Nobody Wants This Season 3 Delivers The Year's Best Rom-Com In Episode 7 — Then Gets Cold Feet

Warning: The following commentary discusses "Nobody Wants This" Season 3 in its entirety, with spoilers aplenty. If you haven't started it yet, or haven't completed your binge, bookmark this article and circle back at a later time.

Netflix's "Nobody Wants This" caught a lot of flak for its second season, namely from viewers who felt that "hot rabbi" Noah (Adam Brody) and "shiksa" Joanne (Kristen Bell) were spinning their wheels by tabling the elephant in the room: Joanne still wasn't sure if she wanted to convert to Judaism. It was the very issue that nearly broke them up in Season 1, and ultimately led to their brief breakup toward the end of Season 2, until Joanne had what Bell described as a "lightbulb moment" and recognized that she was already embracing her life through a new lens.

Personally, though, I found Season 2 superior to Season 1. Yes, the elephant in the room was practically trumpeting, but Noah and Joanne were also maturing as a couple, moving past the honeymoon phase and examining what they each needed out of their relationship. They were establishing boundaries and opening up about the parts of themselves and their pasts that had defined them, for better and for worse. Noah's decision to leave his synagogue, and his subsequent struggle to make peace with his new, more lax house of worship, demonstrated what he was willing to sacrifice to be with Joanne. It was a test of his love, and of whether he could put his career second.

More than anything, Season 2 worked because "Nobody Wants This" blossomed into a true ensemble comedy, devoting just as much attention to Sasha (Timothy Simons) and Esther's (Jackie Tohn) attempts to salvage their marriage after the passion had fizzled and they'd grown apart. That growing distance had played no small part in Noah's brother developing a close-knit friendship (some might even call it an emotional affair) with Joanne's sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), dating back to Season 1. By the Season 2 finale, Esther had come to realize that she wanted more out of life than her marriage could offer, prompting her decision to separate from Sasha.

And Lupe as Morgan was easily Season 2's MVP, even if some viewers struggled with her relationship with Dr. Andy — a pairing that, it's worth pointing out, was supposed to make us uncomfortable.

Heading into Season 3, Noah and Joanne were on much more solid footing. Based on the marketing, it was reasonable to assume that the season would focus on our central couple adjusting to cohabitation. As revealed in Episode 4, however, the show had been deceptively planting the seeds for Noah to surprise Joanne with a marriage proposal.

By season's end, Joanne, who'd been attending Judaism classes, had proceeded with her mikveh, and she and Noah decided, then and there on the beach, to forget about their bickering families, who'd only made wedding planning more difficult. Instead, they had Rabbi Eden (Sarah Silverman) marry them on the spot. Honestly, it would have been a perfect ending for this romantic comedy.

Except "Nobody Wants This" went and embraced an even more compelling love story this season — one it had been toying with from the jump, and was only now fully able to explore with Morgan having broken off her engagement to Dr. Andy, and Sasha separated from Esther. 

Even once they were living together under Lynn's roof, Morgan and Sasha were denying what was obvious — and what Lynn pushed Sasha toward seeing: He and Morgan are really good for each other. She encourages him to step outside his comfort zone; he gives her the stability she needs when her impulsive nature threatens to get the best of her.

By the time Sasha wrapped a sunburnt Morgan up like a burrito at Noah and Joanne's impromptu pool party, I was all in. Sure, the writers seemed to be racing toward the finish line here, but the chemistry was undeniable. Any previous notion I might've had that the show would be better off embracing this dynamite duo as one of TV's rare platonic friendships between an adult man and woman went out the window. Then Morgan went and invited Sasha to New York for her taping of "Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen" — not exactly the sort of invitation you extend to a platonic male friend while his arms are wrapped around you.

Katrina Marchinowski/Netflix

That brings us to Episode 7 — which, as the headline suggests, is among the most romantic episodes of television I've seen in ages. Thanks to "The Pitt" star Taylor Dearden (my TV universes colliding!), whose hotel clerk Molly embraces Morgan's "make them" mantra and makes her boss upgrade their room, Morgan and Sasha wind up in a suite with just one bed, forcing them to confront the obvious sexual tension between them. Perhaps if this storyline had been relegated to the B-story, that would have been the crux of what they dealt with throughout the episode. Given the A-story, however, that awkwardness is tabled for the time being.

