Dispatch • 'Nobody Wants This' Cast and Creative Team on Love After the Easy Part

By now, Nobody Wants This has earned its reputation. The Netflix dramedy that turned a rabbi and a sex podcaster into one of TV’s most unlikely love stories is two seasons deep and still carrying the glow of a show people want to show up for. On April 8, that audience filled the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, where PaleyFest LA 2026 hosted a screening and panel for Season 2—and where the people who made it shared what it’s actually like to build a series with a point of view and have it connect.

The show, for the uninitiated, is a romantic comedy created by Erin Foster—loosely drawn from her own life—about an agnostic sex podcaster named Joanne (Kristen Bell) and a rabbi named Noah (Adam Brody) who seemingly have no business falling in love with each other and do it anyway. Season 2 arrived last October; a third season is already in production.

After the screening, Foster joined co-showrunners Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, along with Bell, Brody, Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons, and Jackie Tohn for a conversation moderated by Collider’s Perri Nemiroff. Their ease with each other was visible from the first question. They finished each other’s sentences and kept arriving at the same observation from different directions: that something about this show surprised everyone who made it.

Foster set the tone early. When Nemiroff asked how you make a second season without losing what made the first one work, she didn’t reach for an answer about craft. “Falling in love is a type of love,” she said. “But staying in love is also a really meaningful kind of love.” That’s the show’s thesis as much as its Season 2 mandate. The series doesn’t coast on Noah and Joanne’s early courtship giddiness so much as ask a harder question: what does it look like when two people really try?

That shift required the writers to let their golden-boy rabbi be imperfect. Even Foster’s husband pushed back: a character this idealized, he told her, creates pressure no real relationship can sustain. “Just because someone is your perfect partner doesn’t mean they’ve been perfect to everyone in the past,” she said. “And just because they’ve been imperfect in the past doesn’t mean they’re a bad guy.” It’s the kind of nuance that separates the show from the genre it nominally inhabits.

For Bell, the season offered something she hadn’t had much room for: the chance to be grounded. She’s known for her sharp comedic instincts, but Joanne often asks her to sit with the unsaid. Nemiroff pointed to Bell’s restraint in several scenes: she doesn’t cry; she’s on the edge of it, holding it back. It’s a harder act. “I keep a lot of emotions sitting there that I can access,” Bell said. “But sustaining that amount of energy—it requires a lot of gas in the tank.”

Lupe, who plays Joanne’s sister Morgan, has been with the show since the beginning—but Season 2 gave her significantly more to work with, and she knows what that means. She’s 36, she said, and has spent years working steadily in smaller roles, the kind of slow climb that doesn’t often make headlines. Landing here, with this cast, with this much material, is not something she takes lightly. “You don’t take it for granted,” she said, her voice catching. “It’s a huge, huge deal.” For a show about two people who finally appreciate what’s right in front of them, it felt especially fitting.

Simons offered the night’s most quietly funny moment when he explained what drew him to Sasha’s Season 2 breakdown: a scene at an outdoor bar where years of absorbing everyone else’s feelings finally tips over. “It didn’t feel like it came out of nowhere,” he said. “It felt like something had been building.” Then, after a beat: “I will say, it wasn’t a big reach for me as a daddy.”

The panel also surfaced the story behind one of the season’s most discussed scenes: a conversation between Joanne and Esther centered on Jewish identity and what it means to feel like you already belong somewhere before you’ve been formally welcomed. Foster revealed it was the only scene the production re-shot, a month after wrapping, in a different location, with the cast back in their original outfits. The first version, shot in daylight, apparently felt a bit thin.

“It just felt like it was missing its emotional depth,” she explained. The revision gave it more weight. Foster drew on her own conversion process and her growing closeness with her real-life sister-in-law Marsha—the realization that the sense of belonging she’d been searching for was one she already had. The scene landed where it needed to. Jewish women her age, Bell added, messaged her about it.

Kaplan, for his part, summed up the upcoming Season 3 in a drawing. He arrived in the writers’ room one day with a sketch on the board. The room guessed: a person? A place? Eventually someone asked, “Is that a champagne glass?” It was. The image, he explained, felt right because Season 2 had done the heavy lifting by putting Noah and Joanne through the kinds of struggles that come when two people are actually trying to build something longer-lasting together. Season 3 gets to be the reward. Foster put it another way: the show needed audiences to see Noah as a real person, not a fantasy. A man capable of being imperfect. Only then does the celebration mean anything. After the hard work of two people finding their footing together, Season 3 is the exhale.

And it will have plenty of company. Netflix this week announced the guest stars joining Noah and Joanne’s next chapter, already in production, and viewers will have a lot to look forward to: Andrew Rannells will play Sebastien, a conversion-class rival for Joanne; Sarah Silverman joins as Rabbi Eden, the woman leading Joanne through Intro to Judaism; Keyla Monterroso Mejia appears as Amber, a fellow student with marriage very much on the brain; Avan Jogia plays Travis, an easygoing troublemaker who knows exactly how to get under Joanne’s skin; and Foster will appear as Nicole, a messier, more wayward reflection of Joanne herself.

Brody, for his part, mentioned getting to share a more emotionally substantive scene with Silverman and noted that her dramatic range tends to catch people off guard. “She’s lovely and a really good actor,” he said. “Obviously she’s a super comedian, but she’s a very good actor.” High praise, delivered low-key. Very Noah.

Near the end of the discussion, Foster didn’t hesitate to share what she’s proudest of: romanticizing a healthy relationship. A mature man who actually wants to be with a real partner. Two people who found each other and then did the harder, less glamorous work of showing up for each other. “It’s just really hard to find the person you say you want to find and then appreciate them,” she said. “This show really shows two people who really appreciate each other.”

She went further. There’s a generation watching Nobody Wants This who use it as a reference point, asking themselves what a relationship looks like, what a fight between two people looks like, even what a version of marriage looks like. Foster knows this. “I do think that we’re setting a good example of what that can be,” she said.

It’s one thing to make a show about a healthy relationship, but it’s another to say you made it because you knew people were watching and needed to see one. Any honest portrait of two people choosing each other, and then choosing each other again, changes what an audience believes is possible. Nobody Wants This understands that about itself; that’s rarer than it sounds. And if the champagne glass is any indication, there's plenty left to celebrate.

Nobody Wants This Seasons 1 and 2 are available to stream on Netflix.