Open Hearts
Nobody Wants This, Except Joanne and Noah, Who Want This a LOT!
If you’re new here, read this quick primer on the Story Energies, a new way to talk about storytelling.
It’s an old story: a guy from one tribe falls in love with a girl from another tribe, and they need to overcome all their tribe-related baggage to be together. (Shakespeare wrote a decent version.) Netflix’s Nobody Wants This puts a new spin on the formula—a rabbi falls for an agnostic blonde sex podcaster, and traditional Judaism is pitted against progressive, well, Whiteness.
For Noah (Adam Brody) and Joanne (Kristen Bell), it’s not so much that their respective communities hate one another. It’s more that their values are very different, as are their expectations from life.
Joanne’s tribe—especially her co-host sister (Justine Lupe)—expect her to stay cool, detached and fun, and to cash in on her talent for casually ribald storytelling when they sell their podcast for millions of dollars.
Noah’s tribe expect him to stay on course to become head Rabbi—role model for their community, champion of their culture and their religion.
But how can he champion Judaism and choose a gentile for a wife?
This show is a comedy, that takes every opportunity to mine its situations for laughs. The characters are even more hyperreal than regular LA folks—a little more beautiful, a little quicker with ripostes, sometimes quite a lot more harpyish.
And the show’s laws of nature are similar to ours, but even more likely to send exactly the wrong person bumping into you when you’re browsing the shelves of a sex store.
So we’re supposed to laugh. But we’re also supposed to engage emotionally with this story. The show’s makers want us to root for these two, to will them happiness, and to share in it (if and) when it arrives.
So how do they go about making us care?
Love can be a messy thing, and some love stories depict complicated relationships, with attractions so volatile they sometimes spill over into hate—see last month’s post on Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, and the powerful Magnetic Energy generated by the complexity of the lovers’ bonds.
Other times, it’s more straightforward. A person walks into our life and something zings. They make our faces smile, our hearts race, our loins tingle. Their presence makes us feel happy and safe, and their absence makes us feel sick with longing. Then it turns out they like us too! And the more time we spend together, the more our initial suspicions are confirmed. Maybe they’re a little annoying sometimes, they don’t reply to our texts or they’re weirdly close to their mother, but nothing that merits hatred, or even dislike. Mostly we think they’re actually about perfect.
At least, you know, for the first several months.
I hope this has happened to you. I hope it lasted even longer than a few months! But even if your love stories have been more complicated—if you were really more interested in domination than caring, or if you hoped deep down for the same casual cruelty your dad was always good for—I’ll bet you recognise this desire for a love that opens up new possibilities of meaning for the word perfect. A love that can feel even more miraculous when the whole world seems dead set against it. A love that comes to almost be defined by how much you want it, even if nobody else does.
If an audience recognises something in a character (or characters), they will notice them. They’ll pay attention. What the story then needs to do is have the audience go on a journey with its characters, and share in their experiences. This journey is sometimes a literal one—an odyssey around Ancient Greece or old Dublin, or halfway across the Pacific Ocean on a plane with snakes on it. More often, it’s an emotional one. We laugh, we cry, we gasp, we cheer…
Nobody Wants This doesn’t generate much Story Energy from the complexity of the bond between its two leads. Instead, at least for Season One, that bond is clear and true from the beginning—it’s love at first exchange of witty, knowing conversation.
The story does have obvious Potential Energy in that two-tribes set-up, and in the impressiveness and gumption of its characters. There’s Gravitational Energy in the specificity of their individual worlds. And when those worlds collide, things inevitably get a little tense (Elastic Energy). There is some Magnetic Energy generated by the somewhat more complex relationships in the show—between Joanne and her sister, for example, or Joanne and Noah’s ex. Most notably there’s Nuclear Energy in the funny smart dialogue, and the performances of the talented cast. But what I want to focus on here is the Electrical Energy generated by the emotions the characters experience in real time, in scenes.
[Look out! From here on, the spoilers get worse.]
That first night they meet, he walks her to her car. They open up to each other a little about their lives, and neither makes much effort to disguise their attraction. It takes ages for them to say goodbye, and she almost immediately follows him to his synagogue. There is a little tension, in a will-they-won’t-they way, but that’s dispelled pretty quickly, and by the end of Episode 2, we get their first kiss:
It takes ages!
And just as Noah and Joanne want to show each other how intense their feelings are, the show shows no interest in holding back as we roll through the episodes. So whether they’re negotiating his ex, their friends, their families, their careers, or the ‘ick’, there is always room for the heartfelt, scenes where the characters themselves are often surprised by the intensity of their emotions. These scenes are like earnest eyes in swirling storms of comedy, blinking back tears. And the emotions always seem sincere, and recognisable in their rendering of one form of human vulnerability or another, even if the broader storylines can strain across the bounds of credibility.
And then, in Episode 8, they finally confront the reality that’s been there from the beginning: if they’re to have a future together, he’s going to need her to convert. And she doesn’t know how to respond to his ultimatum. And even though none of this should have been a surprise to anyone—not to Noah, nor to Joanne, nor to me—all three of us were stunned into a poignant silence.
If anything, this trouble serves to highlight how important their romance has become, so that a couple of episodes later, the season’s finale feels like this:
Some of us storytellers can be wary of emotion. Our favourite stories are often praised for their subtlety and nuance, while others are bashed for their melodrama or excess sentimentality. But if a story’s characters don’t seem to care about what’s happening in their lives, why should anyone else?
If you are someone who shies away from big emotions in your stories, give yourself a treat this holiday season and indulge. Allow your characters the time and space they need to let it all out. And see how it feels.
You can watch Nobody Wants This on Netflix.
Storytelling is what makes writing fun. You get a good one, one that absolutely nails what you want to say, it’s bliss on a biscuit.