Anyone who streamed Nobody Wants This last year would have been obsessed with one character in particular: Not the hot rabbi played by Adam Brody, nor Kristen Bell’s spot-on portrayal of a hot-mess sex podcaster. And not the supporting sibling characters, although Justine Lupe (from Succession) and Timothy Simons (from Veep) are hilarious scene-stealers. I’m talking about the City of Angels. The first season of this Golden Globe- and Emmy-nominated Netflix rom-com opened with a montage of palm trees, blue skies, green hills and ducks and geese chilling on an urban lake, as the soundtrack offered up a lyric from HAIM’s Summer Girl: “L.A. on my mind, I can’t breathe.”
The song is meant to invoke the heady intoxication of the sunshiny city with its mountain and ocean views, along with the breathless feeling of falling in love that the show explores. But, in real-world Los Angeles, so much has changed between the end of the show’s first season and the upcoming premiere of its second. If they were to use that same song again, the audience couldn’t help but think of wildfires, protests and general unease.
The creators haven’t said if the new season will reflect recent events. But the Eaton fires were close to the neighbourhoods in the show, and members of the cast and crew were affected – Brody and his wife, Leighton Meester (who joins the cast this season), lost their Pacific Palisades home entirely in the fires. And certainly, the Canadian audience won’t view the show’s locations with the same wanderlust, considering many of us are on a break from U.S. vacation destinations – even to blue states like California.
But there was a time at the end of 2024 when I felt compelled to go to L.A., to experience it the Nobody Wants This way. After watching main characters Noah and Joanne eat, pray and love on the east side of the city, I was curious about their neighbourhoods – Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park and Eagle Rock – which I’d never explored on previous trips. The series promised a mecca of food trucks and indie coffee shops, Pilates reformer classes and hilly hiking trails, vintage T-shirt-wearing gals and basketball jersey-sporting dudes. This is a world where twinkly-lighted backyard soirees happen year-round, and post-dinner sidewalk strolls end with ice cream and greatest-of-all-time first kisses. “We specifically went out to shoot B-roll that included pops of L.A. that you don’t normally see,” the show’s production designer, Claire Bennett, said at recent Netflix event. “It wasn’t aerials of the Hollywood sign. It wasn’t the Capitol [Records] building. We made sure to make it look like you were walking down the streets of L.A. You see a bus. We have buses here.”
Heading into this pop-culture vacation, I had to wrap my head around a California trip with zero ocean interaction. The show did not go near the water, so neither would I: no Malibu, Santa Monica Pier, Venice or the Pacific Coast Highway. If I wanted bikinis, surfers and beach bonfires, I’d be better off at the SoCal locales of Brody and Bell’s other respective series, The OC and Veronica Mars. For a Nobody Wants This self-guided solo tour, I’d remain landlocked and focused on what I’d heard is a hipper, Brooklyn-esque part of L.A.
Fittingly, I kicked things off at Yeastie Boys, a bagel-themed food truck that was prominently featured on the show. Parked on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz, the vehicle’s signage is done in the same chunky, black-on-white lettering as the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head album (which the Brooklyn rap trio happened to record on the east side of L.A. in 1991). I picked up a Lox Deluxe – smoked salmon, scallion shmear, red onions and capers on a sesame bagel – which, like Nobody Wants This, is unapologetically Jewish and messy, and then asked the sandwich maker, Josh, if the series was on his radar. “Yes,” he said with a hint of bemusement, “everyone has been asking about us being on the show.” So, out of curiosity, he tuned in, too. “I liked it,” he said. “I’m Jewish. But not as intense about it as they are.”
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Josh was referring to the faith-based conflict at the heart of the series: specifically, how Noah must risk his family’s disappointment and a prospective head rabbi job if he plans to date, let alone marry, a goy like Joanne. So, as said shiksa did in one of the early episodes, I headed unannounced to the Sinai Temple where Noah led Shabbat service. The Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired building with dramatic floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows is in the upscale neighbourhood of Westwood – and before Nobody Wants This, its pop culture claim to fame was hosting Kirk Douglas’s “second bar mitzvah” when the actor was 83. I was there during the high holidays and the doors were locked, so I moved on to the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Koreatown where Noah’s 13-year-old niece Miriam celebrated her bat mitzvah. This domed, Pantheon-like synagogue was one of the city’s first – and was the spiritual home of early 20th-century Hollywood heavyweights, including MGM co-founder Louis B. Meyer and the four Warner brothers behind the famed family studio. In 2021, the congregation added a sleek trapezoidal-shaped event space, designed by the world-class firm Office of Metropolitan Architecture. In person, the traditional and ultra-modern buildings are a visually stunning focal point in an otherwise nondescript city block; but, on the show, they no doubt reflect the undeniable opposites-attract nature of Joanne and Noah’s star-crossed relationship.
