Nobody Wants This - a TV comedy series review

Just out on Netflix is a first-class romantic comedy called Nobody Wants This. The thing nobody wants is supposed to be a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. In spades.  Between a rabbi and a blond Los Angeles shiksa so clueless about Judaism that she has apparently never heard the word "shalom" before - a bit of a stretch for anyone living in modern America.

The young couple who fall in love are Joanne, played by Kristen Bell and Noah, played by Adam Brody. Joanne makes a living working on a podcast called Nobody Wants This, hence the title, with her sister, Morgan. The two girls have an antagonistic rivalry which they let play out on the podcast and which makes their dialogue interesting. Noah is a cool with-it modern-day rabbi with ambitions to become head rabbi at a major synagogue. The two meet at a party and have an instant, totally convincing, attraction to each other.

The dialogue is hilarious. Really witty. The supporting characters really support the plot, moving it along by contributing additional incongruities: Bina, Noah's mother isn't quite the smothering Jewish mother type, although she plays out the stereotype by trying to pull this "shiksa" and her son apart. Sasha, Noah's brother, is a natural comedian and you can't wait to hear what he's going to say next.

It helps that the Noah character seems to have it all in spades. He's handsome. He is smart, generous and understanding to a fault, compassionate and never ever appears to lose his cool. You can't not like Noah. Joanne is, with her total cluelessness about Judaism, less appealing, but the pairing seems to work. The actors are friends in real life, and that no doubt helps make them believable as a couple.

Less believable is Noah's willingness to allow himself to let a non-Jewish girl into his life, given his lifelong ambition to have a successful career as a rabbi, and it is this existential struggle for Judaism to survive that is the elephant in the room nobody wants to pay attention to, except on the obvious superficial level.

It is unfair of me, and unrealistic, to expect a rom-com to confront the issue of anti-semitism on an existential level. Elise Foster, the author, herself a convert to Judaism, takes it as far as it can go without getting too far into the weeds and asking the real questions: can anybody in the modern world support a group that believes it cannot survive without closing the door to the outside world?  And can Jews survive as a people if they don't? Can one suggest that it's individuals who need help surviving and not ethnic or cultural groups without sounding - or being - anti-semitic?

I'll leave it there. To say more is to spoil the plot ending, and it's too good a production for me to risk doing that. Does Joanne get her man? Does Rabbi Noah fulfill his lifetime dream of becoming chief rabbi?

You'll need to watch the series to find out. 

You won't be sorry; it's a first-rate comedy with characters you're very likely to fall in love with.

Rewatching Six Feet Under

I have just finished binge-watching, for the second time in twenty years, Six Feet Under.

I waited twenty years, I realize, for the same reason I waited years before I could rewatch Brokeback Mountain: some works of fiction can be even more powerful than reality; they can grab you by the spine and make you stop whatever else you're doing and give it all your attention.

Six Feet Under first came out as a series in 2001 and ran through 2005. I was home on sabbatical during part of that time and used to gather with half a dozen friends once a week to watch it together. We recognized its power then, and I have to say that power has not diminished in the two decades since.

If you are not familiar with it, it is the story of three families, the Fishers, the Chenowiths and the Diazes. It takes place in a funeral home in Los Angeles and begins with the death of Nathaniel Fisher Sr., whose car is hit by a bus on Christmas Eve on his way to the airport to pick up Nate, Jr., a kind of prodigal son who ran away to live in Seattle to escape getting drawn into the family funeral home business. At home is Nate's younger brother, David, a "good little son" and closeted gay man; their sister, Claire, still in her late teens who feels very much like the "also ran" child of the family; and their mother, Ruth, who has perfected the art of turning herself into a doormat while at the same time never surrendering the right to lay expectations on everyone else in sight. 

While waiting for his father, Nate meets and has sex in a public restroom with Brenda Chenowith, who has a psychologically incestuous connection to her bipolar brother Billy.  Billy frequently causes real havoc when he stops taking his meds so that he can "feel again" from time to time. They are the children of two sexually-disturbed psychiatrists who have imprinted their kinks and hangups onto the souls of their children and seem not to know what they've done or care.

The third family consists of Federico "Rico" Diaz, a restorative artist who works at the Fisher Funeral Home, his wife and two boys. They seem to have been included primarily to contrast how a supposedly "normal" family falls apart.  Just in case you missed the point that this show is about dysfunctionality.

This second-time around, Six Feet Under, no surprise, had a wholly different impact on me. The first time I zeroed in on the gay characters and the comic effect of the dysfunctionality of the Fisher and Chenowith families. This time, as an old man whose friends and acquaintances are dying faster than I can keep up with them, and whose own death, now that I've been diagnosed with a terminal disease, is, if not imminent, at least in sight, I naturally saw the 63-episode series as being more than anything else about how one contends with death.

It wasn't long before I began to feel the same impatience I feel with virtually all series-length productions. Eventually the time comes when you get annoyed with the failure of the characters to learn from their mistakes. Here, as in most soap operas, character flaws are all over the place: Nate is clueless, Billy is pathologically self-involved, Ruth is a textbook case of passive aggressivity, etc. It's hard to like these people; you find yourself wanting to slap some sense into them. But a moment's reflection makes clear that this response is evidence how good the writing is, and when I reached the 63rd and final episode, which is all about how the characters die in the future, an episode which has justifiably been called the finest ending ever written in a television series, I found myself mourning their passing, and sitting quietly for the longest time wishing I could bring them all back to life.

