Season 2 of "Nobody Wants This": All the Details | Vanity Fair

The runaway success of Nobody Wants This, an interfaith love story between Kristen Bell’s agnostic shiksa podcaster Joanne and Adam Brody’s hot rabbi, can perhaps best be described by Veep’s Timothy Simons, who plays Noah’s oddball older brother, Sasha, on the series.

“I feel like a lot of people are talking about how much they want Adam Brody to cup their face and kiss them,” he told Vanity Fair this fall. “It seems to have been some sort of generationally under-delivered action. People are fucking desperate for Adam Brody to cup their face and kiss them and tell them that they are enough, or that they’re not too much.”

Ask and Netflix shall deliver. Just weeks after the show’s late September debut, the streamer announced that a second season of the series was already in the works. Ahead, everything we know about season two of Nobody Wants This, from its speedy production timeline to what exactly is going on between Sasha and Joanne’s sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe).

When Netflix announced season two of Nobody Wants This, the streamer confirmed that Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, formerly of HBO’s Girls, would be joining the creative team as executive producers and showrunners alongside Nora Silver, who previously worked on Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales and Freeform’s Single Drunk Female. Series creator Erin Foster will continue to serve as a producer and writer on her show’s sophomore season.

In addition to Bell and Brody, Timothy Simons and Justine Lupe will return as the lead characters’ meddling siblings, as will Jackie Tohn as Sasha’s wife Esther, and Emily Arlook as Noah’s ex, Rebecca. Other members of Joanne and Noah’s family tree are expected to reprise their roles as well. His parents, Bina and Ilan, are played by Tovah Feldshuh and Paul Ben-Victor, respectively. Joanne’s parents, Lynn and Henry, are played by Stephanie Faracy and Michael Hitchock.

On Thursday, February 20, Variety reported that Leighton Meester, Brody’s real-life spouse, will guest star on the second season, as will Bottoms star Miles Fowler. According to the outlet, Meester will play Abby, described as “Joanne’s (Bell) middle school nemesis who is now an Instagram mommy influencer.” Fowler joins the cast as Lenny, “Noah’s (Brody) Matzah Ballers teammate who gets set up with Morgan (Justine Lupe).”

Meester and Brody met on the set of the 2011 film The Oranges, before marrying in 2014 and later welcoming two children. They have also co-starred together in 2014’s Life Partners, 2023’s River Wild, and Brody completed a seven-episode arc on Meester’s 2019 ABC comedy series, Single Parents.

At the end of the 10-episode first season, Noah and Joanne decide to give their romance a real shot, despite compelling evidence to suggest that melding their lives may be impossibly tricky. According to series creator Erin Foster, season two will “pick up mostly more or less where we left off. Not the same night, but the same moment of, ‘So, what now? How do we do this?’” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

Things will also become clearer for Noah and Joanne’s respective siblings Sasha and Morgan, who—despite Sasha’s marriage—know there’s a strange sexual tension between them. Foster told THR that the second season is “going to wrap up their weird ‘Is it romantic?’ thing.”

It’s a move Lupe and Simons are on board with, as they told VF. “A lot of the fun of the show is in Kristen and Adam and Justine and Jackie and I all hanging out in a room together. And if I cheat on my wife with my brother’s girlfriend’s sister, you can’t have these people all in the same room together, so…” Simons said. “It would provide a lot of conflict, which is great for drama, but it might not be the funniest version.” Lupe added, “What’s fun about these two is this kind of oddball friendship. That’s way more in the spirit of the show than two people committing adultery.”

Nobody Wants This will also need to address backlash from Jewish women who have criticized the series for its harmful stereotypes and characterizations. Foster, who in real life converted to Judaism for her husband Simon Tikhman, told The Hollywood Reporter: “I think it’s sort of ‘you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.’ Because, if you go against stereotype, then you’ll be accused of not knowing how to write Jewish characters. And if you go towards stereotypes, I guess people are going to be upset about that as well.”

She went on to note the inclusion of Jewish writers on the series and Leslie Grossman’s role as a female rabbi who accepts Joanne, despite the frosty reception Joanne gets from other Jewish characters like Esther and Rebecca. “There’s this hyper focus on the female Jewish characters being stereotypes, but there’s a real lack of acknowledgment about how strong they are as women, and how they’re the matriarchs of the family,” Foster told the outlet, adding that “we’re going to continue telling the story in season two and fleshing those characters out as we always planned to do, and not as a reaction to criticism. Because I think the majority of people see that this is a net-positive for Jewish people in general.”

These days, shows can take years between seasons—but Nobody Wants This plans to stick to a more reliable schedule. “They’re trying to get it out with some regularity,” Simons told Vanity Fair days before his first trip to the season two writers’ room. “A lot of TV shows are like, ‘Three and a half years from now, we’ll see the first half of the second season.’”

Not so with Nobody Wants This, as Brody told Variety during a recent event: “We’re shooting in February and hopefully they’ll have it out by September next year.”

As Foster confirmed in her THR interview, “Once a year, the same time, we’ll be really consistent. We’re just going to be a Rosh Hashanah launch, always.” She also shared that the writers have already begun to set aside storylines for a potential third season. “And we’re like, ‘Should we just make a board and pitch out season three to them at the same time?’” she said. “Because, we have ideas.”

This post will be updated.

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