fortunately for Netflix, Nobody Wants This is definitely not living up to its title: The comedy from writer/actress Erin Foster is currently No. 1 on the platform and is already considering what a season 2 would look like.
Here, Foster and her sister Sara — who is an EP on the show and co-host with Erin on “The World’s First Podcast” — talk about the comedy’s semi-autobiographical evolution, how no one except Netflix wanted it, and how “this story, hands down, is good for Jewish people.”
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DEADLINE What has surprised you the most about the reception to the show?
ERIN FOSTER The thing that has surprised me the most is how emotional themes are resonating with so many women. So often you go into a project with this mindset of, ‘oh, I’m going to have this subtle symbolism here, and I’m going to have this line that’s going to speak to so many people.’ And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t happen. So the things that I fought for that were important to me are really being felt by other women. That’s the most validating thing. It’s also surprising that it worked.
DEADLINE The line about the ick factor — which Kristen Bell’s Joanne says when Adam Brody’s Noah shows up to meet her parents holding a gigantic bouquet of sunflowers — certainly resonated.
ERIN FOSTER The rom-coms we’ve seen before have these very extreme themes that feel a bit manufactured and don’t feel true to life. And in real life, I met my person and I still got the ick early on because I was scared of falling for someone who was nice and well-adjusted and emotionally available. And that scared me. I thought maybe he was going to be a beta who couldn’t handle a tough woman. And so when that person isn’t scared off by you, doesn’t panic and become desperate, but just stands there and is like, ‘alright, work this shit out and I’m going to be here,’ that gives you permission to just relax. It’s okay if I get a little scared. That’s the thing that happens for a lot of us in relationships. It’s the first sign of something we don’t like. We panic, ‘oh my God, what if I don’t like this person anymore? Oh my God, what if we’re not meant to be together’?
SARA FOSTER I think, also, women are depicted a lot of the time with this fragility, and you see the guy getting the ick a lot more than you see women getting the ick. Erin wrote an incredible story where we see a secure guy, which we also don’t see a lot, getting the anxious female to feel safe. I think that’s what women are really gravitating to. The messages I’m getting from women through our podcast about the show, I’ve never gotten in my life.
DEADLINE Sara, did you have the same reaction that Morgan, Joanne’s sister played by Justine Lupe, did in the show, when Erin started dating a Jewish man?
SARA FOSTER Absolutely not. From the moment I met [Erin’s now husband] Simon, I was like, ‘dear God, please let him not lose interest in Erin. He is what we need in this family.’ It’s very loose depiction. Erin always says, ‘this is the seeds of the story [in Nobody Wants This], our family story. But after that, you’ve got to create conflict to be able to sustain multiple seasons of a show, which hopefully, doesn’t exist in our reality.
DEADLINE Erin, where did the title come from?
ERIN FOSTER We struggled with the title. The show was originally called Shiksa, but it’s not a word that’s familiar to a lot of people. It’s hard to spell, hard to say. People don’t know what it means. Netflix is a global company. You have to think of something that’s really clean and commercial. And so we played around with a lot of different titles, but we ended up with this one because it’s the name of the girls’ podcast on the show, and these two people want to make it work, but no one around them thinks it’s a good idea.
DEADLINE I was surprised that within that first season, you already had Joanne’s character talking about converting.
ERIN FOSTER It’s important to me to make this feel like a realistic relationship. These people are not in their twenties. They are clearly in their mid-thirties. So in real life, you do have those conversations quickly because there’s no future if you aren’t on the same page. And so it was a discussion with Netflix about how fast we would get to the conversation about conversion. My opinion was that if you don’t address it at all in season one, then you become one of those shows where the viewer is screaming at the TV saying, ‘if you just have one conversation, this whole thing gets cleared up.’ I can’t stand as a viewer being like, ‘this is really easy to solve. You got to just have the conversation.’
DEADLINE But you still ended on a cliffhanger that maybe she won’t convert. Is that because you needed that conflict to end? Is that going to remain a question going into the second season?
ERIN FOSTER We don’t have second season yet! We have to get a second season first. But I would say if we got one that I would want to pick up where we left off and figure out what that looks like. I mean, two people in a romantic gesture at the end of a show can choose each other. But what does that look like? Does he have a job? Are they going to run away together? Is his family going to accept the decision he made? The pressure of that on the relationship would be a lot. So I think there’s a lot more questions than answers at the end.
SARA FOSTER Maybe he gets his real estate’s license, right?
DEADLINE When you pitched this, did you go straight to Netflix or did you do the rounds?
ERIN FOSTER No, we got rejected everywhere before Netflix. A few people said it felt small because it was about Jewish and non-Jewish people, and they were like, this feels so specific. Hulu passed, Apple passed, FX passed ….