There are scenes along the way that are over-the-line heavy.  The one about sudden infant death syndrome - crib death - was one. But the one that wouldn't let go is the one in which David is car-jacked by a crazed psychopath pretending to have car trouble. David stops and offers to help when the guy pulls a gun on him and makes him dump the body David is transporting, then makes him get out of the van, pours gasoline on him and sticks a pistol in his mouth before laughing and driving off with the van, leaving his gasoline-soaked victim to find his way home. Keith too is living with a memory he can't shake of killing a man who points a gun at him in a struggle.  David and Keith both struggle to overcome shame and guilt over not being able to seize control in a moment of life-and-death consequence. and can't get themselves to recognize and accept how powerless they were to change the way things came down.

A major player in the plot line is the evolution of gay rights.  When the story begins, homophobia is still ever-present and Keith is frustrated with David for being so resistant to coming out. By the end of the series, five years later, David and Keith are married and adopting two abandoned boys.  They have come through the struggle to form a mixed-race family - Keith is black, as are the boys, and David is white - with two daddies, and it's David who is, if anything, the more progressive and enlightened of the two.  Alan Ball, the writer and producer of Six Feet Under is himself gay, and the story is a beautiful example of his activism. The warmth of the social realism - if that's what it is - contrasts with the starkness of all the death and dysfunctionality.

I don't know if I'd recommend the show to everyone. The language is coarse, the sex is kinky and often overwrought, and focusing on death is understandably not everyone's idea of a good time activity. But if you believe, as I do, that movies, whether made for the big screen or for television, are the art form of our day, you could do much worse than binge on Six Feet Under.

 photo credit

left to right in photo: David Fisher, (played by Michael C. Hall, of Dexter fame); Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy); Claire (Lauren Ambrose), Nate (Peter Krause), Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez)

Katty and the Mooch

After listening to the debate I'm now caught up in the commentary on the debate. It's a good exercise because it reminds me that I am just as susceptible as anybody to the temptation to believe what I want to believe and to choose sources of information to listen to that confim those beliefs.

I am an ardent supporter of Kamala Harris, not just, but largely, because I am convinced the reelection of the populist Liar-in-Chief would likely choke the last bit of oxygen out of our idealistic efforts to bring America ever closer to becoming a real functioning democracy.  I worry I'm just another Chicken Little crying "The sky is falling...the sky is falling," but I am persuaded that a Trump victory would provide evidence that Henny Penny, aka Chicken Little, was not an alarmist but a soothsayer.

Of all the commentary I've heard so far, the most insightful, in my opinion is the one I heard just now on Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci's podcast, The Rest is Politics.

I hope you can find the time to have a listen. If you don't, let me lay out three points they make, two I agree with and one I don't. The one I don't agree with is made by Katty. She wants Kamala to accept Trump's challenge to do the next debate on Fox with moderators of Trump's choosing. Katty thinks Kamala is a strong enough debater to go against what would be 3 to 1 odds, and it would reveal to the audience that she is an underdog with great chops. I have no idea, of course, whether Katty is right about this. On what feels like a common-sense level, I think it sounds like challenging a guillotine by putting your head under the blade and saying, "Go ahead. Give it your best shot!"

Now for the two points I agree with: One is that Kamala needs to take a crash course in economics, and particularly the American economic situation, and then demonstrate her knowledge in frequent and regular appearances before crowds on the campaign trail.

The other is Scaramucci's point that Trump is playing by the playbook of one of the most sinister characters in American political history: Roy Cohn.  Cohn was the lawyer supporting the work of Joseph McCarthy.  He figures large in the red scare and the lavender scare of the 1950s, essentially witch-hunts against communists and homosexuals, real or rumored. Cohn later became Trump Senior's lawyer and Fred Trump passed him on to his son. Roy Cohn's advice to Trump, his playbook, was:

1. Never apologize, never admit you were wrong;
2. Never admit defeat; continue to insist you won, even when you haven't;
3. Follow your instincts.

It's evident to all the world that Trump has internalized Cohn's playbook and followed it his entire political career.

This playbook fits, hand-in-glove, with the current populist movement that denies truth and insists things are whatever you claim they are, a fascist practice of putting power over truth and the will of an individual strongman over the rule of law.

What is missing in this podcast discussion is a serious discussion of how to negotiate one's way in a world of such overpowering deception. Does one continue to bang on with counter-argument when one makes the claim that argument is ineffective?  Does one counter with lies and hope the gullible can be persuaded to believe your lies and not the other guy's?

I'm still waiting to hear serious discussion on this topic.

If you've got suggestions on how to deal with liars please send them my way.

In the past I have listened over and over again to friends and others who say, "Why bother to engage; the MAGA folk are not going to listen to rational argument."  My own response is to assume that that's not true, or at least act as if it's not true and plough ahead with facts and corrections anyway, recognizing that in the absence of certainty, it's always better to err on the side of honesty and integrity.

But is that the best possible approach?  I really don't know.