Welcome to It’s a Hit! In this series, IndieWire speaks to creators and showrunners behind a few of our favorite television programs about the moment they realized their show was breaking big.
Erin Foster is pretty organized. She’d have to be, thanks to a packed schedule that includes many personal obligations (wife, mother, sister, friend) alongside a stuffed professional calendar (which includes her hit Netflix series “Nobody Wants This,” which she created, plus podcasting, running clothing company Favorite Daughter alongside sister Sara Foster, and much more).
So when we got on Zoom a few weeks ago to talk about the smash first season of “Nobody Wants This” in the context of the current Emmy season, Foster was thrilled to hear that there was an agenda in place, mostly hinging on chatting through a favorite IndieWire question: “When did you know this show was a hit?” Still, all that organization and planning soon went out the window, because in addition to being organized and busy, Foster is — much like her alter-ego on the show, Kristen Bell’s Joanne — disarmingly honest.
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“‘I don’t know’ is the not-fun answer,” Foster said with a laugh. “I definitely didn’t know when I first watched it in editing. When I was in the editing process, I was by no means like, ‘Wow, get ready, everyone. I have a hit on my hands!’ At all. I remember very clearly thinking, ‘It’s sweet, it’s really sweet. I don’t think that my friends will make fun of me. But I think they’re going to be like, “It’s nice.’” I didn’t know if the message I was trying to get across was going to come through.”
But while most people would argue that Foster did get her message across — more on that message, and the very personal experiences that inspired it, below — the creator and Season 1 co-showrunner (she shared duties with Craig DiGregorio) was initially concerned that the general genre packaging around the series was different than she was expecting.
“It’s sweet and it’s soft,” she said. “I set out to make ‘Fleabag’ and I ended up making a sweet rom-com. I was like, ‘OK, it’s not the edgy thing that I thought I was making, but it’s actually really sweet.’ Then it turned out that was its superpower.”
But while the show, which follows Adam Brody and Bell as a seemingly mismatched but extremely appealing new couple, was a hit out of the gate — with strong critical reviews and big-time viewing metrics that pushed it to the top of the streamer’s top 10 in its first week — it took Foster a little longer to realize what she had made. I told her that I realized it was breaking through by way of my own metric: my mother had watched it, twice in its entirety, before I had enough time to burn through its first 10 episodes.
“For me, it happened one little step at a time. It was inch by inch,” she said. “It’s different for me than it is for you, with your mom saying that to you, because I had lots of friends’ moms saying that to me, too, but it’s my show, so they’re always going to say that to me. They’re going to say, ‘I loved your show. I watched it in one night!’ It’s very hard to gauge outside perception when you’re at the center of it.”
When Foster saw other celebrities — crucially, other celebrities that she does not personally know — saying in interviews or sharing online that it was their favorite show of the summer, that struck her too. “That’s weird to me,” she said with a laugh. “I know who you are. You don’t know who I am!”
While it’s relatively easy to measure success by way of stuff like total hours streamed or how quickly it was renewed for a second season (just two weeks after the first season was released, not too shabby), Foster’s rom-com also succeeded in other arenas. Like, oh, reminding people just how much they love Adam Brody and Kristen Bell, and giving so-called elder millennials a potent dose of teen nostalgia packaged in something brand new.
“I can’t let you call us ‘elder millennials,’ it’s so mean! It is so mean,” Foster said when asked about tapping straight into her own generation with her inspired casting. “I know that’s what we’re called. Not to brag, but I had breakfast with Adam when we were offering him the role, and I was sitting across from him and I’m like, ‘Damn, this could really work. He is so cute, why don’t people know about this?’”
That doesn’t mean that casting Brody as kind and sexy rabbi Noah and Bell as his more outspoken lady love Joanne was a slam-dunk from the start. “I was a little bit nervous about this millennial [nostalgia] thing, this ‘The O.C.’ meets ‘Veronica Mars’ [casting], because I didn’t want the show to be cheesy. I wanted the show to be really well-received and not cutesy. I didn’t want it to feel soapy,” Foster said. “I was a little bit nervous about that, and hesitant about it, but luckily I have people around me who are smarter than me that were like, ‘Millennials are going to eat this up and this is great.’ Once I got over my fear, I just leaned into it. And when I watched him on camera with Kristen, their chemistry is psychotic. I got lucky, because you can’t plan that.”
While much has been made of Joanne and Noah’s first kiss, for Foster, that “psychotic” chemistry and obvious romance are on offer almost immediately. When did she know she had really made the right casting choices?
“It’s the walk to the car in the pilot [episode],” Foster said. “That scene was always really, really, really important to me, and it never changed from my original writing of it. Well, the ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ joke was not mine, that was added later. Originally that line was, ‘Say something rabbinical,’ and he says, ‘Never pay retail.’ We changed it to, ‘There’s a fiddler on the roof,’ because it really made us laugh. That scene, I really felt it. I just felt like this is exactly how I wanted the show to feel.”
