Nobody Wants This premieres September 26 on Netflix. Six years ago, a guy Erin Foster had just started dating was meeting her mother for the first time and brought to the restaurant a bouquet of sunflowers large enough to command its own chair. “The flowers were so long, and they kept falling over,” says Foster.
“Sitting there, I was like, Well, if someone cares this much, then that feels like a weakness. ” She was 36 and had dated enough assholes, including a few celebrities, to know that she was the jerk in this case, but still, she recoiled from him on the car ride home. “ There’s no hope for me, ” she remembers thinking.
“ I am a human who got some bad wiring about what a relationship is supposed to look like, and I’m clearly sabotaging something. ” When Foster, the creator and an executive producer of the Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This , first told her writers’ room this anecdote, the men were baffled, but the women immediately got it. “That made me feel like it was a good story to tell,” she says.
The scene gets worked into the sixth episode of the show, which stars elder-millennial network-TV statespeople Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. Bell plays Joanne, a jaded, agnostic podcast host who also doesn’t know what a good relationship is supposed to look like. Burned out by bad Raya dates, she inadvertently falls for a charming, well-adjusted rabbi named Noah, played by Brody, until he tries too hard to impress her parents.
“I can’t .
