Kristen Bell and Adam Brody on Hit Series, S2

There are the rare television shows that seem to sail through the various stages of production blissfully. They have writers rooms that are cohesive, producers who share a vision and distributors that are confident in what they’re readying for release. On these shows, episodes typically come in on time and without significant issue, and the stars involved are primed for success.

Nobody Wants This was not one of these shows.

The Jewish rom-com, starring Kristen Bell as an agnostic sex-and-relationship podcaster and Adam Brody as a laid-back rabbi, spent the better part of last year mired in chaos. Production on season one had fallen woefully behind schedule, as whole episodes were scrapped, scripts were written at the eleventh hour and producers, including Bell, began second-guessing the series’ tone.

“There were a lot of different visions,” says Erin Foster, who, as a first-time creator and showrunner, found herself routinely fighting for hers. “I just kept saying, ‘Guys, please trust me.’ “

But on Sept. 26, 2024, the 10-episode first season dropped in its entirety on Netflix and any lingering concerns seemed to swiftly vanish. Outlets like The New York Times and New York magazine lavished it with praise — “Compulsively watchable!” “Instantly combustible chemistry!” — and the show spent six consecutive weeks on the streamer’s Top 10 list. By the year’s end, Nobody Wants This was viewed 57 million times and went on to pick up nominations at every major awards show, including the Emmys, Golden Globes, SAG Awards and Writers Guild Awards.

“The fact that I saw pictures of Halloween costumes feels like the benchmark of cultural penetration,” says Brody, who was thrust back into the zeitgeist for the first time since The O.C. aired two decades earlier.

Even Bell, whose résumé is lined with hits including Frozen, had never received this much attention for a role. “And now, if you ask me, I’d say, ‘I believe Erin Foster will become a reference point in TV and film meetings going forward,’ ” says the actress, who, like many in the Nobody Wants This cast, was interviewed over the Jewish High Holy Days. “People will say, ‘Oh, it’s Tim Burton-esque. It’s Wes Anderson-esque. It’s Erin Foster-esque.’ I just wasn’t adept enough in season one to realize it.”

Ahead of season two, which drops Oct. 23, there was a sizable reshuffling behind the scenes. Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, both veterans of HBO’s Girls, were brought in to co-run the series — and, per Foster, “help get the train back on the tracks.” And by all accounts, they have. In fact, the second season seemed to sail through the various stages of production blissfully. They have a writers room that’s cohesive, producers who share a vision and a distributor in Netflix that is confident in what it’s readying for release.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

***

Half a decade earlier, Foster had all but given up on Hollywood.

For years, the daughter of music producer David Foster and former model Rebecca Dyer had tried to get a toehold, first as an actress, with largely forgettable guest roles on series including The O.C., then as a writer. There was reality TV parody Barely Famous with her sister Sara at VH1, but mild cult status couldn’t stave off its cancellation. Then Foster sold a semi-autobiographical sitcom pilot to Fox in 2018 — in addition to writing and producing, she starred opposite Don Johnson as her playboy dad. It was over before it started. “They pull out the edge and specificity and they water it down, and then they don’t pick it up because it’s not saying anything,” says Foster. She walked away wondering, who needs it?

But just as her professional life had seemingly stalled, her personal one took off. At 35, Foster met the love of her life, a Jewish music executive named Simon Tikhman, and agreed to convert. In fact, she was regaling her manager, Oly Obst, with stories of the Jewish conversion process when he suggested there was a TV show in her experience. Its title, he told her, should be Shiksa. Foster agreed to write a script for 20th Century Television, where she was still in a deal. If it was picked up, she’d star as a loosely fictionalized version of herself.

The only catch: Tikhman didn’t know about any of it and was somewhat horrified when he found out. Unlike Foster, who was raised in a very public Los Angeles family, he wasn’t comfortable with his private life becoming public. So for years, Foster dragged her heels. “It was a real journey,” says Sara Foster, with whom Erin shares a podcast, a clothing line and a production company. “It took many forms: ‘I don’t want to do it,’ ‘Fuck it, let’s not do it,’ ‘Nobody even wants this show.’ ” In 2021, Erin finally settled in and started writing.

