Oh, the vitriol!

Heres what my wife had to say after reading my review of Nobody Wants This: “You tore down my show asshole! Way too negative! Way too negative! You really don’t get it, do you? The reason why it’s become so popular is because the characters are over forty. You should appreciate that, there is value in that. All the other rom coms star people under thirty. Nobody Wants This is refreshing because people see how you can restart later in life.

“Also, Kristen Bell’s character isn’t vapid, she’s an empowered, smart, intelligent woman who is finding her way in the cruel harsh environment of the LA dating scene.”

Intelligent may be a stretch…She didn’t know prosciutto was a pork product. Ok, ok, I do see the merit in having older peeps onscreen and reinventing themselves, yada yada, but how about we have them act like forty year olds then instead of teenage girls? Bell’s character, Joanne, is quite immature in this regard, who says somewhere in the ten episode yawn fest that she is a ”mean girl.” She seems to live on her phone, and yes, this is a trait of the immature, and her sister at one point makes fun of someone for reading a book.

Listen, I may have been overly harsh on purpose but I really thought the series did lack much artistic merit in terms of well, pretty much everything. Ugh. Ok, ok, this is supposed to be a rebuttal where I say only positive things about the show. Ok, let’s start over…Sigh…Ok, I watched the series in the first place to learn a little more about my love, Jo. She digs this stuff. It makes sense, she’s lighthearted. I, on the other hand, am not. She wanted me to see more of this stuff because she wants me to write a romance novel of some sort someday. She was dead on about the cocktail book. It was her idea and it actually went somewhere, so now maybe I should listen? Boy oh boy. I could never write anything like that, straight anyway…And what I mean by that is it just isn’t in me to write it without inserting some sort of science fiction or horror twinge. And I guess that’s what I dislike most of all about Nobody Wants This and modern day rom coms in general. It’s the overall lack of imagination. The series, although it stars two forty somethings, is basically the same formula as any other rom com out there. Girl meets boy, boy meets girl, they fall in love, there is a bunch of things in their lives they have to overcome and then at the last moment it looks as if all their collective efforts will fail despite their enduring love…But wait a minute…At the last possible moment it looks like it’ll all work out after all.

I think Nobody Wants This would have been much better with a few injections of real life. At the very end when it appears their differences may indeed be too much, yeah, they end it. She still stalks him on instagram or whatever and watches as his life gets better and better as hers becomes more and more lonely despite her increasing podcast success. Better? I don’t know. Still pretty cliche. And I think that’s the toughest part of the rom com these days–avoiding cliche. Because as each genre begins to run their course, the cliches of said genre become more and more evident and harder to ignore. Case in point: Action movies. One of the reasons why they’re not popular anymore is because they followed the same formula for so many years and people got bored. So what happened? They kept trying to reinvent it by crossing the action movie with other genres. This is now what will happen with the rom com. They’ve found a way to make it a reality show (Love is Blind) and now are altering it slightly by including older characters. But in the end, it’s still the same old, same old.

And yes, with the advent of streaming we now watch more TV than ever before. Here’s a huff and puff/back in my day example: When I was younger, we had to wait until the time a show came on. Let’s say, Seinfeld at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday night. If you missed the slot, you missed the newest episode and you would have to wait for the rerun to air if at all. The point is, there is so much more content out there now, there has to be, that the shows are going to have to be regurgitated more and more often which only creates less original programming in the long run. Add this with the fact that the longer we go, the more movies and TV series come out which is a reason why less original stuff comes out year after year and we get so many sequels and remakes. After some time, it all becomes a bit drab. Remember the Marvel years? Now when was the last time you saw a Marvel movie? Avengers: Infinity War was 2018. Yeah, you read that right. Six years have passed and I haven’t cared since but back then everyone, and I mean everyone, saw that movie.

There are a lot of great original rom coms out there. 40 Year Old Virgin, When Harry Met Sally, and As Good As it Gets just off the top of my head (Oscar winning performance by Jack Nicholson). So there is room, somewhere, on some streaming platform for something more authentic.

Anyway, Nobody Wants This does try to resuscitate a tired, flatlining genre. I will give it that. I think we’ll see more of this sort of thing in the future and if it does represent the forty somethings, then more power to it. For all you executives out there, here’s your next great idea: Two high school sweethearts reconnect while in an old folk’s home.

Your AI generated image for this post, #406