In the end, these spaces weren’t open for visitors, either, which is probably for the best. I didn’t exactly want to interrupt Yom Kippur with my trivial pop culture quest. Also, I would have been a little self-conscious introducing myself since my first name, Shanda, is Yiddish for ”shame” – the word even had a moment in 2005 when New York Times writer Neal Karlen published his memoir, Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew. There’s no way my small-town gentile hippie parents – who thought they had come up with such a unique moniker – could have known or foreseen. And, thankfully, my secular Jewish husband finds it all quite amusing.
Meanwhile, back on L.A.’s Eastside, all the Nobody Wants This roads were leading to more noshing. When Joanne met a couple of girlfriends at Mirate, a cool Mexican joint in Los Feliz, they drank coffee and picked at salads, while discussing whether she should convert to Judaism. Without such a weighty subject to consider, I ordered a little more adventurously, trying the mezcal cocktail El Taquero, which is meant to taste like a liquid version of a smoky pork taco (and is way more delicious than it sounds) and the decadent Queso Fundido, which is essentially melted cheese chock full of leeks and chorizo. Looking around this multi-storey light-and-plant-filled eatery – which has a massive tree growing in the centre of it all – it’s easy to see why Bell and Brody returned to the Instagram-worthy spot to do their press interviews and photoshoots for the show.
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It also helps that Bell resides just a mile away. “She lives in a big mansion in this neighbourhood, up in the hills,” says Mirate manager Brian Kang, referring to Laughlin Park, a gated community that has also been home to Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Kristin Stewart and Natalie Portman. “One of my friends sees [Bell] all the time, but is too nervous to approach her.” When I ask if the actress is a regular at the restaurant, Kang says, “Maybe … we wouldn’t really notice. President Obama’s kid was here one time and we only knew because we had to accommodate the Secret Service. Otherwise, it’s pretty low-key. Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly came in and no one said anything. Danny DeVito was here, but no one really bothers celebrities on the Eastside. That’s why I love it. Once you cross into Hollywood, West Hollywood and then head to the West Side, there are the paparazzi and the tourists.”
Down the street at Floral Art By Mia (which had a blink-and-you-missed-it cameo in the Nobody Wants This pilot), the eponymous owner says Bell is most definitely a regular – and that she brings her two “adorable” daughters in to pick out blooms. Brody, on the other hand, is a live-by-the-water-westside kind of guy but has said he used to hang out a lot in this ’hood during his 20s. So, when they filmed the series’ first-date scene, which takes Noah and Joanne from dinner at Bacari in Silver Lake to making out in front of the Los Feliz 3 cinema, it was familiar terrain for both the actors and their east end-dwelling characters.
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For me, though, retracing those steps felt all new. Grabbing an ice cream, I strolled up Vermont Avenue where the soon-to-be-couple flirtily walked and talked, passing by neighbourhood staples like Figaro Bistrot with its jam-packed sidewalk patio, and Skylight Books, a cozy independent shop that also has a tree growing inside. Eventually, I stopped just past the movie theatre, next to the lamppost you can see in the background during the kiss. For fun, I put my ice cream and bag on the ground (just as Noah instructed Joanne to do) and briefly imagined what it would be like to date an all-grown-up but still adorable Seth Cohen. Disappointingly, the setting isn’t exactly romantic. Turns out, the spot is teeming with people waiting for tacos from Guac Daddy, a takeout window that isn’t seen in the show but is located just behind where Joanne is standing when she melts into Noah’s embrace.
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After making a mental note to come back and try the guac, I realized that, while I struck out in the pray and love aspects of this trip, I did find plenty to eat. And I felt like I discovered a completely new city and never once thought about the ocean – just as those who made the series intended. “People have a very specific idea of what they think L.A. is, and I don’t believe they know what the true heart of this city is,” Maura Corey, the series editor, said recently. “So it’s really great to express those stories.”
Considering the challenges L.A. has faced, season 2 of Nobody Wants This could develop the city as a character with even more poignancy, mirroring its resiliency in the way Noah and Joanne approach their relationship hurdles. Come Oct. 23, when the new season airs, I’ll be there for the hot rabbi and the hot mess. But I’ll also be thinking about the timeless sentiment from Randy Newman’s 1983 classic song: I love L.A.
