“Nobody Wants This” with Erin Foster
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Loosely inspired by Writer-Producer Erin Foster’s real-life experience of meeting her menschy husband.
In Erin Foster’s romantic comedy series, “Nobody Wants This,” a sexy rabbi and an edgy, agnostic sex-and-relationships podcaster walk into a dinner party. The podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) had heard that a rabbi was at the soiree. But she doesn’t initially realize he’s the cute guy Noah (Adam Brody, who played Jewish heartthrob Seth Cohen from “The O.C.”) she’s been flirting with over glasses of wine. Finally, he cops to being the clergyman.
“You’re a real-life rabbi?” she asks him. “It’s hot, right?” he quips.
Apparently, Joanne thinks so, because later she shows up, unannounced, as Noah is giving a sermon at his synagogue. Afterward, someone asks Noah’s protective Russian immigrant mother, Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), who the newcomer is. “A shiksa,” she says, narrowing her eyes.
The 10-episode series may well become the most Jewish show on TV when it premieres Sept. 26 on Netflix. Noah paraphrases the Talmud, condemns “lashon hara” (harmful gossip) and tells parables. At the party, he asks the host if Joanne “is Jewish at all?” The friend responds that there isn’t a Jewish bone in her body. Even so, the couple embarks on a courtship, which is threatened by sabotaging relatives. Along the way, the question is not only whether Joanne and Noah can work things out, but: “Will Joanne convert?”
“Nobody Wants This” is loosely inspired by Foster’s real-life experience of meeting her menschy now-husband, Simon Tikhman, CEO and co-founder of The Core Entertainment and who early in their relationship asked if she would ever consider becoming a Jew-by-choice.
Unlike the character of Joanne, however, Foster said she was never reluctant about converting. “When I first met Simon, he told me that it would be important to him to marry someone who is Jewish. And so, it was sort of always understood that that would be the course we would go on together,” said Foster, who lives in Los Angeles with Tikhman and their baby daughter Noa.
And for Tikhman’s Russian Jewish family, who fled anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s, “It was definitely important that I would convert…. But I was never hesitant, so there was never any difficulty there. I felt an enormous amount of appreciation on their part that I would be willing to convert. And my family was supportive. My mom jokes that she wants to convert, too.
“I really didn’t grow up religious at all,” she said. “I technically grew up Christian — I don’t even know what sect of Christianity. I had a mom who had grown up in the Bible Belt in Texas in the 1950s, and she really hated her relationship with religion. So, she sort of raised us a bit agnostic, not really believing. And yes, I had people in my life who were Christians and used it in a way I didn’t love. So, I always had, like, a negative connotation with organized religion.”
During a recent Zoom interview, Foster, 42, was witty and down-to-earth. She said she and her husband will host their family Rosh Hashanah gathering, which will take place a week after “Nobody Likes This” premieres on Netflix.
“I feel really proud and honored to be Jewish — and honored to be Jewish right now,” she said. “And I hope that people appreciate me trying to bring Jewish stories to the mainstream.”
Foster grew up in a family immersed in the entertainment industry. Her father, David Foster, is a multi-Grammy-winning music producer, film composer and music executive. Her mother, Rebecca Dyer, is a former model. “Being raised in L.A. in an industry family is just an unconventional way to grow up,” Erin Foster said.
Later, she found, dating in Hollywood proved difficult. “L.A. specifically has, I think, a very vanity-obsessed culture,” Foster said. “It’s very career-obsessed, it’s very beauty-obsessed, it’s very youth-obsessed. And that’s going to make it hard to date because people always think there’s a better option around the corner. I think people date people to validate their own worth in this town. You want someone who’s going to impress somebody else next to you. I think there’s not a lot of focus put on the longevity of relationships. So, I don’t know if there’s a lot of support for staying in something and pushing through the hard stuff.”
Foster told Netflix’s Website Tudum that before she met Tikhman, she thought the funniest thing about love is when it goes wrong. “I was always a very cynical writer because I was a very cynical person, and that’s where my comedy came from and where my comedic perspective comes from — failing at dating and failing at relationships and things blowing up and finding the humor in it.”