By then, Sara, the more business-minded of the sisters, had “full-on stalked” Steve Levitan and convinced the Modern Family co-creator to join her and her sister as an executive producer. “Erin’s such a good writer, and she understands these characters better than anyone,” says Sara, “but we needed to bring someone on who could help us sell it.” In addition to early structural contributions, Levitan proposed a more dramatic hook: Rather than have Brody’s character be your run-of-the-mill Jewish guy whose family doesn’t want him marrying outside the religion, make him a rabbi, so his profession complicates it, too. It would give the rom-com real stakes — and by distancing it from Foster’s real life, prevent a premature divorce.

The completed script was sent all around town — and every outlet that read it passed. “The feedback was always, like, ‘This feels small,’ ” says Foster. Then Tracey Pakosta at Netflix got her hands on it and instantly saw the value. “I didn’t think there was anything small about it,” she says. “I felt like everybody would see a piece of themselves in these characters, not only in the big romance, but also in the relationship Joanne has with her sister, Morgan [played by Succession‘s Justine Lupe].”

Netflix was in, but they’d require a bigger star at the center. If Foster’s ego was bruised, she didn’t let on. In fact, she told Bell, who was the streamer’s first and only choice to play Joanne, that staying behind the scenes would allow her to move forward with the show and have a baby at the same time. So Bell signed on and promptly began studying Foster’s mannerisms and tacking up images of her various looks to the walls. “It was full Single White Female,” jokes Bell.

Foster will tell you they saw “every Jewish man in Hollywood” to play opposite Bell. The truth is, they approached comedian Nick Kroll first, but he passed. “This is like Matt Damon turning down Avatar,” Bell’s husband, Dax Shepard, teased when he had Kroll on his podcast earlier this year. Foster was bummed at the time, though she concedes it would have been a very different show — certainly not the millennial fever dream of The O.C.’s Seth Cohen (Brody) and Veronica Mars (Bell). “There was just something validating to me about a comedian [like Kroll] as the lead that felt like, ‘Oh, I’m making a real comedy,’ ” she explains. “It was a lot of my own insecurities as a writer.”

All the while, Bell was insistent that Brody was perfect for the part. She even threw together a reel of their work in Showtime’s House of Lies and the 2013 film Some Girls to showcase their chemistry. “I was like, ‘Guys, you’re going to need an ice pack while you watch these scenes,’ ” says Bell. “I just kept saying, like, ‘Trust me, Adam knows how to stare dopily at someone and so do I, and that’s kind of all you need.’ I mean, I’d love to tell you it’s real. It’s not. We both just know how to do it.”

Foster warmed to the idea almost immediately. So they sent Brody the script, and he agreed to a Zoom. He had questions about where the show was headed, many of which Foster couldn’t answer. Still, she was charming, and so was the script. “I was like, ‘Well, fuck it,’ ” says Brody. “‘I really like her, I like this episode, and I love Kristen and it’s Netflix and there are a lot of reasons to just roll the dice.’ “

***

The first of many battles was over the show’s title. Foster was dead set on Shiksa, but Netflix executives balked. It would be hard to say, they reasoned, and even harder to spell — more importantly, a global audience likely wouldn’t know what it means. (According to Brody’s character, it’s an old Yiddish term that now mostly refers to “a hot, blond non-Jew.”) A few dozen other titles were batted around; for a stretch, they’d settled on Heartburn, but it was already taken by a Nora Ephron book and film, so they pivoted to Nobody Wants This.

“We were all like, ‘Man, I hope the reviewers like the show because if not, they’re going to dog-fuck us into the ground with that title,’ ” says Timothy Simons, who was cast as Noah’s doofy brother, Sasha. “The headline writes its fucking self: ‘Nobody Wants This Show.’ “

They filmed the first two episodes, and then took a preplanned break to assess what was and wasn’t working. In that time, the cast got to see a rough cut of episode one. For Brody, in particular, it was a massive relief. “I was blown away,” he says. “There was an energy to it, a sort of sexiness that I wasn’t sure about as we were making it. With some of the banter, as I was doing it, I’d be like, ‘Is this going to make me want to gag or is this charming?’ “

Then came the table read for episodes three and four.

As three was initially written, Joanne and Noah have just had, per the script, “the best kiss either of them have ever had,” and then his Jewish ex-girlfriend calls to say her mother has died. As her family’s rabbi, Noah feels compelled to be there for his ex and her relatives as they sit shiva. Foster had wanted the conflict to be embedded in the Jewish grieving process, which is completely foreign to Joanne and leaves her spiraling over Noah’s whereabouts.

