The romantic comedy, when we talk about television, is a very treacherous genre. Romantic tension usually serves as a hook to capture the audience and to develop character dynamics and, once it joins the current couple, fiction has problems maintaining the same level of interest and the same spark. Already we discussed it. But, while this challenge is clearly on the table in the second season of Nobody wants thisthere is another more urgent theme: the privilege that permeates each and every one of the scenes and of which he is never fully aware.
“First comes love; then comes life,” indicated the synopsis of the new episodes, which arrived on Netflix this Thursday. The agnostic Joanne, host of an ego-podcast with her sister, fell in love with Noah, an attractive and modern rabbi. At the end of the first season, they both chose to take a chance despite the hardships and uncertainty of investing in a relationship without the absolute confidence that she would convert to Judaism for him. Now, supposedly, life came. But how is this life supposed to unfold if Nobody wants this Do you live in a bubble of inconcretion?
Television does not have to obey the logic of the real world. In fact, I have always defended fantasies on the screen. Let us remember, for example, how Carrie Bradshaw could afford an apartment in Manhattan as a weekly columnist. Today we also have Emily Cooper having the ideal life in Paris, where she only bumps into attractive men and where the clothes (which are not exactly from Inditex) seem to magically multiply inside the closet.
But, even seeing these works as fantasies, they have a little more consistency. In Sex in New York A price was put on Manolo Blahnik’s sandals and Miranda had to go to Brooklyn, despite having a good salary as a lawyer, due to the impossibility of renting a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. In Emily in ParisHowever, 80% of the characters present themselves as rich and Emily, in contrast, lives in an apartment that is like a shoebox and without an elevator. In nobody wants There is no context in this and, consequently, there is no life.
Even in fantasies like ‘Sex in New York’ and ‘Emily in Paris’, the social context and conditions of the protagonists are better justified.
Take Joanne for example. She rents alone in what looks like a huge house in a good neighborhood in Los Angeles. From the way she moves down the street, it doesn’t seem like she’s exactly Alex Cooper, the most famous podcaster in the United States. But, in a certain episode of the new season, he gets angry with his sister and they decide not to film the show. Is there any mention of their finances if they stop working? Does anyone wonder how they will deal with complaints from subscribers or sponsors? No, of course not.
The same thing happens with Noah, the rabbi. hot. In the new season, he has to consider what will happen if he loses his job at the synagogue where he trained. He also lives alone, in a designer house, but there are also no explanations as to how he can afford this standard of living or what would happen if he lost his salary. Is it due to the position of his parents? Could it be that he lives subsidized by the family like Joanne? Even in Friendswhich was an aspirational and escapist sitcom with huge apartments because it was in Manhattan, there was a minimal explanation of the place that each character occupied and how they were supposed to survive economically or fill their time.
This bubble of fiction is distracting primarily because it eliminates any possibility of nuance. It even eliminates potential plots: considering that Noah’s mother wants to control his life, it would be funny if she could blackmail him to continue supporting him. But no, Noah is simply rich without justification. Nor is he worried about anti-Semitism with Israel’s occupation of Gaza (because everything is fantastic there, there are no genocides). And let no one be confused: I am not asking Nobody wants this let it be a social drama, that talks about the housing crisis or the fentanyl epidemic in the United States. I would simply like to be able to understand the reality of the characters.
Noah and Joanne are two people who live inexplicably well, who live in a kind of void in space-time and who, to make matters worse, always seem to have the day off. They only need that, like a widowed countess of Downton Abbeyone of them lets out a “What is a weekend?“by not being able to differentiate the days of the week except the Sabbath. And, with this context as privileged as it is unjustified, they are like soluble and decaffeinated, incredible characters, in a season that suffers from repeating conflicts in this void. Justine Lupe and Jackie Tohn, as the sister and sister-in-law, can steal scenes with their extraordinary comedic vision and character, but they cannot work miracles either.
Maybe it makes sense that Nobody wants this be so. It shows the reality of its creator, Erin Foster, daughter of musician David Foster, the winner of 16 Grammys, producer of the I will always love you of Whitney Houston and stepsister for years of Gigi and Bella Hadid. But, in the same way that we can know who Erin Foster is and why she is the way she is, we can’t say the same about her characters. What irony.
