What Is Nobody Wants This’ Sasha-Morgan Endgame?

Justine Lupe and Timothy Simons in Nobody Wants This Season 3 —Emily V.

Aragones—Netflix 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.

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 —Netflix What 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.