‘Nobody Wants This’ Producers Reveal What Got Scrapped, Pushed and Rewritten in Season 2

When Nobody Wants This creator Erin Foster was doling out interviews at this time last year, she would talk about how season two would focus on Joanne converting to Judaism.

Then she returned to the writers room, which added new co-showrunners Jenni Konner and Burce Eric Kaplan ahead of season two, and that plan changed dramatically. In fact, as she and Konner detail below, the room engaged in heated debates about how much to slow the breaks on the relationship at the center of the Netflix hit. Foster, for her part, wanted the two leads, Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), to end the season engaged, but — spoiler alert! — that doesn’t happen either. 

“If season one was, ‘Will they, won’t they,’” says Foster, “season two is, ‘How will they?’”

She and Konner sat down as part of THR’s cover shoot to discuss the battles in the writers room, as well as the scene that required a post-wrap revamp and plot points that almost took a very different form. 

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Erin, I’ve heard you say that it was important to you that you give the audience what they want. What does that mean, exactly?

ERIN FOSTER I just think this is not the show for trickery, and I’m not trying to give people an unhappy ending. It’s not intended to be, “What’s going to happen? Will this all fall apart?” I definitely never set out to write a rom-com, but once it was absorbed for people as a rom-com, I [recognized] that the romance and love and togetherness is a really big part of what people enjoy, so I’m not going to make an artistic choice to, like, kill anybody off or find out Noah’s cheating on Joanne.

JENNI KONNER Yet!

FOSTER Jenny wants to kill everyone off. 

KONNER I do. I want Erin to star in the show, so we have to slowly kill people. 

FOSTER Bye, Kristen… (Laughter.)

What was the biggest debate in the writers room?

FOSTER Oh, I know what it was. 

KONNER What? 

FOSTER Morgan [Justine Lupe] and Sasha [Timothy Simons]? 

KONNER Oh, I was going to say… 

FOSTER Them [Joanne and Noah] getting engaged or not? 

KONNER Yeah. 

FOSTER There was a battle about, “Do they get engaged?”

KONNER A long battle.  

FOSTER We survived it. But we weren’t on the same side of it. We were against each other and one of us won…. and it was Jenni. [Editor’s note: Joanne and Noah are not engaged by the end of season two.] But we got through it. 

KONNER And are you excited now? 

FOSTER I’m very happy. I would’ve been happy either way, but I’m very happy, 

KONNER Disagree. (Laughs.)

FOSTER The other battle was what to do with Sasha and Morgan’s will they, won’t they? Is there a romance? What is it? Is it a flirtation? How far does it go? Does it go anywhere? Does it go nowhere? That was something we really stressed about season one and then also season two, trying to figure out how to clean it up properly.

KONNER But we also wanted to really keep it grounded and real, so it wasn’t a thing that just disappeared completely. Which is why right at the beginning [of season two], Esther [Jackie Tohn] drags them into the bedroom and is like, “What’s happening? And we’re putting a stop to it,” which felt very Esther to us.

FOSTER Also, in real life, if you find out your husband has had a flirtation of some kind, that means they were open to it in some way and that’s a vulnerability in your relationship. So we love this idea that it sort of woke Esther up. If you’re a wife who doesn’t necessarily appreciate the husband you have, who’s obsessed with you, and you see that somebody else might want him, it wakes you up and makes you think, “I need to maybe be the best version of myself because my man’s got options.”

Did I hear you had written a version where Sasha and Morgan do, actually, get together?

FOSTER In season one, it was going to go further. And then while we were in the process, it just didn’t feel like it was tracking for us. Sometimes you have an idea in your mind and then once you start writing the scripts and you see everything together with the actors, it starts to feel like we’re not ready for that. Also, we really wanted Morgan and Sasha to be able to hang out in season two, and if they had gone too far or if there was a lot of tension, we wouldn’t be able to do that.

What was the hardest thing to pull off?

KONNER The finale. 

FOSTER Yes! 

KONNER It’s hard. The end of a rom-com is when the lights [typically] go out and you never come back. You make up in your head, “Well, and then they got married and then they did this, and then they did that.” So, to start from there is hard. It’s hard to figure out what a finale is and how to make a happy ending that feels different enough from a really happy ending.

FOSTER Also, season two is a lot of putting on the brakes and still making it fun, which was hard to pull off. How do you slow the process down? Because they’re not getting engaged and she’s not converting. So what are they doing that’s fun? What do you want to watch? You have to zoom in really closely to a relationship and think about, what are the things that are happening in those months? And there actually is a lot that can happen, but we weren’t able to pull the big things. 

