In the mid-noughties, teenage girls around the world were split into two camps. Either you were madly in love with Ben McKenzie’s Ryan Atwood, The OC ’s bad boy with a secret heart of gold, or you had fallen hard for Seth Cohen, the quieter, gawkier – yet no less gorgeous – nerd played by Adam Brody. Not watching The OC, at least in the circles I ran in at the delicate age of 14, was not an option.
Ryan was by far the more popular (his enduring love for Marisa Cooper was admittedly hard to resist), but Seth fans – and lovers of Dave Rygalski, the sweet musician who Lane should’ve held on to in Gilmore Girls – are finally having our adoration vindicated. Brody is the star of Netflix’s new romcom Nobody Wants This – currently the second most watched series on the streamer worldwide. He plays Noah, a sexy and conveniently recently single rabbi who falls in love with agnostic “shiksa” – Yiddish slang for, in his words, a “hot, blonde non-Jew” – and sex podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell (also American teen soap royalty, having starred in Veronica Mars and voicing Gossip Girl).
But their friends and family don’t support their new relationship – believing them incompatible because they come from such different worlds. And they don’t hide it. I’m not surprised that Nobody Wants This is an instant hit.
It’s sweet without being sickly and has a sharp, sometimes edgy sense of humour (“Does my brother not look like he could control the med.