“But one person makes the next person panic and then the next person panic, and the panic was, ‘Is this funny enough?’ And I just kept saying, ‘Guys, I don’t think you have to worry,’ ” says Foster. She didn’t yet have the credibility with her fellow producers, the studio or the streamer to stave off their concerns, however. So, the script got tossed out, the shutdown extended and Levitan stepped in and wrote a notably lighter, shiva-free version. Foster resisted almost every change. “I was at a place where I thought, ‘This is my only chance to have a show,’ ” she says, ” ‘and I’m not going to let everybody else convince me that I don’t know what I’m doing.’ ”

The actors, with the exception of Bell, who’s also a producer, were left largely in the dark. “One day we were all collectively celebrating this kind of magic that we’d captured, then two days later the wheels came off,” recalls Brody, who adds of the whiplash: “I was like, ‘What the fuck? The show is so good. What is the problem?’ “

From there, the scripts fell further behind, and concerns over structure and tone kept mounting. Several involved say they were genuinely fearful that the whole series would fall apart. At a certain point, even Brody felt like, as he puts it, “we were being noted to death.” Levitan is said to have tired of the dysfunction and walked away roughly halfway through the season, though contractually he’ll remain an executive producer for the life of the series. Soon after, Jack Burditt, whose credits include 30 Rock and Last Man Standing, was brought in either “to calm the network” or “to do triage,” depending on who you ask. But before the first season had even dropped, both he and the original co-showrunner, Craig DiGregorio, were gone as well.

The actors navigated the uncertainty as best they could, though some struggled more than others. “I like to have an idea of what the fuck is going on while we’re shooting, and there’s a difference between being like, ‘Where is this headed next season?’ And ‘What’s happening in this scene?’ ” says Lupe, who spent much of the first season trying to understand the sexually charged relationship that her character has with Noah’s married brother, Sasha. But Foster, who initially had the pair hooking up, only to scrap that plan during production, didn’t have clear answers for her or her co-star.

“I’d be like, ‘Am I seducing this person right now? Am I going to fuck him in the next episode?’ Like, ‘Erin, I need to know,’ ” says Lupe, who was also pregnant at the time. “Then, when I watched it, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, yeah, this gets parts of me tingling in a weird way, where I’m like, what is this?’ Like, it’s interesting and vague, and that’s what made it fun. So, she was right, but as an actor, I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ “

Meanwhile, Bell, or “KB” as her castmates call her, was having her own challenges. For the entire first season, she was convinced she didn’t know what she was doing. There wasn’t enough plot for her to make sense of, and the level of ambiguity in the scripts sent her spinning. “I pushed back with constant questioning because I didn’t have the same hooks into the emotional math of my character that I’m used to having,” she says. “And now I see how much ambiguity there is in real life, and I see what Erin was doing — but there were times where I’d just roll my eyes at her and be like, ‘Ugh, you don’t understand.’

“Once I saw the show, and to be honest, once I saw people seeing the show, because proof is in the pudding, I was like, ‘Oh wow, this girl is writing about what happens to your neighbor or your girlfriend,’ ” she continues. “So it wasn’t just because of the success of the show that the second season got easier; it was because Erin and I finally saw each other.”

***

By the time season one had finished filming, nobody involved knew what to make of it. Then came whispers that Netflix had put the show on its internal server, and employees couldn’t get enough of Bell and Brody’s crackling chemistry.

“We were hearing that they were sliding off their chairs, and I mean that in the way you think I mean that,” jokes Jackie Tohn, who credits Bell, “a real dirtbag,” for the lewd comment. Asked to defend herself, Bell says, “That’s a high compliment when someone slides off their chair for you, we all know that.” She smiles. “Girls can be pervs, too.”

Still, no one would have predicted the scale at which the series landed, making the streamer’s Top 10 list in 89 countries around the world. Overnight, memes of Brody’s character telling Joanne, “I can handle you,” or cupping her face in a passionate kiss, were racing around the internet. Audiences were eating up their refreshingly healthy love story and, for that matter, whatever was going on between Morgan and Sasha.

