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As though to prove a point about Sex and the City’s long-lasting impact, Megan Thee Stallion recently appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to tell him, despite other things she had to promote, that she had only just started watching the show and couldn’t believe how long she had slept on it. It would seem that the creator of Nobody Wants This, Erin Foster, might have been banking on people (like Megan Thee Stallion) to continue sleeping on said show—otherwise why borrow so many tropes from it? Not least of which, of course, is that its female lead, Joanne (Kristen Bell), would have to convert to Judaism in order to be with Noah, a rabbi who she encounters at a dinner party hosted by her friend and “PR gal,” Ashely (Sherry Cola). Which is where the SATC comparisons already start to flicker in. Because while, sure, Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) didn’t have to convert to Judaism for Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler), it was an integral part of the storyline in terms of “making their relationship work” (in addition to Charlotte having to overcome how much less attractive Harry was than her).
But, obviously, Joanne’s character is much more in line with Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) “breed.” For, like Carrie, Joanne is something of a “sexual anthropologist,” using her dates as fodder for her podcast, called, naturally, Nobody Wants This (on a related note: to “update” Carrie’s column shtick for the present, she does get a podcast on the SATC “sequel series,” …And Just Like That). The difference between her and Carrie (apart from sartorial bombast) is that Joanne “co-researches” the dating scene with her sister and best friend, Morgan (Justine Lupe). It is Morgan who serves as the three-in-one sounding board—embodying the Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte characters all at the same time—for all of Joanne’s dating woes/horror stories. And this is something we’re given insight into from the moment the show starts and Morgan comes to collect Joanne from a bad date that the latter ditches out on because the guy keeps talking way too much about his grandma and the tragedy of losing her when he was twelve.
The shit-talking of the first scene segues into the podcasting (and continued shit-talking) of the second scene, wherein Morgan not only expositorily informs Joanne that they’ve recorded one hundred and nineteen episodes, but that, throughout each one, she has revealed the same thing over and over again: “When you find a nice, normal guy…you find fault with him.” Case in point: “Grandma Guy.” Morgan further proffers that maybe Joanne doesn’t even want to find a real relationship, a theory that of course has truth to it since, without “bad date inspiration,” she’ll end up like Carrie in the season five episode, “Unoriginal Sin,” lamenting, “I’m not getting laid. Therefore…I’m getting laid off” (though, ultimately, she wasn’t).
This “deliberately self-sabotaging” epiphany comes for both women. That’s right, even blind-to-everything Carrie is forced to have this epiphany about herself after a bad breakup (the first one, anyway) with Mr. Big (Chris Noth). The “breakthrough” occurs when her friends make her see a therapist named Dr. G (Anne Lange), who has another patient named Seth (Jon Bon Jovi) that Carrie keeps flirting with in the waiting room. It’s only after the two finally have sex that they each understand why there were attracted to one another. For Seth, it’s because he immediately loses interest in a woman after sleeping with her. For Carrie, the according revelation is, “I pick the wrong men.”
As for Joanne, she’s more open about the joy of picking the wrong men for the sake of “the story” a.k.a. her podcast, which has started to gain enough traction to become considered as worthy of being a corporate acquisition. This almost “willful” choosing of the wrong men is done in a similar vein as Carrie, who relies on not just her friends’ relationship horrors, but her own in order to come up with a weekly column called, what else, “Sex and the City.” It is in this headspace that Joanne gleefully accepts Ashley’s invite to a dinner party where all the male guests “sound terrible.” Including a rabbi named Noah Roklov (Adam Brody, perennially resurrected, if one will pardon the Christian allusion). Except that Noah turns out to be the man she’s instantly attracted to upon entering the space. Only she doesn’t know he’s the rabbi because he doesn’t come out and admit it, instead going along with her mistaken assumption that it’s another guy at the party with a beard.
When she does get the big unveiling of his identity, the reaction is that there is no romantic future whatsoever. But, of course, that’s what makes the allure all the more prominent. Which is how she ends up walking into his temple soon after (such Carrie behavior) to exchange a “witty repartee” also in the style of “flirtatious” Carrie when Noah jokingly asks, “Are you a member of this temple?” She replies, “You guys do memberships? Is there a gym?” Ho-ho-ho-har-har-har.
In “Either Aura,” the third episode, Joanne spends the majority of it dissecting a text and the lack of response it gets the way Carrie would spend entire brunches and lunches dissecting something Big or [insert name of some other asshole here] did and what it “means.” Then there is the kind of spiraling she does in the season three episode, “Drama Queens,” wherein it takes Aidan (John Corbett) ignoring her for her to suddenly comprehend that losing his interest would be the worst thing ever. That’s the same kind of spiral Joanne is on throughout “Either Aura,” waiting for Noah to respond to a text that her sister tells her was “weird” (the text being: “I think I’m pregnant” in regard to how good their first kiss was).
At first, Noah’s availability is almost a detriment to his “desirability.” Because, as Carrie says in “Drama Queens,” “I’m used to the hunt and this is just…effortless. It’s freakin’ me out.” Charlotte eventually has to interject, “I don’t believe this! Now we’re dumping guys for being too available!” The prospect of Noah not being available (you know, for other reasons besides being a rabbi) is equally as terrifying to Joanne, prompting her to wonder (or being unable to “help but wonder”) if she’s a “good” person. As in, morally decent enough for a rabbi.
