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There are a lot of things to love about the new Netflix show “Nobody Wants This.” Unfortunately, its depiction of Jewish women isn’t one of them.

When news first broke that a rom-com show was in the works starring Adam Brody as a hot L.A. rabbi who falls for an agnostic, blonde sex/relationships podcaster played by Kristen Bell, we were ecstatic. We are rom-com devotees who have crushed on Seth Cohen and idolized Veronica Mars. We’re podcasters. And we are, respectively, a Jewish woman and a non-Jewish woman who is married to a Jew. If a TV show was crafted in a lab to appeal to our particular set of passions and lived experiences, it would be “Nobody Wants This.” And yet, after cruising through 10 eminently binge-able episodes, we were left simultaneously delighted by Brody and Bell’s crackling chemistry, and uneasy about the show’s rather vicious portrayal of Jewish women.

It’s clear that Erin Foster, who created “Nobody Wants This” based on her own love story with now-husband Simon Tikhman — he’s not a rabbi, but he is Jewish and Foster converted as a result — has a deep connection to and respect for Judaism. Some of the loveliest moments of the show are when Noah and Joanne connect over the meaning that Jewish traditions and culture can bring, like observing Shabbat or “wrestling with what God is or isn’t.” But much less care was put into crafting the Jewish women who surround Noah: his extractive mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), his mean sister-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn), his manipulative ex-girlfriend Rebecca (Emily Arnook), and the gaggle of more peripheral friends (the WAGs) who only seem to talk about Aruba, breastfeeding and their ugly line of chokers.

The central question at the heart of “Nobody Wants This” is whether it is possible for a gentile who has never even heard the word “shalom” (unlikely for a native Angeleno, but I digress) to seriously be with a rabbi who is “all in” on his faith. It’s fertile ground upon which to set romantic obstacles, and it’s easy to root for Bell’s Joanne and Brody’s Noah to bridge their cultural gaps and make out. But the main obstacles we see during season 1 of “Nobody Wants This” come in the form of Jewish women, who are frothing at the mouth to defeat their ostensible mortal enemy: the “shiksa.”

There’s a long history of the “shiksa goddess” — the blonde, gentile woman that acts as irresistible lust object for Jewish men — in American pop culture; first uttered in the 1927 talkie “The Jazz Singer,” chased after in 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid,” and crooned about in 2014’s movie-musical adaptation of “The Last Five Years.” The shiksas of “Nobody Wants This” — Bell’s Joanne and her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) — represent freedom for the men they encounter. They are open and vibrant and funny and successful and flawed in ways that are compelling. They’re so beautiful that their mere presence can stun Jewish men into slack-jawed silence. (Yes, this actually happens. Twice.) It’s easy to see why Noah and his brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) would be drawn to Joanne and Morgan, especially because the women in their own community all seem to be cruel, controlling, irrational, manipulative, overbearing shrews. (A notable exception is the welcoming Rabbi Shira played by Leslie Grossman.)

Bina, Esther, Rebecca and the WAGs are more caricatures than human beings, and in totality perpetuate some of the most noxious stereotypes that exist about Jewish women. In a paper from the Jewish Women’s Archive, scholar Riv-Ellen Prell charts the evolution of the Jewish American Princess and Jewish Mother archetypes, both of which developed out of in-community anxieties which were subsequently filtered through a gendered lens, and which then proliferated in the wider culture.

Of the Jewish Mother, Prell writes:

“Rather than offered out of concern and responsibility, her caretaking served her own needs. She induced guilt. She gave in order to obligate. She loved because she wanted. She suffered in order to be compensated. Rather than sustaining, she destroyed.”

In the same paper, Prell describes the JAP:

“The JAP was portrayed as excessive in wants and desires… The JAP not only wanted, she withheld and denied, rendering her Jewish partner a slave. The culture’s attack on Jewish masculinity, the generalized middle class anxiety about the accessibility of their class to their children, and a consumer culture that narrowed its definitions of attractiveness and desirability conspired to create the JAP. She was so hateful that separating from her—even destroying her—promised liberation by self-erasure.”

Bina is the consummate Jewish Mother. She controls her passive husband, emasculates her sons, and whispers “you’ll never end up with my son” like a threat into Joanne’s ear. Even her dedication to keeping kosher is framed as a tool for familial manipulation rather than a genuine practice. (Joanne witnesses Bina housing prosciutto in the kitchen after excoriating her for bringing pork into the house.) The JAP haunts nearly every other Jewish woman character. Rebecca’s relationship ends because of her “excessive” desires. Esther effectively neuters Sasha. When Joanne is trying to win Esther and her crew of WAGs over, Morgan describes them as “angry women who haven’t had fun in over a decade.”