She told JLiving, “My sense of humor was always drawn from sarcasm in situations, and I was always sort of writing failed love stories or about a girl who can’t make it work or is self-sabotaging everything. That was very true-to-life for me in so many ways for so long, and that’s really where I shined as a writer. It’s where I got all my material from and where I got all my jobs from. That was my voice.”
That voice is evident in “Barely Famous,” the web-based TV series Foster created and starred in with her sister, Sara Foster, in 2015. The series skewers not only dating in L.A. but also reality TV and Hollywood affectations.
“But when I met Simon … and he’s this very positive, happy, content, loving, loveable person, and I was happy and content in this healthy relationship, I just didn’t really know what to make fun of,” she said. “So, I got stuck and I didn’t write for … the first three years of our relationship. I guess I just thought I was losing my mojo. And then when I realized that (“Nobody Wants This”) was what I was going to write, I still really struggled to figure out what the comedic angle was going to be…. And then I realized it’s not about how things can go wrong. There’s still a lot of comedy in things going right, and that kind of opened me up to a whole new perspective of things that can be funny.”
Foster met her husband — whose parents had fled the former Soviet Union due to anti-Semitism in the 1970s — at a small, private gym where both trained in 2018. “I made the first move,” she said.
Foster eventually began conversion classes with Rabbi Beau Shapiro through Wilshire Boulevard Temple.
She and Tikhman were married by Rabbi Shapiro in Nashville on New Year’s Eve in 2019.
When Foster began writing “Nobody Wants This,” the original title of the show was “Shiksa.” She said Tikhman’s family never called her by that term, which she says has been deemed a “derogatory word invented to be disparaging to a woman.” But, she opined, “I do think that in this day and age, it’s sort of just referring to a blonde girl who might be trying to flirt with your son or steal your man.
“On the show, it is used in a fun way and it’s more lighthearted,” she continued. “My mother-in-law in real life is the person who said that she had been told this phrase when she was younger: ‘Shiksas are for practice,’ which would be disrespectful to that person and their religion. But of course, when she told me that, I said, “‘That would be a good line for the show.’”
The “Shiksa” title eventually fell by the wayside. “I think that’s a hard word for many people to say, and a lot of people don’t know what it means,” Foster said. “And so, we wanted something that felt more commercial and more accessible. We played around with a lot of different names, and in the end, we wanted something that felt modern and fun, that made it clear it’s a rom-com but didn’t feel too sweet and cutesy. We wanted something that felt a little edgier, and ‘Nobody Wants This’ is what won…. It’s sort of tongue-in-cheek — it’s got a little sarcasm. Noah and Joanne really want to be together, but the people around them don’t want them to be. So that’s what the title is referring to.”
It’s also “definitely low-hanging fruit for critics who don’t like the show and want to pan it,” she added with a laugh. “It’ll be very easy for them. It’s handing it to them on a platter.”
The conversation turned to what Foster brought of herself to the character of Joanne. “This is someone who presents herself as being interested in shock value and making bold, blanket statements like, ‘I don’t believe in God,’” she said. “But underneath that, she’s really wanting to believe in something.
“When I was dating, and I was still in my cynical era, I didn’t enjoy being on dates with other people who were cynical. I wanted people who believed in marriage and to date someone who believed in staying together and that love would work out, and I wanted someone to really teach me how to do that…. I think that’s how Joanne feels. She tries to make these bold statements as a self-protecting mechanism, but the truth is she really wants to be in love with someone who’s a good person.”
Online, some people have complained that the character of the rabbi’s mother, Bina, is a stereotypical Jewish mother. “It’s interesting,” Foster said. “I made a Jewish rom-com, which doesn’t really happen very often. It’s a sweet, beautiful Jewish love story that’s meant to highlight Jewish characters who are true-to-life. And I think that even though the show might have a mother-in-law who doesn’t want her son to marry a non-Jew, and that might feel like a stereotype, I also have a really handsome Jewish rabbi leading the show. And he’s not neurotic or nebbishy, which you see so often.”
“Nobody Wants This” premieres Sept. 26 on Netflix.
