The veteran television writer Jenni Konner knows how to tune out bad press. After all, she spent six seasons as the co-showrunner of HBO’s Girls, the lightning-rod series that was bashed as frequently as it was hailed for its brilliance. “Having been on Girls for so many years, we’re pretty hardened to the world’s criticism in a lot of ways,” she says.
But even if she’s more or less inured to critiques, that doesn’t mean Konner hasn’t heard them, which makes our conversation over Zoom one October morning an unusual one. Konner knows that I had some harsh words for the first season of Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, her latest project, which drops its second season on Oct. 23.
Konner didn’t work on the episodes where I detected a mean-spirited depiction of Jewish women. (The precise words I used, in a piece written for this magazine about their portrayal in the show’s first season, were “nags, harpies, and the ultimate villains of this story.”) She took on showrunning duties alongside her fellow Girls alum, Bruce Eric Kaplan, following Season 1. The series, loosely based on creator Erin Foster’s real-life romance with her husband, is a rom-com about the relationship between shiksa podcaster and Foster stand-in Joanne (Kristen Bell) and her rabbi boyfriend Noah (Adam Brody).
Now, Konner is eager to know whether I’ve changed my tune—“So did you like this season?” she asks early in our nearly hour-long conversation.
The truth is: I did.
Under Konner and Kaplan, Nobody Wants This has grown into a more settled and expansive show. Now that Joanne doesn’t need to learn Judaism 101, the narrative is more about the trickiness of relationships in their various stages than a non-Jewish person encountering the religion for the first time. This allows the writers to delve into Joanne and Noah’s dynamic beyond their butterfly-inducing makeout sessions, as well as interrogate the marriage between Noah’s brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) and his wife Esther (Jackie Tohn). The latter storyline allows the series to correct one of my main frustrations: the Esther of Season 1, in my view (as a culture critic and a real-life Esther), was a one-dimensional rhymes-with-witch standing in the way of Joanne and Noah’s happiness.
Konner isn’t comfortable speaking about choices made before she came on board (Foster served as showrunner for that season alongside Craig DiGregorio), but she says she was a fan from the start. When it debuted a little over a year ago, Nobody Wants This was largely praised for its breezy, modern take on the rom-com, but I was not the only critic who took issue with its portrayal of Jewish women. Foster, who converted to the religion, told the Los Angeles Times, “I think it’s interesting when people focus on ‘Oh, this is a stereotype of Jewish people,’ when you have a rabbi as the lead. A hot, cool, young rabbi who smokes weed. That’s the antithesis of how people view a Jewish rabbi, right?”
While many assumed Jewish creatives were brought in after the reviews, Konner says Netflix and 20th Television reached out to her before the public had seen any of it. She then recruited Kaplan to join her, and Rabbi Sarah Bassin was brought in to consult throughout the season.
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“I found it so winning and funny and fresh, so it was just sitting down with Erin and making sure she wanted to learn how to do the other parts of the job,” Konner says. “She clearly knows how to do the writing and the creative parts, and she really has this incredible sense of what the show is.”
Konner, a child of two TV writers herself, has spent much of her career as a sort of shepherd of great ideas, working with inexperienced creators to help their projects come to life. But she didn’t necessarily intend to fall into that role. When she met Girls creator Lena Dunham, she had just broken up with her writing partner, and thought she would strike out on her own. “Then I met Lena and was like, well, except for this one,” she says.
This arrangement has now become her calling card. She’s had similar positions as executive producer on Single Drunk Female, created by Simone Finch; Deli Boys, created by Abdullah Saeed; and now Nobody Wants This. “I really think I’m good at spotting talent,” Konner says. “That is something I feel a lot of pride in.” In Konner’s opinion, the TV world is not currently set up for new voices to succeed. She wants to help make that possible.
“I think showrunner is a four-person job that they give to one person,” she says. “Great voices are getting lost by the system because there’s nothing organic that [says] a writer should be good at having a conversation with an executive or looking at a budget.”
