A Shiksa Love Story

Erin Foster has spent the past decade turning her Hollywood life into content, to mixed results. Her new Netflix rom-com series, based on her own conversion to Judaism, might change that.

- Phoebe Reilly

SIX YEARS AGO, a guy Erin Foster had just started dating was meeting her mother for the first time and brought to the restaurant a bouquet of sunflowers large enough to command its own chair. "The flowers were so long, and they kept falling over," says Foster. "Sitting there, I was like, Well, if someone cares this much, then that feels like a weakness." She was 36 and had dated enough assholes, including a few celebrities, to know that she was the jerk in this case, but still, she recoiled from him on the car ride home. "There's no hope for me," she remembers thinking. "I am a human who got some bad wiring about what a relationship is supposed to look like, and I'm clearly sabotaging something." When Foster, the creator and an executive producer of the Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This, first told her writers' room this anecdote, the men were baffled, but the women immediately got it. "That made me feel like it was a good story to tell," she says.

The scene gets worked into the sixth episode of the show, which stars eldermillennial network-TV statespeople Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. Bell plays Joanne, a jaded, agnostic podcast host who also doesn’t know what a good relationship is supposed to look like. Burned out by bad Raya dates, she inadvertently falls for a charming, well-adjusted rabbi named Noah, played by Brody, until he tries too hard to impress her parents. “I can’t believe I ever let him touch me with those giant-flowerholding hands,” she says to her younger sister, Morgan (Succession’s Justine Lupe), and they launch into all the random ways former boyfriends have given them “the ick.”