The Jewish women of “Nobody Wants This” exist only in opposition to Joanne and Morgan, and their paper-thin rendering takes a show that contains so much deliciousness, and turns it all a bit sour. As Esther Zuckerman put it: “You can see why Joanne would want to be married to a Jewish man; you can see why she’s not sure about wanting to become a Jewish woman.”

Journalist Elizabeth Karpen recently asked Foster directly about the genesis of her show’s Jewish women characters on “Nobody Wants This.” Her answer was as illuminating as it is disappointing: “It wasn’t really something I was thinking about too much,” she said.

Unfortunately, it shows. Here’s hoping that the show can course correct for season 2, because everybody wants more Rabbi Noah.

In this week’s subscriber podcast, we get into the joys and failures of “Nobody Wants This,” our eternal crushes on Adam Brody, the show’s shared cultural DNA with “Keeping The Faith,” and more. Hope you enjoy! Xo

“Nobody Wants This’ Review: Kristen Bell and Adam Brody Share Crackling Chemistry in Netflix’s Frustratingly Uneven Rom-Com,” Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter

“Nobody Wants This Mean-Spirited Depiction of Jewish Women in Nobody Wants This,” Esther Zuckerman, TIME

“Jewish Gender Stereotypes in the United States,” Riv-Ellen Prell, Jewish Women’s Archive

“Netflix’s ‘Nobody Wants This’ Brings Up the Age-Old Question: Is the Word ‘Shiksa’ Offensive?,” Lior Zaltzman, Kveller

“‘Nobody Wants This’ Creator Erin Foster Wasn’t Thinking ‘Too Much’ About the Show’s Depiction of Jewish Women,” Elizabeth Karpen, Hey Alma

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After four years and four seasons of television, Emily Cooper has finally been in Paris for an entire year. That’s right: despite seasonal hopscotch, some misleading pregnancy timelines, and a general sense among the show’s audience, characters, and seemingly even writers that our plucky young marketing phenom has been in Paris forever, it’s really only been about 12 months in “Emily in Paris” time. June has happened roughly 14 times, and Christmas once. Gabriel has had his own restaurant for about three months and can’t believe that he wasn’t awarded a Michelin star within weeks of opening (honestly, what’s the point of it all?). Camille was pregnant for between 8 and 27 weeks. People are beginning to ask questions that the show just can’t answer.

But “Emily in Paris” is not, in any meaningful sense, a show about characters or narratives that take place over the course of specific timelines. It’s about outfits, vibes, meet cutes, breakups, and most importantly, pitch meetings in which Emily saves her colleagues’ butts by coming up with the perfect marketing concept on the fly. It’s also, secondarily, about how sexy men look with their hair pushed back and the travails of growing out bangs.

So we simply couldn’t miss season 4 (the “Emily in Rome?” season), nor the opportunity to discuss all the absurd and silly parts of the show, which are piled together in a disconnected, chaotic heap. Its odd charm only serves to make its manifold flaws more infuriating, and yet, of course, we’re hooked. When Emily learns a full sentence of French, we need to be the first to know. On this episode, we discuss all of the above, especially the show’s tendency to shuffle characters on- and offstage as needed without any consideration for their possible emotional journeys during the intervening time. Hope you enjoy! xo

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The minute the beat drops on Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” during the opening scenes for Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” you know you’re gonna be in for a god damn ride. The camera is trained on social media star Taylor Frankie Paul, a mother of two in her late 20s who is all hair extensions and highlights. She’s also the closest thing this series has to a protagonist. A producer asks a question to set the scene: “So tell us how a couple of Mormon moms, getting together, making TikToks, suddenly turns into this crazy swinging sex scandal?”

Mommy don’t know daddy’s getting hot / at the body shop / doing something unholy…

We then see eight beautiful women in matching pale blue coats, holding hands outside of the Mormon Temple in Provo, Utah. These are the women of MomTok, a content collective of Mormon and formerly Mormon moms who make a living for themselves and their families off of social media influencing and content creation.

If you watch “Secret Lives” seeking tea on the “soft swinging” scandal that blew up online in 2022, you’ll be sorely disappointed. We get a quick primer on the fact that Paul and her ex-husband split after engaging in sexual swapping with other couples in their Very Online friend group, but that’s about it. Every other member of the show’s cast vehemently denies being involved, and soon the swinging scandal recedes into the background altogether. We came for a show about a Mormon sex scandal, and got a show about MomTok’s Whitney Leavitt leaving the group chat. And yet… we’re hooked?

