Nobody Wants This, a serialized Hallmark rom-com of a Netflix show, is what happens if you put Sex and the City, Annie Hall, early-aughts television and 2020s Instagram into a blender. Composed exclusively of familiar elements, the end result is something extremely now in its datedness.

The protagonist is Joanne (Kristen Bell), a poor man’s Carrie Bradshaw (a sex-and-relationships podcaster with a home more lavish than that job could plausibly support). She goes to a dinner party (meet-cute frowns on apps) and meets Noah (Adam Brody), who is a rabbi. A “Jewish rabbi” as some character puts it at some point, denomination unspecified (more on that later).

Noah is a Jew. A Jewish one. With a beard and everything. A kippah, sometimes, even. He is top-notch husband material—employed, ambitious, from a wealthy family, oh and a moral sort, a stand-up guy, a don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to who seems ready-made for the hygge, sweater weather coziness of this sort of narrative.

Joanne is a gentile. A Christmas-celebrating non-religious individual whose hair is blond. Naturally blond, according to a female rabbi who surfaces in what only feels like episode 10-million-and-12, and whose Talmudic expertise hopefully exceeds her ability to spot face-framing highlights.

The series title, Nobody Wants This, refers to the fact that the pair are not merely an unlikely couple but one whose very coupledom horrifies the wider world. At first, the obstacles come mainly from Joanne’s side. Should a dating podcaster really settle down, and with a rabbi? This is soon enough dealt with—sure, why shouldn’t she do this. In real life, one could imagine this playing out differently if, for example, the good ol’ question of Zionism entered the picture. (Her friends seem as though they might be against; the rabbi and his crowd, in favour.)

The bigger concerns are developed later, and are on his end. He can’t marry a gentile because…? Because this would hold him back from becoming head rabbi. Would it? On the show, it would. Because it would destroy his mother. Again, we take the show’s word for it, and I suppose not to dwell on the fact, and it is a fact, that if an equivalent man met an equivalent woman in real life, everyone would congratulate the two no-longer-that-young people for finding love and call it a day.

The show exists simultaneously in a hazy, nostalgic Then and the present day. Jews are identifiable on the show by brown hair (white people come in two varieties: brunette-and-Jewish and blond-and-“shiksa”) and these big honking Star of David necklaces they all must wear, lest anyone forget which character belongs to which group. There are Capulets and Montagues. Such are the stakes.

And yet, there is an Asian-American lesbian best friend, sidekick, personal assistant, something or other. A slightly broader friend group with (seemingly) a Black gay man. Taylor Swift fandom is mentioned. Someone’s mother has a therapist named Isis who uses they/them pronouns. Podcaster is a viable profession, and people get from point A to point B via something called an Uber, not horse-and-buggy.

All of this is to say that it’s confusing to somehow also be in this all-white world where the only two possibilities are white-gentile and white-Jewish. We’re in the 2020s or thereabouts, and yet a man in his 40s (or are we pretending Rabbi Noah is in his 30s?) has a mother (played by Tovah Feldshuh) with the accent and demeanor of an old-world Jewish refugee from the 1940s. She’s supposed to be Russian, but I guess some part of Russia that the modern world didn’t touch, because she has no resemblance to any recentish Jewish arrivals to North America from the former Soviet Union I’ve ever encountered.

The hot cleric trope predates this series. Fleabag, which I have yet to see but very much want to, has a hot priest. Keeping Up Appearances, the 1990s Britcom I have watched ten trillion times on loop, has the “dishy vicar.” There was even a BBC 4 radio comedy in the late 1990s and early 2000s called The Attractive Young Rabbi, featuring a sexy lady rabbi (wild!) and, in a different role, the greatest........

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