Nobody Wants This Season 2 Doesn't Earn Its Classic Rom-Com Moment

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Nobody Wants This Season 2.]

When the credits rolled on Season 2 of Nobody Wants This, the very first thought I had was how dare they make me dislike the rom-com run. It might be an expected trope in a romantic comedy film or television series — a person so overcome with emotion and fear of losing the person they love most that they haul ass to reach them wherever they are and tell them exactly how they feel — but that's because it works. It's romantic and swoonworthy. I don't care how many times I've seen it done; I love it. I love it when Billy Crystal runs through the streets of New York toward Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. I love when Renée Zellweger and her undies book it through snowy London toward Colin Firth in Bridget Jones's Diary. And yes, I love it when Adam Brody flees a bat mitzvah and runs into the arms of Kristen Bell at the end of Season 1 of Netflix's Nobody Wants This. It's dreamy and moving. But when both Brody and Bell go for the big rom-com run to close out Season 2, I audibly groaned. It's not that the two actors don't give it their all, but to deploy the same move to wrap up a storyline two seasons in a row just feels uninspired, repetitive, and indicative of some of the major problems in the series' second outing. 

Sure, the logistical details around the ending of Season 2 are different from Season 1. This time, Joanne (Bell) and Noah (Brody) break up at Morgan's (Justine Lupe) doomed engagement party, not a bat mitzvah. Here, Noah leaves, not Joanne. And, again, both Joanne and Noah have epiphanies and, each realizing they don't want to give the other up, run after each other before making out in front of the Urban Light LACMA installation. Oh, and this time they cross paths in an elevator, so there's that, I guess. While technically this season-ending gesture is different-ish, emotionally speaking, it's all the same. And that's because the central conflict Joanne and Noah face in Season 2 is a complete retread of Season 1. 

At the end of Season 1, Joanne breaks up with Noah because after a season of weighing her options, she isn't ready to convert to Judaism, and that would hold him, a rabbi, back from moving forward in his career. After thinking about it for a hot second, Noah realizes he doesn't care; he wants to be with Joanne no matter what, and he takes off to let her know with a big kiss in a parking lot. Early on in Season 2, however, we learn that these two have different ideas of what that grand gesture meant. Noah believes they simply "tabled" the conversion conversation so that Joanne can come around at her own pace. Joanne believes conversion is nowhere near the table because Noah said he didn't care if she wasn't Jewish. And thus, this same conflict — will Joanne convert for him? Will Noah be okay if his future wife isn't Jewish? — starts all over again. There are quick detours into other issues between the two, including Joanne confronting her former commitment issues, but it always comes back to the biggest problem. 

It's not that an interfaith couple grappling with the question of conversion doesn't warrant deeper conversation — for people like Noah and Joanne, it's a complex issue. But there's no real complexity to their conversations about it. She doesn't want to convert because she doesn't feel connected to Judaism — she's waiting for a bolt of lightning to tell her she's Jewish. He thinks he has to have a Jewish wife in order to get his dream job; there's no way around it. (He tries one progressive temple — run by Seth Rogen and Kate Berlant! — and hates it, so there goes that.) Over and over again they rehash these same points. When Joanne gets evicted, Noah does not want them to move in together until she's decided to convert, and they realize that their relationship is not going to move forward until the conversion problem is dealt with completely. They have no future unless Joanne converts. This is the exact same conclusion they came to in Season 1. There has been no growth or development or new way of looking at the conflict. It's one thing to watch a TV couple stalling out, but when the actual storytelling is doing the same thing, that doesn't make for much of an exciting watch. 

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At Morgan's party post-breakup, when both Joanne and Noah have the realization that they still want to be together no matter what, it isn't as revelatory as the show thinks it is, because we've seen it before. Joanne, who, thanks to a chat with Noah's sister-in-law, Esther (Jackie Tohn), has realized that she is kind of already deep into Judaism, has a last-minute change of heart, which is new, but it's completely smothered by Noah making the same declaration he did at the end of Season 1. He doesn't care if she converts or not; he chooses her and he'll choose her over and over again. And we know that's true because he's already done it more than once. You so badly want to get swept up in that moment because Bell and Brody's chemistry is still a wonder and their characters are easy to root for, but your feet remain firmly on what is at this point well-trodden and very familiar ground. Watching Noah and Joanne dramatically come together in Season 1 felt electric, but when Season 2 serves up a rerun of that moment, there are no real sparks to be found.

Nobody Wants This Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.