The ties that truly bind these women together are less a sense of shared faith — tensions between the more and less pious make up a large chunk of the show’s drama — and more a shared sense of business opportunity. The MomTokers are colleagues, but also friends, and the social dynamics of those blurry relationships play out in fascinating ways.

They’re also all armed with the sense that their choreographed videos might be a way to challenge the deeply-ingrained, patriarchal culture of the religious community they grew up in. Half of the main cast was married and divorced before 30, and most had children when they were still children or young adults themselves. “We were raised to be these housewives for the men, serving their every desire,” Paul says in the premiere. But now… they’re the breadwinners. One woman, 24-year-old Jen Affleck, financially supports her whole family, but still seems to be responsible for doing the vast majority of child care, cleaning her shared home, and coddling her extremely blonde husband’s very fragile ego.

In episode 7, Demi Engemann directly calls out the ill effects of purity culture and and early marriage within the Mormon community: “It’s kind of a theme with our church…and kind of what the problem is,” she says. “Everyone is getting married before their brains even develop.” (Nailed it.)

In this episode, we discuss Paul’s tricky role as the show’s emotional center, saints and sinners, Whitney’s villain edit vs. the real villain (Zac), Demi’s feminist soapbox, Jessi’s company branding, and whether MomTok “can even survive this.” Hope you enjoy! Xo

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Last season of “Selling Sunset” saw Chrishell Stause victorious, the undisputed queen of the Oppenheim Group and, more importantly, of the reality show about it. In season 8, her power can go unstated, but it’s felt; she and her clique run the school (complimentary). But as their stars are rising, and other agents jockey for similar clout, the narratives on the show seem to be driven less and less by real estate affairs and more and more by reality TV production affairs: Who set up what on-camera conversation, and for what purpose? Who said what about whom during an Instagram Live or in a social media conversation about the show? If a show depicts the personal lives of its stars — their marriages, family lives, romances — is everything pertaining to their personal lives fair game, or are some things too sacred or too sensitive to be used as TV fodder?

Coming into this season, we already knew that Chelsea Lazkani, a standout agent whose reality star quality was evident from her first moment on the show, had separated from her husband and filed for divorce this spring. What we didn’t know was that not only would the divorce be addressed in the season, the show apparently had a heavy hand in the end of Chelsea’s marriage to Jeff Lazkani. Her nemesis, fellow agent Bre Tiesi, not only revealed Jeff’s infidelities to her but participated in making them an on-camera storyline, thrusting the rupture of Chelsea’s marriage into the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Chrishell has continued to feud with human ick Nicole, who has spent a season struggling to properly apologize for thanking a fan who wrote a homophobic Instagram comment about Chrishell. Chelsea has been at odds with Mary, the long-time office matriarch, after two major slights: Mary’s claim that Chelsea is a pot-stirrer (she is, and she’s fabulous at it), and Mary telling Jason and Brett that the skort Chelsea wore to a broker’s open was too short to be professional (too short? on this TV show?). A glamorous and competent but bland new agent, Alanna, has joined the cast, where she is almost too adeptly staying out of the conflict swirling around her. And Jason, mourning the loss of his and Mary’s dog Niko, consoles himself in the most relatable possible way: buying a $275k muscle car. Good thing he’s hustling to earn that retail therapy by acquiring pet listings and overpricing them by 50-100 percent.

We discuss all this and more in this episode, plus the constant relatable pratfalls of our stiletto-shod corporate camp goddesses and how long-running workplace reality shows like “Selling Sunset” inevitably morph into shows about celebrities who work together on making a TV show. Hope you enjoy! xo

Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the “Love Is Blind UK” reunion.

The “Love Is Blind UK” reunion show dropped Monday, and we were ready. While we were eager for updates on all of our troubled but mostly lovable duos, there was one from whom we expected to hear nothing noteworthy: Sabrina and Steven Smith, the standard-issue golden couple of the season. In each six of the U.S. seasons of the franchise, the most glowingly edited, rock-solid couple was still married at the time of the reunion, and the Smiths seemed like a textbook case. They seemed to focus in on each other quickly, had a warm and open communication style with each other, and shared a steady confidence in their bond. They both easily said “I do” at the altar. And as the cameras went up on the reunion stage a year later, they were sitting, tight-faced and miserable, on opposite sides of hosts Emma and Matt Willis. From the first moment of the reunion, it was clear there was much to discuss.

