Turns Out Somebody Wants This Very Much

Monday is about movies, and sometimes TV. Today, Netflix’s struggle to make decent half-hour sitcoms — and a new contender for their best effort so far.

DALL-E

Netflix is the shitty boyfriend of streaming services. You hear a whole lot about what’s painful about Netflix, about what it doesn’t have, and what it doesn’t do, but not many people ever actually break up with it. They might ‘go on a break’ but they return. They just tell their ‘shitty boyfriend stories’ about it. While handing over their money still. And paying also with their time.

It’s the wallpaper that sits behind phone addictions — or is actively part of the addiction for some watching only ever on the smallest of ‘small screens’.

My ‘shitty boyfriend story’ with Netflix is that the platform cannot do comedy. Particularly the old half-hour comedy series; perhaps a seperate conversation is how the old-fashioned, terrestrial-TV half-hour comedy episode (22 minutes of tight jokes and wholesome storyline, generally, with a pay-off) has been lost in the streaming age.

We line up for drama. We put all of our morals to the side to watch true-crime docos and dramatisations. Turns out we really do like it darker.

But where is the light?

Netflix had a huge problem creating original content in that shape, specifically the sub-30 minute category. They threw their weight behind the standup-comedy specials (again, seperate topic). That dried up for a while with COVID, it’s back — but most of the comedians that really draw, in that formate, are right-wing clowns (or have audiences that are right-wing clowns) like Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais.

They succeeded with some things that changed the shape of the 30-minute comedy show - like Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, which played with both the format and timing, its single episodes appearing more like slightly-connected short films, taking their cue somewhat from Louis CK’s genre-buster of a series, Louie. But Master of None was nearly a decade ago.

Where is the funny, short series with the vaguely relatable characters, and the smart writing, and the strong core cast with some fun recurring performers in the smaller roles?

Shitty boyfriend’s best efforts there have been licensing Friends and Seinfeld, paying the money down to land those perpetual cash-cows for yet another form of syndication. That’s loss-leader stuff. You go fill up on other things from the menu because they’re giving you a ‘door-buster’ of $1 giant bottles of coke for your weekend party.

Anyway, that’ll do for a long intro — my metaphors are twisting into each other, and shitty boyfriend is on the couch with his nachos and a mega sippy cup of coke watching Chandler Bing doing his annoying thing, which we can arguably no longer criticise, because, R.I.P. Matthew Perry.

"Could it 'BE' any more tragic?" - A Eulogy (of sorts) for Matthew Perry aka Chandler Bing

The point of today’s newsletter was really — actually — to say that, seemingly out of nowhere, Netflix dropped a new series that I really kinda dug.

Over the weekend I binged Nobody Wants This. Misleading name, turns out a lot of people wanted this. It’s a 10-episode comedy series of around 26-minutes apiece. The simple-enough premise is that Joanne (Kristen Bell) has a meet-cute with Noah (Adam Brody) and then finds out he’s a rabbi. She’s agnostic. They connect — so it’s too late, and that’ll obviously be a problem down the track when we hear more from the extended families.

Joanne hosts a sex/dating podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe), and so that’s obviously part of the issue going forward. And to round out the quartet of main cast we have Noah’s brother and bestie Sasha (Timothy Simons).

Now, I’d never seen The O.C., nor Veronica Mars — the shows that really introduced Brody and Bell. I knew them both from a few other things, but had no real feelings about them either way really, though I did love Bell in The Good Place — one of the last of the ‘proper’ old school comedy series’ I’ve been talking about.

I often think for such a vehicle to work it’s more about the second tier characters, the wingman and -woman in this case, so that’s Simons (Sasha) and Lupe (Morgan). Fortunately, both are fantastic. Timothy Simons is best known (to me anyway) as the brilliantly irritating Jonah from Veep. And Lupe is one of the best, most versatile actors on TV currently, being differently amazing as Willa in Succession, and Holly in Mr. Mercedes — and now different again as Morgan. There is strong chemistry between them, and really decent chemistry between Brody and Bell also.

There are some great players in the guest/supporting/recurring roles too, particularly mobster-staple Paul Ben-Victor as one of the fathers, and Jackie Tohn as Sasha’s wife. The legendary writer and actor Stephen Tobolowsky (“Ned? Ned Ryerson!” from Groundhog Day) is in there too as Noah’s boss, the head rabbi. Perfect.

Look, I’m not saying this is genius-level comedy. It’s also too early to tell, by the way. But having hoovered the whole series in one night it not only did for me exactly what Netflix wanted me to do with it, it did not bubble back up in an awkward or uncomfortable way. It has legs for another season or two. It has jokes. It has charm. And it has a quirky, different topic hiding there somewhere in and around the rom-com — interfaith relationships. There’s something charming and old-school about this, and yet it feels modern and progressive enough. Some cliches, and obvious tropes? Absolutely, Of course. This is not meta-comedy, this is not trying to break molds, as much as re-establish them. So it has some strong writing around the tropes and cliches — and that’s the difference.

I was so pleasantly surprised by Nobody Wants This. And I can’t remember a time when Netflix, or really any of the main streamers (our new main ‘networks’) got it right in this way for this format. Did you watch it? Or is it on your list? And if not, what’s your pick for a recent Netflix half-hour or 20-minute comedy and why?