In the first episode, written by Foster and directed by Greg Mottola, brassy podcaster Joanne meets the more strait-laced and steady Noah at a pal’s dinner party. That he’s a rabbi is one of many things that surprises her, along with his easy charm and clear interest in getting to know her better. When Noah walks Joanne to her car at the end of the evening, their banter is thrilling, but so is the sense that Noah gets her. Even if that means fudging on what he’s actually doing.
“I tried to come up with creative ways to get him to be sexy and romantic that’s not cookie-cutter,” she said. “It was like, he’s being chivalrous and walking her to her car, but she’s like, ‘Don’t walk me to my car,’ and he’s like, ‘No, my car is right where your car is.’ He has a plan, like, I know a girl like this isn’t going to want me to walk her to her car, so I have to tell her that I’m walking both of us to our cars. Then, when we get there, I’m going to be like, ‘Oh no, I got a space up front.’ I didn’t have to draw attention to it.”
Small moments like that stand out throughout the series, which is based on Foster’s own romance with her husband, Simon Tikhman. While Tikhman is not a rabbi (he’s in the music business), he is Jewish, and Foster converted to the religion before they married in 2019. For many characters in the series, the pair’s mismatched faith is one of the biggest obstacles for their relationship (a rabbi and an agnostic podcaster?!), but Foster’s own experiences inspired plenty of other elements of the show, even if not everything is directly pulled from her life.
“Whatever’s the best story is what goes on screen. It’s not like it has to be true to life by any means,” Foster said. “My husband’s not a rabbi, so there’s many things that I have to embellish and change. But I would say that my philosophies are in the show, my philosophies on love, my philosophies on relationships.”
She’s not just saying that. For Foster, “Nobody Wants This” is funny, sexy, and romantic, but it’s also based on some very personal and quite hard-won life lessons.
“My husband really represents, for me, this idea of a kind of man that I didn’t know existed,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that he’s perfect Prince Charming or anything like that, it just means that, as modern women, we have been made to believe — because it’s true a lot — that you have two options. You have a spicy, sensual, exciting, exhilarating love with a toxic person, or you have a consistent, boring, regular safe option with a nice person. I was really scared of how to make that choice. I was probably going to go with the toxic person, as most women do, because rom-coms typically show us getting the toxic person to choose you and not be toxic anymore. In my experience, you can’t get the toxic person to stop being toxic.”
When Foster met Tikhman — just like when Joanne meets Noah — it forever altered her perception of what a relationship could be. And she wanted to see that on the screen.
“My relationship with my husband opened my eyes to this third option, which was emotionally healthy, confident, strong, honest, truthful, funny, romantic, but not a pushover,” Foster said. “I knew how much it blew my mind. I’m like other women, I have a strong personality, but I want an equal partner, someone I can’t walk all over, but someone who lets me be myself. I was really excited to show a love story with that kind of guy, because I want every woman to end up in the same kind of marriage I ended up in, which is healthy and fun.”
When translating that to the show, Foster didn’t get precious about making tweaks and changes to true stories, all the better to serve Joanne and Noah’s story. Consider the genesis of the sixth episode in the first season, titled “The Ick,” in which Joanne feels turned off by Noah trying to impress her family.
“I got the ick with my husband early on because I just got spooked. I got spooked that he was being really nice, and he was trying really hard with my friends and family, and he really wanted this to work out. Those are really nice things,” she said. “Somehow, it scared me. I had gotten the ick a million times in my life, ‘Oh, he’s got salad dressing on his mouth, I can’t marry him.’ The littlest thing can turn you off from someone because they falter in some way. But I never had a guy on the other end of it stop me and be like, ‘Don’t do that. What are you doing right now? That is stupid. I’m not going to feel embarrassed because I want your parents to like me. You should feel embarrassed.’ He really just called me out on it. That was obviously very attractive to me.”
The “ick” that Joanne feels in that moment might be silly or stupid, but it’s also deeply human and enormously relatable. That makes it both funny and worth sharing, the kind of entertainment that sticks with you, because it’s pulled from the truth.
“I fell madly in love with my husband, and then this really dumb thing made me think that I actually never wanted to be with him again because I wasn’t mature enough in that moment to see past the way he said ‘Prego’ or whatever,” Foster said. “That’s a made-up thing, but the idea of that is true. It’s not that I’m proud of being that way, but that’s the human experience. I was fucked up and I had bad habits, and I was lucky enough to find someone that my brand of crazy worked for.”
As Foster prepares for the series’ second season to hit the streamer in October — a season she already promised IndieWire won’t hold back on all the stuff its audience already loves, including both romance and comedy, naturally — she’s intent on keeping up that kind of honesty, even when it can be a little tough.
“I’m not all the way there, but I’m pretty comfortable exposing my flaws, and when you personalize something, it helps people connect,” Foster said. “I am willing to do that, because it also makes me feel seen.”
The first season of “Nobody Wants This” is streaming on Netflix.
