Adam Brody and Kristen Bell attend Netflix's 'Nobody Wants This' season two premiere on October 16, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. The show aims to be about Judaism but can also seem strikingly incurious about it. Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Netflix Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment About 20 years ago, when Six Feet Under ruled the prestige-TV roost, a casual moment unfolded in which the secular Jewish Brenda talked with her mother about her late father's relationships. The father and his brother did not get along, the mother explained, because one could not forgive the other for "giving up Chanukah." Even my younger, less-formed self thought that line was funny, because, while Chanukah is a lovely holiday, it is not so central that its neglect could be a euphemism for assimilation. In fact, Chanukah is the one holiday that even many highly assimilated Jews celebrate. Related Stories Business Netflix Sets 10-For-One Stock Split to Make Shares More Accessible to Employees TV 'Stranger Things' Season 5 Official Trailer Released: Vecna Is Back This was a small moment in a much bigger show that had nothing to do with Judaism. So I just laughed it off; it was far from the first or last time a TV show bungled a nuance of the Jewish (or any other) tradition. Points for trying; let's move on. That would normally have been my response to a moment early in the recently released second season of Erin Foster's Nobody Wants This, when Seth Rogen, as some corners of the Internet made mockingly clear, mistook Tu B'Shvat for Tisha B'av - when he called the saddest day of the Jewish year by the name of the birthday of trees. Rogen's rabbi is proudly unconcerned with the details, so it could have been a comic mistake from the character as he was talking to Adam Brody's more idealistic clergyman, lead character Noah Roklov. But Roklov doesn't correct him and the whole thing just seems like an unfortunate production blunder. (Netflix curiously could still just overdub the two words, but another matter.) I might have again had the Brenda reaction - "points for trying, let's move on." But this was a smaller moment in a much bigger show that has everything to do with Judaism. And sadly that moment epitomizes so much of what I think Nobody Wants This troublingly gets wrong. Much has been made about the caricatured depictions in the first season of the Netflix series about the relationship between Noah and the non-Jewish Joanne (Kristen Bell), with Noah's sister-in-law Esther and mother Bina coming right out of an old-time ethnic joke book. Esther becomes more dimensional this season; Bina, ever the cartoon villain, does not. But that's not the show's biggest problem. The main issue with Nobody Wants This is that it does not seem especially interested in the very Judaism it purports to be about - and worse, seems too often to suggest that there's not even much to be interested in. Like many religions, Judaism can provide moral grounding, community bonding, daily meaning and, at its most elevated, an awareness of and engagement with the divine. You'd never know it from watching Nobody Wants This, where it mainly seems like a way for family members to be suspicious of each other (Bina especially, vis-à-vis Joanne). Two of the more promising moments - the kind that made me sit up and think we were actually going to get a full-blooded exploration of tradition - both fizzled into deracinated nothingness. An on-screen Purim party, which, despite 2,500 years of tradition that varies greatly by region, contains barely a single moment that has anything to do with the holiday, just becoming a Halloween party like so many others happening this weekend. And a "brit bat," a daughter-naming tradition that has emerged as part of a gender-equity movement alongside the bris, teases you with talk about Ashkenazi naming traditions - but then its main takeaway becomes that Jews having babies live in very opulent houses and give ridiculously hippie names. (Seriously, who calls a baby "Afternoon"?) Also, sorry, but in what world do Jews gather in a room in the last two years and not once mention, let alone debate, October 7, Gaza, Israel or hostages? In the real world unaffiliated Jews are discovering roots, asking questions, evolving beliefs, grappling with worldviews. My own synagogue has at least three new attendees currently doing just that. Yet in Nobody-world the main expression of Judaism for anyone who isn't the rabbi is the donning of a "Matzah Baller" jersey. It's not just cringe - it's out of date. Each episode of Nobody Wants This contains nothing offensive per se, by which I mean there's no awful slur or (those Bina and Esther depictions aside) horribly crude stereotype. (Let's not mention the first-season scene of Bina surreptitiously shoveling prosciutto in