What Is Nobody Wants This’ Sasha-Morgan Endgame?
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This article discusses the full third season of Nobody Wants This.
Joanne and Noah are going to make it. Two seasons of so many highs and lows, will-theys and won’t-theys, makeups and breakups had gotten a bit repetitive. So it comes as a relief that Season 3 of the Netflix romantic comedy Nobody Wants This all but guarantees us Kristen Bell’s formerly secular sex podcaster and Adam Brody’s hot rabbi will live happily ever after. With Joanne taking conversion classes, the couple checks off commitment milestones in quick succession: cohabitation, then engagement, and, in the finale, an unplanned exchange of wedding vows after the bride emerges, officially Jewish, from an ocean mikvah. It’s a lovely, duly earned culmination of their interfaith courtship. But it raises the question of where the show can go from here.
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The season’s other main storyline—and sole substantive source of conflict—suggests that creator Erin Foster and her co-showrunners, Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, are staking its future on the relationship between Joanne’s erratic, underachieving sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), and Noah’s eccentric, underachieving brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons). Morgan is fresh off her latest ill-advised romance, an ethically dubious relationship with her ex-therapist (Arian Moayed) that imploded at their engagement party. Sasha is separating from his wife, Jackie Tohn’s Esther. (This is her choice, probably because writers remain sensitive following complaints about the portrayal of Jewish women in the first season and wanted to avoid making hot, blonde Morgan the cause of the split.) And so the best buddies, who’ve been flirting since Season 1, are finally single at the same time. But is it actually a good idea for the show to bring them together, as it briefly does in the second half of this season? I’m of two minds about that.
Justine Lupe and Timothy Simons in Nobody Wants This Season 3 —NetflixWhat the Morgan-Sasha romance has going for it is the unlikely, off-kilter yet undeniable chemistry between Lupe and Simons, which has somehow surpassed even the electric connection of Bell and Brody’s soulmates. (Let’s take a second to appreciate the versatility of Simons, whose other great performance was as Veep’s toxic West Wing staffer Jonah, a character who would never be attractive to anyone.) Morgan is a brash, blunt, benignly self-absorbed icon in her own mind who also, in her darker moments, fears she’ll never get her life together. Awkward, self-deprecating Sasha is genuinely dazzled by her. For a guy who sacrificed his youth to marriage and fatherhood, she represents all the fun he never got to have. And because they’ve never seemed like viable partners for each other, they have a better rapport than either could manage on a date with someone who’s more their type. “Act the way you act with me,” Morgan advises Sasha as he apprehensively delves into the apps. “You should pretend that you’re talking to me every time you talk to anyone, because I bring out the most charming side of you.” She’s conceited, as usual, but she also happens to be right.
The most refreshing aspect of their friendship is their mutual honesty. So it was clever of Foster, Konner, and Kaplan to make that the driver of their storyline this season. When Sasha fills in for Joanne on the sisters’ podcast, his banter with Morgan is, of course, gold. He explains how he has used the Let Them theory to make peace with professional setbacks—then she calls B.S., and goes on to improvise her own Make Them theory, a pure expression of her aggressive approach to getting what she wants. The episode goes viral. Morgan starts to see a future for herself as a self-help author. Sasha is there to encourage her to dig deeper when her early attempts at writing fall flat. And she can be counted on to inform him that his “lucky shirt” is not exactly the chick magnet he imagines it to be. Yet they also frequently build each other up.
Each faces more disappointment as the season goes on. Morgan blows a meeting with a publisher (Poorna Jagannathan, in her third of four high-profile TV role this year. Hey, I’m not mad about it). Sasha tries to force a connection with a woman who gets confused when he mentions the social contract. So they’re both in a tender place when Morgan impulsively invites him to accompany her to New York, where she’s been booked to talk Make Them with Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. The season’s seventh episode is almost entirely devoted to the trip. That it is such a pleasure to, er, watch what happens between them is a testament to the power of great characters to reinvigorate old genre tropes. From the shopping montage where Sasha buys Morgan a dress, Pretty Woman style, to her earnest speech as they walk the High Line, to the false starts that end with them in bed, familiar rom-com beats feel exciting because of the affection we have for these two. Morgan’s epiphany that, “When I was younger, I always fell for people I wanted to be seen with. And now I think I just wanna be with someone who sees me,” could be a Carrie Bradshaw koan. It hits, though, because it’s so true to her character arc.
Timothy Simons and Justine Lupe in Nobody Wants This Season 3 —Katrina Marchinowski—NetflixBut what’s the endgame for Sasha and Morgan? Presumably in order to save some material for Season 4, Nobody Wants This pulls them apart just hours after their hookup. Sasha awakens to a note that says Morgan has hopped on an earlier flight home. There, she crashes out in bed, resigned to the impossibility of a long-term relationship with her future brother-in-law. When it dawns on Joanne that her sister is serious about Sasha, she gives Morgan her blessing. Yet by the time Morgan tracks him down and delivers another big monologue (“I don’t wanna half-ass you”), he’s decided he can’t endure her avoidance so soon after Esther left him. Then he sleeps with Esther, who’s dating a rich guy a full generation her senior (Steven Weber), laying the groundwork for an absolutely disastrous encounter between Joanne’s and Noah’s families at the mikvah.
No end to the season could have been more apt than Joanne and Noah pledging their eternal love while, in a gorgeous beachfront rental just steps away, their parents and siblings tear each other apart. And, again, the scenes Sasha and Morgan share have become some of the most exhilarating of the show. But Nobody Wants This has always been better with isolated situations and screwball dialogue than it is with big-picture plot. With that in mind, I worry it’s written itself into another corner with this relationship. A Season 4 love triangle, with Sasha forced to choose between Esther and Morgan, could only lead back to the same old referendum on Jewish women. If the two Jewish brothers did both end up with the two gentile sisters, that would make its own, somewhat discouraging statement on the latter issue.
Even if you can get past those implications, it’s hard to imagine Morgan and Sasha’s long-term romance arc going anywhere worthwhile, narratively speaking. We’ve already seen the culture clash, the parental pushback, the conversion drama. Are we going to do the same thing all over again, with the same abrasive mother-in-law, brief breakups, and tearful reunions—except with lower stakes because Sasha isn’t a rabbi? I’m not saying nobody wants this. I just need to be convinced.