Nobody Wants This Stars, EP Talk Finale’s Alternate Endings, Noah and Joanne’s Future — Watch Video
Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Nobody Wants This finale. Proceed at your own risk!
Nobody Wants This’ central couple, rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) and shiksa Joanne (Kristen Bell), found themselves at a relationship crossroads in the Netflix rom-com’s season finale.
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After Noah’s ex Rebecca explained to Joanne the responsibility that comes with being a rabbi’s wife, his current girlfriend had a change of heart about converting to Judaism.
“Because I love you, I can’t convert,” Joanne confessed to Noah. “I’m just not ready, and in so many ways, I want to be, but if I’m being honest, I was only doing it for you. … I’m just not there yet, and I don’t know if I ever will be.”
Noah suggested that they just slow down their relationship, but neither one of them could see how this works out if Joanne doesn’t convert, especially given Noah’s recent promotion to head rabbi.
“I see what’s at stake now. You need me to be something that I can’t promise that I can be, and if I falter even a little bit, your whole life blows up. That’s not fair to you,” Joanne continued, before saying goodbye to Noah. “You can’t have both. And I would never make you choose.”
Joanne instructed Noah not to come after her, but she couldn’t stop herself from repeatedly checking for Noah as she departed his niece’s bat mitzvah. Just when it seemed like all hope was lost, Joanne got off the shuttle and found Noah standing in the parking lot.
“You were right. I can’t have both,” Noah said, then kissed Joanne… and gave up his job promotion for love?
“I like to think he’s chosen Joanne, and the rest will work itself out, but that’s not his primary concern,” Brody tells TVLine in the above video. “I don’t know if, in the light of day, he still feels that way, but in the moment, I feel like that’s what he’s communicating.”
Bell, for her part, thinks of Joanne’s decision as “like a Gift of the Magi situation, where Joanne wants to sacrifice this to be with him, but then, all of a sudden, realizes the importance of what she’s doing, and that this might be her first adult decision she’s ever had to make,” the actress says.
“You cannot half-ass this, if you’re going to say, ‘I’m going to commit to this faith,’ and the fact that she pulls back is the most important, because she’s finally being true and authentic,” Bell continues. “But I kind of feel like they’re both trying to compromise for each other, and then the excitement with a Season 2 is, like, where is it going to go? Are they going to let the factors of the world affect what they feel between them? And isn’t that kind of a topic everybody thinks about once in a while? Like, do I want what I want? Or do I want what society wants for me?”
Trying to find the right note to end the season on took a little bit of finessing, with three slightly different endings filmed.
“One is, like, she gets off the bus, and he’s just standing there,” creator Erin Foster reveals. “One is he says, ‘It’s you and me.’ Then the other one is, like, ‘Well, then how’s this going to work?’ We just, like, played with different levels, and we all kind of took a vote and ended up where we are.”
Although the series has yet to be renewed despite positive reviews, Foster is already thinking about a Season 2 and what’s next for Joanne and Noah.
“I just want to continue where we leave off,” Foster says of her vision. “We took Season 1 really slow in their relationship. We didn’t move too fast, and I think it worked out really nicely, and so, I want to be able to continue that in a potential Season 2 and not move too quickly.”
What did you think of Nobody Wants This’ ending? Grade the finale, then hit the comments!
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