When it was originally on: 2024-present

Original network: Netflix

Where you can stream it now: Netflix

Had I seen it before: I’ve seen all of Season 1, none of Season 2.

What IMDb says: An agnostic sex podcaster and a newly single rabbi fall in love; discovering if their relationship can survive their wildly different lives and meddling families.

Why I picked it: I love contrasting streaming originals with more traditional tv, and there’s actually fewer Big Hit Netflix originals in recent years than you’d think. This is one that actually had both mainstream success and critical acclaim. Ergo, it was great addition to the list.

What I liked: I like that most of our time with Noah and Joanne together is in relatively mundane moments. I’ve been watching some less-great romance TV of late and so many shows each other. Some shows make it all about the big dramatic declarations of love or the hot sex scenes or the coy looks from across the room. They undervalue the importance of the two leads just having a normal, mildly flirty interaction with each other while they open a bottle of wine.

I also like how the pilot invests time in establishing the sibling dynamic with Joanne and Morgan, and to a lesser extent, Noah and his brother whose name I forget, but it’s the dude from Veep. It’s not a very long pilot, so it’s not easy to make these sibling relationships feel real and lived in while also still getting us invested in the romantic relationship.

What I didn’t like: The Jewish women all feel like stereotypes of what a gentile thinks a “Jewish Mom” would be. I totally forgot how insane the scene of Noah breaking up with his partner, Rebecca, is. Apparently she found an engagement ring he bought, just started wearing it despite not being proposed to, and doesn’t understand why this is upsetting to Noah, so Noah ends it. I know the show deliberately wrote this to be wtf behavior from Rebecca, but it’s such a high level of wtf behavior met with a relatively calm “I don’t think we should be together anymore” from Noah that it doesn’t quite work. It’s hard to believe that Noah could end a relationship with a woman he literally bought an engagement ring for and be so unfazed by it. I’m also not really sure that the Noah/Joanna arc benefits at all from him being fresh out of a serious relationship vs. just another single person. If it does that’s certainly not evident in the pilot.

In addition, when Joanne comes to the temple at the end, we see multiple older Jewish ladies try to introduce their daughters and nieces to the hot rabbi. All that so that we can see Noah push them all aside, go to Joanne, and then the Jewish ladies (including Noah’s mom) can steam in their anger that he’d consider a shiksa. It’s just a bit much, and the rabbi-dating-an-athiest conflict was already clear enough without it.

I also wish it relied a bit less on the podcast conceit to explain our characters. Do we really need Morgan literally saying out loud on the podcast that Joanne self-sabotages and is never attracted to dudes who actually like her, all within the first five minutes or so of the pilot? Let me get to know Joanne and learn about her self-sabotaging tendencies myself.

Do I want to watch Ep. 2?: Well… I already did. At the end of the day, it’s just fun to watch Kristen Bell and Adrian Brody flirt with each other. That’s enough to power the show.