The wonderful Gibson Johns, host of the pop culture podcast “Gabbing With Gib,” joined me for a debrief on this shocking reunion, which brought both devastation (we were rooting for you, Steven!!!) and joy. Because many of the surprises in this reunion were delightful: cute updates from our remaining couples, self-possessed and sharp performances from (most of) the ladies, and some extremely frank news about family planning. We broke down each couple’s segment, plus the odd choice to produce the special as if it were a video recording of a local awards gala. Hope you enjoy! xo

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Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the final drop of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes.

Turns out that Claire is a goddamn “Love Is Blind UK” oracle, because *almost* all of her wedding-related predictions from last week came true. She sees the future, and we must give credit where credit is due.

And yet, even if the outcomes were foreseen, the finale episodes of LIB UK’s inaugural season were gripping nonetheless. We got some beautiful love stories and some difficult breakups, and unlike some recent seasons of the American “Love Is Blind,” we weren’t left with a vaguely sick feeling in our stomachs after watching it all go down. (Truly incredible that even when you put together a cast of fairly well-adjusted, thoughtful adults, drama just happens! Guess that’s kind of the thing about breakups and families. They’re hard and interesting and particular, even without much visible prodding on the part of production.)

In this episode, we discuss the stag and hen dos, the most beautiful wedding venue we’ve ever seen on a “Love Is Blind” show, and, of course, who got married and who got jilted at the altar. Thank god we’re getting a reunion soon, because we are absolutely DYING to know what has gone down since filming. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the second batch of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes.

The certified hotties of the inaugural season of “Love Is Blind UK” are officially out of the honeymoon phase. Literally.

Our six (!!!) couples leave Corfu and head back to London in this batch of episodes, where they move into some immaculately-designed riverfront apartments (seriously, we would like to move in!), meet each other’s family and friends, and begin to discover the cracks in their romantic relationships.

But because this cast is slightly older than what we’re used to seeing on the U.S. franchise, the conflicts that come up feel particularly resonant and interesting. Maria and Tom clash over gender roles, Jasmine’s mother grills Bobby within an inch of his life, Cat is alternately cold and a ball of insecurity and Freddie wants a prenup, Benaiah and Nicole have to deal with Sam’s lingering presence, and none of the men can handle themselves when model-esque Sharlotte walks into a bar. (On the other hand, Sabrina and Steven seem practically perfect, and Ollie and Demi are mostly basking in the relief of leaving the pressure-cooker of couples mixers in Corfu.)

In this episode, we talk through the highlights of these FIVE episodes, call out our stand-out friends and enemies, and Claire gives her predictions for who will get married and who will split. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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SPOILER ALERT: THIS PODCAST AND POST CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST BATCH OF “LOVE IS BLIND UK” EPISODES.

They’ve got the pods. They’ve got the golden goblets. They’ve got a Nick-and-Vanessa-Lachey-esque married couple with English accents (Emma and Matt Willis, to be specific). And they’ve got a host of singles from across the U.K., mostly in their late twenties to thirties, who are ready to bare their hearts through a luminous opaque glass wall in hopes of finding a spouse. “Love Is Blind UK” is here, and it’s got all the romance and drama we expect from the series with an extra dash of winning British slang and cultural references.

The first batch of episodes introduced us to a batch of (mostly Instagram-hot) men and women who have felt stymied by their dating options and are ready to take a big swing to find love. And while recent seasons of “Love Is Blind” have either faltered or intentionally deviated from the usual formula, “Love Is Blind UK” seems to be hitting its marks neatly: Six couples get engaged, and five of them head to a luxurious honeymoon in Corfu, Greece. There’s a lovable golden couple who seem to be going from strength to strength, and some likable couples to root for, but more than one of the remaining pairs is showing a few cracks that might lead to trouble down the line. There’s an Unlikable Male Lead, a bevy of women we’d like to get margaritas with, and a couple love triangles that clearly have more juice in them even after the proposals.

In this episode, we discuss the vibes of the UK edition of “Love Is Blind” and of the couples emerging this season, we discuss the omnipresence of absent fathers and weight loss in the cast’s backstories, we speculate about which couples will founder on the rocks (and why), and we pick our top enemy and friend from the first batch of episodes. Hope you enjoy! xo

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It feels like we’ve been preparing for this one for years. We’ve talked about nap dresses and mom bodies. We’ve talked about the fear of losing your selfhood in motherhood. We’ve talked about egg-freezing and IVF. We’ve talked about the way that parenthood and non-parenthood are treated on both the left and the right. And now it’s time for all of these threads to merge together into a mega-discourse, thanks to Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance.