All of this making “her stomach flip all on her own” (another Carrie quote from “Drama Queens”) plays into Carrie’s pondering for her column: “When things come too easy, we’re suspect. Do they have to get complicated before we believe they’re for real? We’re raised to believe that course of true love never runs smoothly. There always have to be obstacles in Act Two before you can live happily ever after in Act Three. But what happens when the obstacles aren’t there? Does that mean there’s something missing? Do we need drama to make a relationship work?”
If that’s genuinely the caveat, then Joanne and Noah are destined to be together (and predictably do end up that way for the season finale). Their density of “obstacles” are further compounded by Noah essentially acting ashamed to be with her in the fifth episode, “My Friend Joanne.” Needless to say, this smacks of the “Secret Sex” episode of SATC in season one. The allusion to it, whether “intentional” or not, is already made in the first episode of Nobody Wants This, when Morgan mentions a guy named Greg who wouldn’t be seen with Joanne in public. But this thread picks up again when Noah takes her to a Jewish youth camp in Ojai and suddenly acts the opposite of a loving boyfriend when he realizes his boss is going to be there and, thus, introduces Joanne to a colleague as a “friend.” It takes some of the teen girls at the camp to spell it out for her: he introduced her as his friend. Hence, they’re definitely not together as solidly as she thinks.
To be sure, as Noah tells his brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), “I’m not ready to face the whole ‘I’m dating a shiksa’ thing” in public. In fact, he’s convinced he won’t have to because Rabbi Cohen (Stephen Tobolowsky) won’t be there…or so he thought. But when the big boss shows up, Noah fully fathoms just how much is at stake for him, career-wise, in dating someone as non-Jewish (read: totally white bread) as Joanne. Who also happens to be coming across as Carrie-level clingy in this episode, whining to Noah when he tells her they have to cancel their Carmel trip because of his unexpected work commitment, “What am I supposed to do? Just stay at home alone?” Yes, bitch, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. In addition, apparently, to being unavoidably disgusted when a man is too “nice.”
Or, in Noah’s instance, too “sniveling.” Specifically, to Joanne’s parents, who he meets in the sixth episode, titled “The Ick.” And, what do you know, it’s an episode that speaks exactly to what Sex and the City already did in season six with “The Ick Factor.” Centered on Carrie’s “steady” of the moment, Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), being way too over the top—therefore, “icky”—with his romantic gestures, Carrie struggles vis-à-vis how to deal with someone so cringingly saccharine.
Much the same as Carrie, Joanne can’t “digest” a man who brings flowers “for respect” and says obsequious things that end up involving him doing a bad Italian accent (specifically, so he can utter the word “Prego”—as in the nasty sauce brand—when Morgan says she found an old Prego jar to put the flowers in). Morgan, attuned to her sister in ways that no one else is, clocks the look on Joanne’s face when taking in all of the icky things going on with Noah in this scenario. When Morgan calls her out about having the ick, Joanne tries to deny it—to which Morgan warns, “You can’t fight the ick, it’s like a Chinese finger trap: the harder you pull, the stronger it gets.”
But naturally, as it happened for Carrie and Aleksandr, Joanne is able to surmount her icky feelings thanks to being candid with the object of her ick about it so that said object can work to remedy being so “icky.” However, if Aleksandr’s eventual fate is something to go by, Noah isn’t totally out of the woods in terms of redeeming himself as Joanne’s “forever person” (besides, that wouldn’t make for “compelling television,” n’est-ce pas? Gotta leave viewers on their toes).
The grand denouement of Nobody Wants This is the bat mitzvah of Noah’s niece, Miriam (Shiloh Bearman), who grudgingly goes along with the Noah’s mom/her grandma Bina’s (Tovah Feldshuh), desired theme: “Miriam Takes a Bite Out of the Big Apple.” A more than slightly traitorous choice in L.A., but perhaps Bina is aware that the Jewish population in NY is larger, with L.A. coming in second in the U.S. after it for having largest population of Jewish people.
To the point of New York versus L.A., it must also be said that, as Sex and the City’s “fifth character” is New York, Los Angeles plays a key supporting character in Nobody Wants This (even if it additionally betrays L.A. by having what can be called a “Philip Roth book cover font” for its title card).
What’s more, much of Sex and the City was rooted in a “Jewish undertone” (apart from just Carrie bandying “keywords” like “mazel tov” so annoyingly) precisely because it was set in New York (see also: Charlotte’s wedding episode in season six, “The Catch”). Indeed, that was pretty much the extent of the “ethnic diversity” that the show “allowed” for. With Nobody Wants This, there’s about that same amount of “diversity” despite the narrative taking place in a city as racially varied as L.A. And yet, the show appears to count on the glamoring distractions of familiar storylines from Sex and the City—whether it relates to overbearing mothers, awkward situations with vibrators, emotionally distant men or fundamental incompatibility. And maybe part of that reliance stems from Foster underestimating just how many viewers can still cite Sex and the City episodes like scripture.
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Genna Rivieccio
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