Konner likes to keep her colleagues close and have multiple balls in the air. After she was tapped for Nobody Wants This, she recruited Kaplan so she could keep up with Deli Boys and other projects in development. She and Kaplan also brought along other Girls alums including writer Sarah Heyward and directors Jesse Peretz, Jamie Babbit, and Richard Shepard, who is Konner’s husband.
Any perceived change in Nobody Wants This, Konner attributes not to an intentional course correction, but just to the reality of having more episodes to explore the characters. “No one was developed who weren’t the four main characters,” Konner says of the first season’s 10 episodes. “These shows are 21 to 22 minutes each.”
A similar thing happened on Girls with Elijah (Andrew Rannells), Hannah’s college ex who came out as gay, and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), who in Season 1 was largely defined as a chatterbox virgin. Both characters deepened in that show’s later installments.
In Nobody Wants This, the main reason Esther has grown so much in Season 2, Konner explains, is because narratively, they no longer needed a foil for Joanne and Noah now that the pair has pushed past the obstacles presented in Season 1. The tension now is built around whether the agnostic Joanne will feel compelled to convert to Judaism, and how that decision impacts Noah’s career aspirations.
“It would be not interesting to tell another story of Esther getting in the way of that relationship,” she says. “So what’s the story of Esther?” Without spoiling the details of her arc, Konner shares the questions that now preoccupy the character: “Why did she marry Sasha? Why did he marry her? Here they are with a teenager, and it’s that thing where you look at your spouse and go, ‘Is that all there is?’”
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Esther remains the tough woman introduced last season and maintains her snarky edge, but the plot allows her to become a friend to Joanne, not just a mean girl making fun of her.
“The secret of Esther is that she is great and helpful and funny, you just have to get through the way she is giving you that help,” Konner says, citing one sequence where she grabs Joanne’s phone to email another challenging woman in Joanne’s orbit, Noah’s mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh).
Bina hasn’t fully softened, but Konner points out it’s not as if Bina likes any of the Jewish women who dated her sons either. Konner sees her as like a “mob boss”—“Tony Soprano without the charm”—and her trick for humanizing the character is keeping in mind that all of Bina’s actions are taken with her family in mind. A scene of tentative bonding between the imposing matriarch and Joanne’s more brash and flighty sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) also makes it clear Bina’s not entirely conniving even if she’s not exactly likable either. For that matter, the same could be said of Morgan, a “tough customer” in Konner’s words.
Likability can be a cudgel against female characters, and, thanks to Girls, Konner is used to dealing with questions on that subject. “What we always said about Girls is, she may not be likable, but she’s relatable, and that’s how I feel about these characters.”
Konner explains that in the writers’ room, Foster will tell a story involving her husband—who is Jewish though not a rabbi—and while some of the staff will relate to Foster, others will see themselves in her spouse. “I go, ‘OK, even within this room, people are recognizing themselves in it, so probably people in the world are also going to recognize it,’” she says. “And if they don’t, they go, ‘Ugh, that girl reminds me so much of a girl I hate. I can’t wait to watch her more.’”
It’s true: When we first get on our call, I tell Konner about how I specifically identified with one plotline this season. Joanne tags along with Noah when he’s presiding over a baby-naming ceremony for an influencer that Joanne knew in childhood, played by Brody’s real-life wife Leighton Meester. Joanne still holds a grudge because at a childhood sleepover this girl cut off the hair of Joanne’s prized American Girl doll, Felicity. I tell Konner that a frenemy in my youth decapitated one of my dolls in secret and I’ve held it against her ever since.
“This happened to our script supervisor,” Konner says. “And the girl still denies it.” I reveal I’ve never confronted the doll criminal in my life. “I think it’s time, Esther,” she says.
The post How the New Co-Showrunner of Nobody Wants This Helped Change My Mind About the Netflix Hit appeared first on TIME.
