‘Nobody Wants This’ Stars Adam Brody, Kristen Bell & More Dissect All Of Season 2’s Relationships, From Family To “Frenemies” To Lovers

Noah and Joanne are deepening their relationship in Season 2 of Nobody Wants This. After sorting through their feelings for one another in the first season, Brody says, “broadly, they’ve made a commitment to each other…now, they’re getting into the nuts and bolts of everyday life and being together, and with that comes new challenges.”

In the second season, Joanne is still learning about Judaism and its traditions as she tries to decide whether she’s willing to convert. Meanwhile, Noah is going through his own spiritual reawakening after leaving his rabbiship at Temple Chai in search of a congregation that might be more accepting of his somewhat non-traditional relationship.

“There’s almost more storyline there than there is to them falling in love, because there’s sort of one element of falling in love — ‘Am I falling in love with you?’ — that needs to be answered, but now, once you’ve decided, there’s so many more questions about how you merge into a ‘we’ that are left unanswered,” Bell says of the season’s primary tensions.

Over the course of 10 episodes, Noah and Joanne each seriously begin to question whether their feelings for one another are enough to overcome the obstacles that stand in their way. In the finale, it seems as though the answer might be no — though they ultimately do decide that their love can transcend whatever is stacked against them in the final moments of the season.

This reconciliation feels weightier than those that came before, if only because, as Brody puts it, they are both more aware of the “sacrifice” they’ll each have to make to be together and are making the fully informed, empowered decision to keep going in spite of it.

“It’s a bigger commitment in my eyes, absolutely,” he added.

Arian Moayed joins Season 2 of Nobody Wants This to play Morgan’s therapist…and also her boyfriend. And yes, that is as troubling as it sounds.

“I think that Morgan is in crisis at the beginning of this season,” Lupe tells Deadline. “Her sister’s kind of flown the nest, and she’s seriously committed to this romantic relationship. I think Morgan is like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m divorced. I’m 37…the love of my life, who’s my sister, is fully moving on, and I don’t know what my life is.”

The last straw that leads Morgan right into the open (and very manipulative) arms of the mental health professional who has been treating her for several years is when she’s rejected by the man she’d been dating previously.

When he ends things, he tells her that he doesn’t think she’s capable of showing real emotion, which throws her for a loop and sends her spiraling.

“So she turns to a creating a delusional relationship fairy tale that’s not grounded in anything substantial,” Lupe said, adding that Moayed’s Dr. Andy “knows her the best and knows her shadow self and accepts her and is interested in her and puts her on a bit of a pedestal.”

“So I think it’s kind of this perfect storm that allows her to buy in with some hesitation throughout the whole arc of the season,” she continued.

The pairing also represents a reunion of sorts, as both actors were previously co-stars on HBO’s Succession. Although they didn’t share too much screen time on that drama series, Lupe tells Deadline the two have an easy working relationship that lent itself to this lighter, comedic fare.

“We had so much fun. I love Arian. I was so excited that he was going to do this. We are very goofy together. I feel very comfortable with him. He’s not afraid to go far out,” she said. “Their whole relationship is kind of based on posturing. So, we really had fun with what that is and how far we could go with it.”

At the end of the season, Morgan does eventually break things off with Dr. Andy — at their engagement party. She also admits to Sasha that she thinks she jumped into that relationship because she felt like she needed to catch up with her sister in many ways. But, while it’s a monumental realization for Morgan, Lupe isn’t convinced it’ll necessarily change her behavior all that much moving forward.

“I feel like old habits die hard. She’s a chaotic character. She’s a free spirit. She’s a little bit random and impulsive, and that’s what makes her so fun,” she said. “I hope that she carries a little bit of at least knowing what authentically she wants from now on, that there’s enough of a desire in her to find something that’s honest and real, that she’s brave enough to wait for the right thing. That’s what I hope for Morgan. But I also am just like, this is Morgan, and Morgan will probably be chaotic through any dating experience.”

While Noah and Joanne seem to be growing closer through their conflict in Season 2 of Nobody Wants This, Esther and Sasha’s marriage troubles seem to be driving them further apart.

Their 10-episode arc sees Sasha trying everything he can to reconnect with Esther, all while she’s questioning whether she even wants to be married at all anymore.

“For Sasha specifically, I think it’s about him trying to recommit himself to the relationship and knowing that he hurt Esther’s feelings,” Simons said.

As for Esther, adds Tohn: “She’s coming to the realization, in and out of the relationship, that everybody else is having fun, and she’s just this almost self-imposed stick in the mud…I think that opens something in her brain where she’s like, ‘Is this the relationship I love?’ Esther and Sasha love each other, there’s no question. But is this the relationship I would have chosen if we didn’t get pregnant and then just start a life together without really thinking about it?”

By the end of the season, Esther has come to the conclusion that, at least in the short term, the relationship isn’t working for her anymore. In the finale, Esther tells Sasha that she wants to separate at Morgan and Dr. Andy’s engagement party (fitting, considering the celebrated couple doesn’t even make it to the end of the soiree in one piece).