“For Erin and me, it was so nice because I think people have always questioned us — they’ve questioned our talent, questioned our ability, questioned our place in the business,” says Sara Foster, who Lupe’s Morgan is loosely based on. “But to be honest, you never know when to grab the champagne. It’s like, ‘OK, great, season one was a hit, now we have to make season two a hit.’ ”

Of course, by then, the season two room was well underway. In fact, the five leads — Tohn, who plays Sasha’s wife, Esther, was upped to a series regular between seasons — had already been in to get a sense for where the story was headed. Bell, in particular, liked what she heard. “Erin said, ‘We’re going to give the people what they want,’ and I thought that was very cool,” says Bell. “She was like, ‘You don’t want it to turn into, like, a murder mystery — you just want the bubblegum flavor to last forever, and we’re going to do our best to do that.’ “

Konner and Kaplan had come in as self-proclaimed “superfans” of the show. “So, our intention was never to change anything,” says Konner, who, having worked with Lena Dunham for years, was well-versed in both protecting and shaping someone else’s vision. The pair instituted structure and boundaries that didn’t previously exist. By the time filming began, eight of 10 scripts had been turned in, in one form or another. Creatively, they embraced Foster’s ideas, while pushing, successfully, for her to slow the story down. (Spoiler alert: By the end of season two, Joanne has not made the big life decisions Foster initially envisioned.)

“It took a while for me to relax and trust, but Jenni knew that she was dealing with a traumatized bird,” says Foster, and Konner doesn’t argue with her assessment. Instead, she says: “Having done this kind of role before, I felt very confident that I could help her navigate without trauma.”

She was by Foster’s side last fall as the show fielded its first bout of backlash. It centered on the show’s treatment of Jewish women, who, according to one widely shared Time essay, “are portrayed as nags, harpies and the ultimate villains of this story.” Foster continues to find the criticism frustrating. “It’s so rare to have a beautiful Jewish story on a mass commercial scale that to focus on something and decide it’s problematic to Jews just felt very shortsighted to me,” she says. “Also, it’s about a non-Jewish girl coming into a Jewish family, and if they all welcomed her with open arms, there’s no show. But yes, these characters evolve in human ways because that’s what you do in a second season.”

Konner is keenly aware of the online narrative that her hiring, as a born-and-raised Jewish woman, was in response to that criticism, even if the timeline doesn’t check out. “And it’s insulting,” she says. “I didn’t come in to be the Jewish police — I have a lot of other qualities, it turns out, as does Bruce Kaplan.” Kaplan is similarly dismissive. He acknowledges that they did discuss the backlash in the season two room but very quickly brushed it aside. “I view these characters as people, not as representations,” he says. “So I’m just like, ‘Well, what would Esther do?’ I don’t need to care what the internet is saying.”

***

Now, with season two about to be unleashed into the world, the writers are back in the room, blue-skying a not-yet-officially-ordered third season, and the cast is enjoying the success and one another. “I’ve spent a lot of time not in this position, so to have it happen at this point in my life is gratifying,” says Brody. “And as silly as awards may be, recognition is nice, respect is nice, opportunity is cool.”

By all accounts, that’s the outlook that permeates the Nobody Wants This set — it’s a bunch of adults that value the opportunity, even if, occasionally, they still behave like children. There’s no better or more hilarious example of the latter than the elaborate April Fools’ prank Lupe played on Bell earlier this year. Over the course of nearly two months, Lupe convinced her co-star that she was drinking her own urine for its health benefits. She would walk around the set with mason jars full of colored liquid, and nearly everyone but Bell was in on it. Simons still can’t believe Lupe attempted it, much less saw it through. “Pulling a prank on KB, that’s like a witch’s curse,” he says. “You’re going to get that shit back tenfold.”

Asked about her plans for retaliation, Bell offers only this: “I’m not going to Lindbergh her baby or anything, but it’s going to be something and it’s going to be great.”

At any given time, there are multiple cast text chains going, including one titled “Shiksa Shegetz,” which regularly features the image of Noah and Joanne’s famous, hands-on-face kiss, which Simons will superimpose in front of real-life scenes like Lupe in the delivery room with her newborn daughter. More recently, the core five have been active on a thread they’ve titled “Sack tap,” which, Simons acknowledges, “is a very bro-ey name for a group that isn’t super bro-ey.”

The actors frequently bring their kids to set (as they did to THR‘s cover shoot), and many of the significant others were involved to varying degrees in season two. Tohn’s boyfriend, Joe Gillette, guests in episode five and eight as Gabe, the husband of an influencer played by Brody’s real-life wife, Leighton Meester. Foster’s hoping both will be back in future seasons. Meanwhile, Konner’s husband directed the final two episodes, and Lupe’s husband and his art appear briefly in episode four. Even Tikhman, who was once vehemently opposed to the very idea of the show, made the soundtrack for season two. “In success, it’s fun for him,” says Foster, before Konner interjects: “Especially when Adam Brody’s playing you as the sexiest rabbi on earth.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.