SARA FOSTER …so did Amazon. That’s why Netflix is Netflix. They saw it. They got it. And it’s where it belongs.
DEADLINE Morgan and Noah’s brother Sasha, played by Timothy Simons, are such a hoot.
SARA FOSTER Looking at Tim Simons, he and Adam Brody do not look like they’re related. Tim Simons is like eight feet tall. But we knew when we saw them standing next to each other in the auditions, how funny it was. And honestly, we gave Adam a lot of say in it too, because we put him in a room with a handful of actors that we thought were really talented and really great for the role. And at the end of the day, he kept saying, I just laughed the most when Tim talked.
DEADLINE Did it take a while to find your Noah?
ERIN FOSTER It did. Kristen was attached to the show right away. As soon as we sold it to Netflix, it was like, yes, we want your show and we know who’s going to star in it. She very quickly said, ‘I know who this guy is. It’s Adam Brody, a hundred percent.’ And I love the idea of Adam Brody, but I also hadn’t seen him in enough as an adult. So I wanted to play the field. I was like, ‘I want to audition every Jewish actor from here to New Zealand.’ But there was not one single audition where I thought, ‘this is it.’ And then finally she was like, I’m right about Adam Brody, aren’t I? Now, you have to understand that Adam is not going to audition. Adam and Kristen are offer only. So it was a risk because you’re hiring these two people, but you have to give them the job without ever seeing them read together. So you don’t know what the chemistry is going to be like. We got really lucky because as soon as we saw it, we were like, ‘oh, we just struck gold.’
DEADLINE What are your thoughts about the low chatter regarding stereotypes and if the show perpetuates them? Did you have Jews in the writers room?
ERIN FOSTER The writer’s rooms shifted like three different times. So we had different groups of people. There was a writer strike in the middle of our writer’s room, and so it varied. We had Jewish women. We had women who converted to Judaism. We had women who grew up in Jewish families, women who we had lots of men too, with Jewish backgrounds. I think someone’s always going to find what they don’t like about a show, and that’s absolutely okay. That’s what the internet is there for, it’s for people to have opinions. But I think if you take a step back and you look at it differently, this show is a comedy and it’s about a girl who is a shiksa entering into a Jewish family. Tell me what the story looks like if you don’t have an overbearing mother who doesn’t want ….
SARA FOSTER … An overbearing wife and mother-in-law transcends religion.
ERIN FOSTER They’re not, in my opinion, Jewish stereotypes. They’re comedic points of view. And Esther [Sasha’s wife played by Jackie Tohn] is rejecting Joanne because she’s best friends with Rebecca [Noah’s ex played by Emily Arlook], not because she’s Jewish, because she’s being a good friend. And we also have a female rabbi in the camp episode [played by Leslie Grossman], who is so warm and welcoming to Joanne. Showing a rabbi who’s hot and smoking weed at a party. That’s not a stereotype. Show me what the story looks like if you don’t have a Jewish mother who doesn’t want a shiksa coming into her family. That is what the story is. I think this story, hands down, is good for Jewish people. I’ve converted to Judaism. It is a point of pride in my life to give a voice and a message to the Jewish culture, to shine a positive light on it. And I think that we have to laugh a little bit more and stop looking at it through the lens of, ‘how this could be hurting Jewish people’ when the overall it is a net positive? Having a Jewish rom-com that is mainstream with so many people wanting to revisit their Judaism? Or girls who are dating Jewish guys thinking, ‘maybe I want to convert?’ I can’t find a way that that’s a negative.
DEADLINE Rebecca ends up being very likable.
ERIN FOSTER The Rebecca character was very tricky, because when you meet her, you have to understand why Noah was with her. But you also have to understand why he shouldn’t be with her anymore. And you have to see how she’s very different than Joanne and how she’s really the perfect Jewish wife. That’s the idea behind her — she is good on paper. She’s the girl your parents want you to be with. She is the status quo. You know exactly what your life is going to look like if you end up with Rebecca, and it’s a good life, by the way. But Rebecca is also a product of her environment. She thinks she’s doing everything exactly how she’s supposed to do it, and she doesn’t understand why she doesn’t get the guy. She’s definitely a fully formed character because she’s like, ‘I did everything.’ And then he went and chose somebody who’s nothing like he said he wanted. He meets Joanne and goes, ‘oh, this is how it’s supposed to feel.’ Someone can think that that’s a Jewish stereotype, but I didn’t grow up Jewish. I was Rebecca and I was Joanne. I was the person sitting there going, ‘I’m saying all the right things. I’m doing all the right things. Why does he want that person over there who’s nothing like he says he wants?’ I don’t think putting it in the framework of Jewish or non-Jewish really applies here.
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