Is there anything you still can’t believe you got away with?

KONNER Getting to do this show — or having so much fun getting to do this show. 

FOSTER Yeah. But what’s the spicy answer? 

KONNER Ordering lunch from Erewhon when it’s out of our budget. That’s the relatable answer. (Laughs.) Okay, ​​what about Sasha’s dance sequence? It was really complicated because we didn’t want it to be too jokey and it just turned out that Tim’s got moves. I feel like we got away with that in a way we didn’t anticipate.

FOSTER It was inspired by my husband doing a surprise dance for me at our wedding. It was to “7 Rings” by Ariana Grande and he got his college friends to be on it too. [To Konner] I don’t think you’ve ever seen it, and I don’t think you ever should because you like Simon [Tikhman] so much, I don’t want to ruin it for you. 

KONNER I’ll get the ick. (Laughs.)

FOSTER Yeah, but it was really funny. Also, I’d say that the scene where Esther tells Joanne — spoiler alert — “You’re Jewish,” we shot a month after we wrapped. I had already gone to the Bahamas, I was like, “Guys, I’m done. We did this.” I went to the Bahamas [with my family] 

KONNER See ya, suckers!

FOSTER Literally, I was like, I’m on a boat with my family with my phone turned off. Then all of a sudden I’m getting calls, “You have to rewrite that scene.” It was such an important moment and it wasn’t right. We wanted to get it perfect, so we shot it at a completely different location a month later.

KONNER And Erin and I directed it.

FOSTER We did, because Jenny’s husband, Richard [Shepard] was the director of that episode, but then he was busy. 

KONNER It turned into a much more emotional scene and it tracked where [Esther and Joanne] both were. We always had the idea that Esther would be the one to pivot Joanne, but we didn’t have such a sweet version. 

FOSTER We really loved this idea that my sister-in-law, in real life, and I started out kind of as adversaries and then when we got married, she was like, “You’re my sister now.” It was this really great full-circle moment, so we really loved this idea that Esther becomes this person who brings Joanne into the fold and welcomes her and says, “You really are one of us.”

How was it initially written and shot?

FOSTER Someone was always going to tell her, “You’ve always been Jewish” …

KONNER But we experimented with a lot of people who it could have been. And the one we shot was a version of that scene [with Esther]. It was just not right.

In the finale episode, Esther decides she wants to separate from Sasha. Was that a debate in the writers room? 

KONNER It was definitely a debate because it’s a huge thing that we wanted to be really thoughtful about, but we were aiming at it for a long time.

FOSTER It felt like she was making herself so clear all season. We love this idea that Esther doesn’t want to be Esther at Purim, it was so symbolic. We also all have friends who’ve been married a long time, who get that itch, and you kind of have to figure it out on your own a lot of times. We also love the idea of Sasha showing up as this really good guy and being like, “I’ll get out of your way so that you can figure that out.” So it was always the goal [to have them separate], but there were some people [in the room who] weren’t on board and wanted us to soften it a bit, and make it vague and not final. Personally, I don’t love when I’m watching a TV show and nothing happens. I needed something definitive to happen, and who knows if they’ll stay apart or be back together?

Let’s stay on the finale: What were the conversations and debates like with regard to Noah and Joanne’s arc, which mirrors the season one finale?

KONNER We were going for a flip of the [season one] ending, which was much more Joanne driven. We always knew we were heading towards her figuring out that she was Jewish and that she felt something. There are these little steps along the way where she’s like, “I moved an inch. I’m starting to see it.” But like Esther says, she’s waiting for this huge thing to happen that will do it, but it wound up being all those little things.

FOSTER We were like, “Wait, this is so similar to the ending of season one, are we just repeating ourselves?” But then we thought, “Wait a second, no, it’s going to be the reverse: She’s going to run to him, she’s going to be trying to find him.” This show is meant to be very grounded, and sometimes you have this idea in your mind of a spiritual awakening, like God’s hand reaching through the clouds, and that is a lot to live up to. So we love this idea that it feels unexpected or different than you think it will. In the same way that falling in love can feel different, becoming a parent can feel different, loss can feel different. Sometimes things feel smaller than you think or bigger than you think, and we really liked the idea this would be a surprising, unexpected, I’ve-already-been-here kind of energy.

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Nobody Wants This is now streaming season two on Netflix. Read THR’s cover story on season two, and spoiler postmortems with Justine Lupe and Jackie Tohn.