Morgan has a television appearance to prepare for — and thanks to Lisa Rinna, she's forced at the last minute to find a new outfit for her big break. Thus begins the cliché-yet-winning story of Sasha taking the reins and insisting they run all over town to find Morgan the perfect dress, culminating in Morgan emerging from a dressing room in a stunning sage-green number, and Sasha, in that moment, falling even deeper in love with Joanne's sister.

Better still is their night out on the town — an impromptu date that includes a stroll along the High Line and a meaningful conversation about how Morgan changed during her failed marriage. It's something the show has never really delved into (we've never even met her ex-husband), which makes this particular admission, and Morgan's vulnerability, all the more effective. The fact that she and Sasha almost kiss, before both acknowledge that there's no turning back if they embrace their feelings for each other, is equally effective.

It's all that mounting tension that makes the scene that follows even richer, as Morgan keeps finding reasons to bring Sasha more linens for his makeshift bed on the couch. She makes multiple trips back and forth across the long hotel suite, until finally, she gets up and opens her bedroom door one last time, only to find Sasha standing on the other side. At long last, the two give in to their desires — and I'm on my couch, applauding my television. Which makes what the rest of the season delivers incredibly frustrating.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think Morgan and Sasha getting together should be easy. There's the fact that their siblings are getting married. The fact that Sasha isn't technically divorced. And the fact that the woman he's divorcing suspected something was going on between them back in Season 1 — and, obviously, she wasn't entirely wrong.

Lupe gives a transcendent performance in Episode 8. After Morgan catches an earlier flight back to Los Angeles, leaving Sasha to wake up and find a note the morning after they have sex, an uncomfortable conversation with Joanne helps crystallize for Morgan what we all already know: She's in love with Sasha. When she confronts him later that day and tells him that she's done running — that she wants to pursue something real — her pleading, and his reluctance, make all the sense in the world. He just had his heart broken, and he doesn't want to risk having it broken again. (And, again, he's not even divorced yet!)

Everything that follows in Episodes 9 and 10, however, points to a recurring problem with "Nobody Wants This": The way these people deal with their feelings doesn't feel age-appropriate. It's obvious, though never explicitly established, that these late-30- and 40-something actors are supposed to be playing characters younger than they actually are. Yet they're confronting (or, more often, avoiding) their issues in ways that feel better suited to characters much younger than they're supposed to be.

Take, for instance, Morgan declaring that she won't attend any of Joanne and Noah's upcoming milestones (the mikveh, their wedding) because she refuses to be in the same room as Sasha. (To repeat: This grown adult is suggesting she'd skip her own sister's wedding to avoid a mess of her own making.) Then there's Sasha, who backslides with Esther, only for both their hookup and what went down in New York with Morgan to come spilling out at the beach house, just moments before Joanne's mikveh.

It's not that any of this is unrealistic; it just comes across as a pile-on for the sake of manufacturing tension and keeping just enough of the narrative unresolved for a potential Season 4.

But here's where the problem truly lies: After fast-tracking Morgan and Sasha's romance this season, the show goes and chickens out. Rom-com enthusiasts would have happily accepted the two reaching their happily ever after by Episode 10, following their whirlwind trip out east. In fact, with Esther settling nicely into her new relationship with Steven Weber's Julian, I suspected Sasha paying for Morgan's dress in Episode 7 was going to come back to bite him in the tuchus — that Esther would see the credit card charge and confront him about it. Perhaps he'd finally come clean, and she'd give him her blessing to move on. Play against audience expectations for Esther — who initiated the separation and was already committed to someone else — and make her the catalyst for their union.

Had that happened, alongside where Noah and Joanne wind up by season's end, it would have felt like a natural stopping point for "Nobody Wants This" — the perfect cap on a three-season run.

Katrina Marchinowski/Netflix

I'll gladly watch a fourth season should Netflix opt to renew. Despite my qualms, it's still one of my favorite shows — and perhaps more importantly, one of the most reliably funny comedies on TV. Still, I don't know that the show would have needed another season had it not left the tension between Morgan and Sasha unresolved.

With so little promotion being done for Season 3 (unlike Seasons 1 and 2, Netflix did not host a traditional press junket), and Lupe attached to a new comedy at Prime Video, I fear this might be all we get. (I've reached out to Netflix for comment about the show's future.) And there was an easy enough way to put a bow on it.