There are many reasons that Esther makes that decision, Tohn says, but ultimately, “she’s trying to sow her oats a little and do weird, bad dancing alone in a kitchen and, just, I don’t know, get this anvil off her shoulders.”

Despite his heartbreak, Sasha not only respects her decision but vows to Morgan that, if exploration is what Esther needs, he’ll give her the space to do so and remain committed in the meantime, in case she finds a way back to him.

“Sasha can be misguided, but fundamentally, he’s good person and a good partner, and I think he goes through that idea of, like, ‘Maybe I was trying to hold on to things too tight, or solve it in the wrong ways.’ It’s probably that that brings him there,” Simons muses. “Ultimately, I do think that he understands how great that relationship can be and just sort of blindly being like, ‘Yeah, all right, I guess that’s over,’ isn’t a mature and healthy thing to do.”

While there is plenty of romance in Nobody Wants This Season 2, the platonic relationships — from Joanne and Morgan’s sisterly highs and lows to Esther’s budding friendship with the pair to Joanne and Esther’s tumultuous connection to Bina — help create an even fuller picture of what it means to blend families.

After keeping her distance in Season 1, Esther seems to be coming around to Morgan and Joanne in the latest episodes, which Tohn says is yet another manifestation of Esther’s journey to understand herself better and let loose a little.

“In Season 1, she especially dislikes Joanne because her very best friend in the world was engaged to [her] brother-in-law, and now [her] best friend’s out of the mix. This fearsome foursome is gone. This random blonde is here, and now the sister of the random blonde is flirting with my husband,” Tohn tells Deadline. “So it’s no mystery why she was like, ‘Get these girls away.’”

That being said, in Season 2, once Esther sets some boundaries around Morgan’s friendship with Sasha — and begins to realize that maybe she’s been too rigid in the past, on many fronts — “she’s softening,” Tohn adds.

On the Sasha and Morgan front, for what it’s worth, Lupe thinks her character handled that “pretty poorly.”

“I mean, she asks for a lot of permission, and that’s kind of as far as she’ll go. [She’s] like, ‘Can I please talk to him? Can you please come outside?’ There’s not a lot of fleshing it out on her behalf,” Lupe says.

Lupe considers both Morgan and Joanne to be a little inept when it comes to dealing with close female friendships, explaining “they don’t have the tools to maybe deal with it in the most emotionally evolved way.”

“Honestly, I was surprised by the way it all tracks and the way they come through for each other at the end of it all,” the actress said of the finale, when Joanne ultimately encourages Morgan to break things off with Dr. Andy and, similarly, Morgan supports Joanne’s struggles with Noah.

“There’s clearly a lot of love there. There’s clearly a lot of goodwill, and and I just love the different ebbs and flows. It feels really authentic to me, the way that sister dynamics and family dynamics and friendship dynamics play out,” she concluded.

As for Esther and Joanne, the jury is still out on whether they will ever truly be friends, but at the very least they are coming to understand each other much better.

“I think she’s just trying to become a more open, easygoing person,” Tohn said of Esther. “I mean, I would say she gets a 100th of the way there, but she’s trying.”

Brody was also joined this season by his real-life wife Leighton Meester, whose character Abby serves as yet another source of tension in Noah and Joanne’s relationship.

“She’s met so many people and knows so many people on the show, in front and behind the camera, but to really introduce her to this, my other my work family and have them really meet her and get to know her was great. I’m so proud of both,” Brody said.

In the episode, Noah and Joanne find themselves at odds when the former is asked to give the blessing at the naming ceremony for Abby’s new baby. Turns out, she’s a childhood friend of Joanne and Morgan, and there is definitely still some bad blood there, putting Noah in an awkward situation when the sisters begin to act out at the event.

“I think having a frenemy episode is a great learning opportunity for your main character, because you immediately propose someone who is a paradox, someone that you admire and that you’re threatened by, and oftentimes people in your life will fit both of those labels, and it’s sort of up to you how you’re going to react to that,” Bell said of Joanne’s growth throughout the episode. “And in the beginning, Joanne is very plants a flag in the ground, like… ‘Okay, I’m not going to like her. I’m just not open to new information here at all, no matter what Noah’s point of view about this woman is.’ When Joanne actually gets to spend a little time with Abby, and particularly towards the end of the episode, when Joanne makes a mistake and is cornered in the baby’s bedroom, I think it allows her to be reminded that Abby is a person too that is trying to learn and grow.”

She added: “It’s a pretty big learning lesson when you can see someone as who they are — not who they are to you, but see them as their own individual and not have an actor-observer bias about them.”

On working with Meester, Bell recalled first sharing the screen with her for an episode of Veronica Mars two decades prior to filming this episode of Nobody Wants This.

“I remember thinking [during Veronica Mars], ‘Oh, this girl is kind of spectacular.’ And then obviously she went on to have a big, beautiful career, but I haven’t gotten to be in a scene with her in 20 years,” she said. “So to re-recognize how adept she is comedically and actually go head-to-head with her was just an absolute delight.”