A preternaturally beautiful, homesteading momfluencer and an alt-right weirdo with the face of a socially-awkward 14-year-old (and an unsettling obsession with punishing childfree women) may seem like odd cultural bedfellows. But, as Claire put it, if Ballerina Farm is the trad honey trap who makes the pro-natalist lifestyle look romantic and joyful, JD Vance is the trad boot heel of the state who aspires to grind down upon all the childfree women in America until they’re barefoot and pregnant in their egg aprons.

For anyone who hasn’t been rapturously following the debate about Ballerina Farm and/or the pile-up of evidence that JD Vance is disturbingly preoccupied with policing the emptiness of America’s wombs, let’s back up and give some context. On July 20, The Times of London published a sharp profile of Hannah Neeleman, the woman behind the Ballerina Farm mega-brand, and her husband, JetBlue scion Daniel Neeleman. The piece included some observations about the couple’s relationship — like when Daniel drops the fact, seemingly unprompted, that his wife sometimes collapses into bed for a week from exhaustion — that led some readers to wonder if Hannah was more a victim of the culture she’s steeped in than a villainous propagandist with complete agency. (The reality is probably a bit of both.)

Around the same time, reporters were digging into Vance’s past interviews — something that tends to happen when you’re selected as the Vice Presidential candidate to a man you once thought might be “America’s Hitler.” And these reporters began to notice a theme: JD Vance fucking hates people who don’t have children, especially women. In 2021, he told Tucker Carlson that the country was being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they have made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Other clips of him making similar comments have since re-emerged, including one interview where he says not having children makes people “more sociopathic and our whole country a little less mentally stable,” and another where he calls childfree people (specifically millennial journalists without kids!) “sad, lonely [and] pathetic,” and urges people to “go to war” against their “ideology.” He has even put these views into several deranged policy ideas: (1) Instituting a tax penalty for people without kids, and (2) giving extra votes to parents. In the wake of mass criticism, Vance has essentially doubled down, grasping at straws to claim that the Democrats are an “anti-family” political party.

And this is where the Ballerina Farm brand and Vance’s ideology converge: a future where mothers are hollowly “exalted” by men, without being offered concrete support for the very real labor that mothering entails; a future where birth control and abortion care and no-fault divorce are societal ills; a future where everything is beautiful and white on Instagram and ugly underneath the surface.

In this episode, we discuss our reactions to Ballerina Farm and the “childless cat ladies” trope, and wonder how we can harness the anger we feel and channel it productively in this political moment. Hope you enjoy! Xo

• “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children),” Megan Agnew, Times of London

• “My day with the trad wife queen and what it taught me,” Megan Agnew, Times of London

• “Let Ballerina Farm Live,” Stephanie McNeal, Glamour

• “JD Vance went viral for ‘cat lady’ comments. The centuries-old trope has a long tail,” Rachel Treisman, NPR

• “Vance argued for higher tax rate on childless Americans in 2021 interview,” Will Steakin and Katherine Faulders, ABC News

• “Trump Is ‘Weird,’ Vance Is ‘Creepy.’ Finally, the Democrats Start Name-Calling,” Jessica Bennett, NYTimes

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“Love Island USA” did its big one this season. (Like so much of “Love Island” lingo… if you know you know. Soul Ties is craaaaaazy!)

I was a self-enforced “Love Island” ascetic. I avoided the show at all costs, didn’t want to understand how it worked, and didn’t even want to be tempted to watch it. I mean, there are just SO MANY EPISODES each season! How could I possibly keep up? Turns out… I can. I followed Ariana Madix straight from the bowels of “Vanderpump Rules” over to Peacock and into a new reality cult.

And apparently I wasn’t the only one, because this season absolutely blew up. The ratings doubled between seasons 5 and 6, it became one of the most-streamed shows of the summer, and the memes are all over Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. (Rob’s overalls! Kaylor’s “fuuuuuuuckahhh Aaron”! Basically everything that Leah says! PPG!)

I was curious what was behind the show becoming such a mainstream phenomenon now, six seasons in. So I brought on “Love Island” aficianado and the author of the superb Nightcap newsletter, Laura Bassett to school me on the show’s history, and analyze Leah and Rob’s star power, Serena and Kordell’s rom-com arc, and what made season 6 so special. Hope you enjoy!

Note: We recorded this episode last Wednesday, so some of the post-show updates we discuss may have evolved!

If you’ve also joined the Love Island cult, here’s some more media to consume:

• “Going Deeper With Kaylor Martin,” The Viall Files

• “Love Island’s Perfect Storm,” Brian Moylan for Vulture

• Call Her Daddy tell-all episodes with Rob Rausch and Leah Kateb

• “How to Make Two Reality Stars Fall in Love? Cue a Tropical Beach,” Calum Marsh for NYTimes

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