What to expect from Nobody Wants This season 3: Joanne's conversion is back on the table — and another couple is heading for a split
The show spent two seasons asking whether the shiksa converts. Season 3 finally has to answer in class, with homework.
Nobody Wants This returns to Netflix on October 22 with all 10 episodes at once, and this time Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody) arrive with actual decisions made. The season 2 finale ended their annual almost-breakup with Joanne resolving to convert to Judaism — for herself, pointedly, not for the rabbi — and season 3 picks up with the two moving in together while she starts the formal conversion process.
The conversion has been the show's load-bearing wall since season 1, when Noah told Joanne he "can't have both" — her and the head rabbi job. Two seasons of circling later, she's enrolling in classes, and even Bell has been openly rooting for the comedy of it.
"Joanne attempting to study to take the Jewish SATs for conversion."
— Kristen Bell, to USA Today, on what she wanted from season 3
The conversion curriculum
Netflix built an actual classroom around the storyline. Sarah Silverman joins as Rabbi Eden, Joanne's conversion-class teacher, and Tudum introduces a new character named Sebastien as Joanne's nemesis in that same class — because of course Joanne would turn religious study into a competition. Creator Erin Foster puts herself on screen too, playing Nicole, described as a chaotic, terminally single mess — essentially the Joanne who never met a rabbi.
There's precedent inside the family: Joanne's mother Lynn beat her to it, converting in season 2 while her daughter stalled. The episode list suggests where all this studying lands — the finale is titled "I Jew."
The other split
Morgan (Justine Lupe) detonated her engagement to Dr. Andy at her own party in the season 2 finale. She won't be the last: season 3 opens with Esther and Sasha's marriage coming apart, after Esther asked for a separation in that same finale — her idea, not his.
"Esther starts out so excited about the possibilities."
— Erin Foster, to Netflix's Tudum, on the separated Roklovs
Sasha, per co-showrunner Bruce Eric Kaplan, is the opposite of excited — and newly single next to Morgan, the woman he's been not-flirting with since the pilot. Kaplan has teased that their "just friends" arrangement now carries something unspoken neither will name. The season surrounds them with dating-pool collateral: Stephanie Koenig plays a relentlessly upbeat date of Sasha's, and Sadie Sandler turns up as a psychic reading Morgan's future.
What the season is working with:
- The numbers: season 2 pulled 18 million views in its first 11 days; Netflix renewed the show on November 4, less than two weeks after the drop.
- The team: Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan co-run the show, with Foster as creator.
- The format: 10 episodes, all on October 22, filmed in Los Angeles since late March.
- The guests: Silverman, Andrew Rannells, Keyla Monterroso Mejia and Foster herself, among others.
The series premise was a couple who shouldn't work. Three seasons in, the bigger question is whether the show works once they obviously do.
That's the real test of season 3: with Joanne and Noah functional and cohabiting, the engine moves to the people around them — a separated couple, a non-couple, and a conversion class with a grade at the end.
Previously we wrote: Hollywood has no roles for Amy Adams and Jessica Chastain at 50 — Reddit blames their agents