Truth be told, when I hear the term “Rom Com” my skin crawls, I roll my eyes, and my sarcasm/cynicism meter jacks past the red line into another zone I would gladly call imagining the worst possible human misery. Yes, my own personal hell would be filled with many, many annoying people (listening to the servers at Rustic talk about their boring lives is a hell I live daily) and their terrible musical choices (are you listening Satan?). Example? Ok, here: Taylor Swift blasting while strapped to a chair, my eyelids cut off and dozens of massive TV screens force feeding romantic comedies and the only beverages around are N/A spirits. Yes, this for eternity while, in the background, servers stand around and talk to one another at the host stand.

To be fair, I do have my own personal eye candy/brain shut off guilty pleasures. I will watch the movies Heat, Dune I & II, Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, The Godfather I & II over and over again and I have…A lot, some of them probably hundreds of times and even total garbage like Bloodsport and Kickboxer every so often as a refresh. You see, the drivel is strong in everyone. They say watching something familiar soothes us…Smoothes out the anxiety of everyday life, especially in a pre- apocalyptic warzone like LA. This is why I watch very little new TV but instead have watched Game of Thrones, Sopranos, and Mad Men four times through. The familiar often has the power to quell the sleep addled brain, set it to rest, allow it a moment to bathe in the glory of schlock.

In terms of my own history with the dreaded Rom Com? Princess Bride, Moonstruck, and Jerry McGuire are all watchable, even enjoyable in the right context. It comes down to shutting off the brain. That’s what TV is for as well as the social context…Sports, etc. give us something to socialize about with our co workers and friends instead of talking about things that really matter like how the human brain was able to double in size over the course of a mere two million years. But the three movies I mentioned have at least some good qualities. I mean, shit, The Princess Bride is a classic and both Moonstruck and Jerry McGuire have Oscar winning performances from Cher and Cuba Gooding Jr.

So there.

Yes, that is one award you will find absent from any modern day Rom Com. The Oscar. Why? Because they fail on so many levels. Acting, production, writing, dialogue, plot, theme, cinematography, pretty much the gamut of what makes a good movie good. Hence the cynicism.

Yet…The Rom Com does have one benefit and that is it makes my wife happy if I watch one with her. Now that, is better then any goddam Oscar. Of course, now, in the age of the extended doc series, we now have the Rom Com series, ugh, because why watch female pornography for an hour and a half when you can binge watch four hours straight? Like I said, if she is happy subjecting me to this drivel then why fight it? This is the mindset I had going into season one of Nobody Wants This. Pick your battles.

But, it’s in my programming, so off the bat, I went in with extreme skepticism. Number one, because the damn show has gone so viral on Instagram which in my mind means lots of people like it so it must be terrible. This is true nine out of ten times. Number two because I am a stubborn son of a bitch.

The basic premise: A vapid woman with no other qualities other than a nice wide smile full of gleaming white teeth somehow gets a total dimepiece of a man to fall in love with her. She and her sister do a podcast together where they talk about all the men they “date” (we all know what that means). The dude, is none other than Adam Brody who wears an awful neck beard throughout the series to bring down his handsomeness to her level. Yes, he’s tall, thin, handsome, smart, and rich, but also sensitive and emotionally available which is what the women who watch the show are really swooning over even though they wouldn’t if he was butt ugly, poor, and worked as a bartender or server. Oh yeah, he’s also a rabbi. Sorry, that’s the spoiler from the first episode. Yes, a rabbi that owns a two story, two plus bedroom home with a large backyard in the, I’m guessing, Los Felix area of LA. Hmm. Google tells me a rabbi’s salary is anywhere from $79,000 to $144,000.

I told you the Rom Com was female pornography at its finest. The perfect man who falls in love with a woman with no positive qualities. Ok, ok, she’s a little witty and seems to make a living somehow from her podcast and looks like she too owns her own home somehow. She has wooed a holy Jewish man. A man who has spent his entire life reading and poring over the mighty Torah and dedicating his entire life to God and helping people.

Does the series pass the Bechdel-Wallace test? Boy, I don’t think so. What is it? Well, in order for any movie or series to pass it must meet three criteria. 1. It must feature two female characters. 2. Ok, check. The two women must speak to one another. Ok, check. 3. The two women must speak to one another about something other than a man. Fail. The two sisters’ podcast is about men and everytime they speak to one another throughout the series they only speak of the rabbi and or his brother or some annoying problem that has come up due to said men.

The sister is played by Justine Lupe whose onscreen presence saves the show from going down in a full blaze of boredom.

There is some interest in just how opposite Joanne and Noah are. A classic tale. This is where the series does generate a modicum of steam but it also ends there as well because the suspension of disbelief is too great. The whole time I thought to myself, “What does he see in her?” But the more I thought about it, Noah wants her because she represents everything that the women in his life are not and he subconsciously wants to sabotage everything he’s worked so hard for just to piss his mother off. He’s got…Mommy issues…

The first half of the series I will say does have some funny bits, that, at least, is the enjoyable part of a Rom Com compared to a full blown romance. Yes, yes, that is why it is called a romantic comedy. Thank you. I laughed more than a few times and I do have to say the first four episodes were entertaining due to the comedy portion of the series. The last six episodes, however, begin to drag a bit when we enter the romantic portion. It becomes less entertaining, less funny, when the shiksa, played by Kristen Bell, has to continually prove herself and win over the members of Noah’s harsh, living in the past family.

It is on this level that the writing fails due to stereotypes. The Jewish women are portrayed as judgmental, territorial, and olympic caliber ball busters whose terrified, browbeaten men with mommy issues succumb to their every whim. Although this may be true in some circumstances in the real world (I don’t know this for sure because I’m not Jewish and have never been immersed in that world but I do have ears) I would hope that on the screen we could possibly see something a little different with a higher level of writing. No? I mean, this is what good writing is, otherwise we would have to endure a laundry list of all the other nasty stereotypes in movies and television we have been subject to all our lives. You know them, I know them, so why, in a series that has been number one on Netflix for a good, long time do we sit and watch and accept them? Because most of the characters are Jewish? On the subject of stereotypes, I would like to mention that all brown people are absent from the show with the exception of the two sisters making fun of a latino busboy toward the end.

In conclusion, if you want to watch a fantasy about a bunch of well to do white people that don’t seem to work much and their boring first world problems, tune in to Nobody Wants This. Which has the most apropos title of any Rom Com. Me? I’d like something a bit more realistic. Maybe a struggling writer with two jobs and two kids, who can barely make ends meet, barely sleeps, and still manages to pump out a decent seasonal cocktail every so often. He loves his wife who also works her ass off taking care of the two young kids. They never get much of a break, the bills are a never ending crescendo of pain and stress and anxiety, but there are small eyes in the hurricane of torment that is their life–occasional laughs at their own plight which was caused by their love for one another in the first place–the tender hug from a crazy toddler, the smile in a cute baby’s face that is all innocence and the promise of a beautiful future. This is something I would watch but it isn’t exactly a dreamy LA love fantasy. It is more a look at what real life is for the middle class, the commoners, those in the parental trenches. I don’t know. Maybe season two of Nobody Wants This will see Kristen Bell with a bun in the oven and Adam Brody working at a gas station after giving up his dreams of being a rabbi for her (spoiler alert). Her podcast has failed, because, let’s face it, how long can a podcast continue if you’re not Joe Rogan or Marc Maron? And now because she has no degree or training in this cruel world she waits tables while pregnant and she hardly has two pennies to scrape together for all her beauty products, botox, teeth whitening solutions, dye jobs, yoga classes, pilates classes, pedicures, manicures, and lip injections.

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