Nobody Wants This spoilers follow.
One Day might have been a runaway hit for Netflix earlier this year (and we weren’t mad about it) but one half of that romance – Dexter, we’re looking at you – was hella toxic, feeding into the age-old rom-com trap of romanticising red flags and bad vibes.
While we binge-watched our way through the show’s 14 episodes as happily as the next person, we can’t exactly say that we were rooting for Dex and Em’s love story because, quite frankly, she deserved better. And that’s before we even attempt to unpack the story’s unnecessarily tragic final episode.
But Nobody Wants This – Netflix’s new love story, starring Adam Brody as Noah and Kristen Bell as Joanne – puts a different spin on some typical rom-com tropes. Most notably its central romance is a refreshing depiction of a healthy and mature relationship (at least when measured against the low bar previously set by romantic comedies).
The tone is set from the off. After their first kiss – which Joanne casually described as being “the single greatest kiss of my entire existence” – she sent a jokey text to her new crush, but it gets left on read for hours.
In highly-relatable fashion, smugness soon turned to anxiety and self-doubt. Didn’t he get the joke? Maybe it was too much? Why hasn’t he replied?
But Noah turned up at her door moments later and wasted no time in sharing the truth of his terrible night (and lack of reply). There was no chase, no “playing hard to get”, and romantic intentions were discussed openly between the pair.
In contrast, One Day kept the power firmly in Dexter’s lap; he was the “cool” kid who everyone wanted a piece of, and his friendship with his University friend Emma sometimes veered into something more but only when it suited him.
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Emma had ample chance to be going onto bigger and better things, and yet Dexter always dragged her backwards – remember when he crashed her exciting new life in France, just to cry into his croissant about the breakdown of his marriage (which he took zero responsibility for)?
In Nobody Wants This, Noah and Joanne were presented as equals. They each had their own thing going on – whether that was a career as a spiritual leader, or being the host of a popular podcast about sex and dating.
They respected each other’s viewpoints and achievements, and wanted to learn from each other. He was keen to throw himself into first date sex shop shenanigans (long story), while she showed up at his synagogue to listen to his first big sermon – despite being a self-declared agnostic.
None of this is to say that Noah and Joanne didn’t face their challenges. But for the most part, these came from external factors or side characters and the couple faced them together head-on.
When a clichéd mix-up threw some doubt over Noah’s truthfulness – had he been texting his ex behind Joanne’s back? – Joanne spiralled for a moment, only to come to the realisation that he had never actually given her a reason not to trust him.
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They talk (who knew?) and lay it all out on the table; Noah offered her his phone as proof that there’d been a misunderstanding, but Joanne decided not to fall into the same old traps from her past instead honouring the trust they had built.
While this might sound fairly dull on paper, the conflict is transferred over to Joanne’s relationship with her sister Morgan instead. We, the audience at home, still got some stakes and drama, but the romance remained a solid pillar of open and healthy communication.
When Noah panicked and hid his relationship with Joanne from his boss, she held her boundary and decided to prioritise her self-worth and her work. For Noah’s part, he looked inward, recognised where he went wrong and wasted little time in putting that into action.
The central will-they-won’t-they thread largely entangled the question of whether Joanna would one day be open to converting to Judaism; there was an expectation for Noah, as a rabbi, to marry within his faith.
In the final episode – spoiler alert! – Joanne communicated that she would have been doing so for the wrong reasons (for Noah, and not for herself). This move undoes the trope of the ‘happily ever after’ grand gesture, and we see Noah and Joanne each respecting the others’ decisions and autonomy.
Ultimately, they decide to be together anyway – because that’s what they both want.
In a genre littered with boombox moments and a tendency towards sacrificing too much of yourself for the sake of a relationship, Nobody Wants This is a refreshing change of pace.
With their solid foundation, Noah and Joanne can now deal with whatever comes next together. We just have to hope for a season two (hear that, Netflix?) to see how that might play out.
Nobody Wants This is available on Netflix.
TV Editor, Digital Spy Laura has been watching television for over 30 years and professionally writing about entertainment for almost 10 of those. Previously at LOOK and now heading up the TV desk at the UK’s biggest TV and movies site Digital Spy, Laura has helped steer conversations around some of the most popular shows on the box. Laura has appeared on Channel 5 News and radio to talk viewing habits and TV recommendations. As well as putting her nerd-level Buffy knowledge to good use during an IRL meet with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Laura also once had afternoon tea with One Direction, has sat around the fire pit of the Love Island villa, spoken to Sir David Attenborough about the world’s oceans and even interviewed Rylan from inside the Big Brother house (housemate status, forever pending).