Nobody Wants This Season 4: Put a ring on it, then put a plot in it – we still want this, just better

The honeymoon phase is over; it's time to set up house.

The first season of Nobody Wants This was the honeymoon phase—for the couple and, well, for us viewers too. We were charmed, giggly even, as the show hit every romcom note in a rising crescendo: Adam Brody is Noah, the dashing, a-little-too-good-to-be-true man who happens to be a rabbi, and he runs into Joanne, a candid, open, maybe a tad brash agnostic podcaster who talks about intimacy for a living and is his polar opposite in every way possible. It can't work, and it won't, but obviously, it will.

It worked, because the premise itself, was that the obstacle was built into the walls. Joanne wasn't Jewish, Noah was in line to become head rabbi, and his mother Bina and sister-in-law Esther were intimidating, so every dinner came with friction pre-installed.

The conflict was already brewing. Ten brisk half-hours left no time to sag, and the chemistry between Brody and Kristen Bell could keep you warm like a Christmas fire on a cold night, enough to forgive the niggles along the way, which may or may not include some soppy dialogue and a rather thin sketch of the women in Noah's life, who mostly existed to disapprove.

And then there was the B-plot that had fans raising the antennae. Joanne's sister and co-host Morgan (Justine Lupe), acerbic and allergic to sincerity, struck up an unlikely friendship with Noah's brother Sasha (Timothy Simons), a man in a marriage with Esther that seemed to run on sarcasm and habit. Nothing romantic happened between them in Season 1, and the show was careful never to say it out loud, but it was visceral. In hindsight, it was the first sign that the most interesting couple in Nobody Wants This might be the one that isn't one.

Season 1 ends the way a romcom season should: the two part ways in the final episode, Joanne, rattled on believing that she would not be able to keep up, only for Noah to chase her down at the shuttle and kiss her, closing on a question you'd expect to close a season with: so how does this work? It was the right question. It was also, as it turned out, the only question.

Season 2 arrived with new showrunners and a noticeably cooler reception—the critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes dropped from 95% to 77%, and audiences were even less forgiving, with the audience score sliding from 85% to somewhere in the high 50s. The honeymoon phase was on its last legs. Joanne and Noah were now officially together without having discussed too many important things, such as, well, conversion. The couple still had the spark and the razor-sharp banter, and yet the conversations went around in circles and brought certain viewers to an uncomfortable question: how many more seasons of Nobody Wants This do I really want?

Every episode dealt with a wrinkle that seemed to get ironed out but was actually building into a rather systemic issue, and by the last episode (again) the couple realised the elephant in the room was pawing at the ground and needed to be addressed. Once again they split, more sorrowfully this time, and it takes a lonely walk through Los Angeles for Noah to replay all the good times with Joanne (we love a good flashback montage; the fans would call them edits) and decide she is his soulmate, and the two reunite. Sniff sniff, a little less than before, but still a sniff.

Sweet, sweet, sweet. But here's the thing: Season 2's problem was never that the couple was too stable. They weren't stable at all—they broke up in the finale. The problem was that the instability was a rerun. Same fault line, same breakup, same sprint, same kiss. Meanwhile, the side plots kept simmering: Morgan got engaged to her therapist, Dr. Andy, something that no one ever understood, then broke it off; Sasha and Esther drifted onto different pages of their marriage. By the end of the season, both Morgan and Sasha were single, and the show had lit the fuse.

And then Season 3 began. The couple finally move in together, and Noah proposes in Napa, under cover of a friend's wedding, in another cutesy scene that went platinum in several households. Joanne converts, and the season ends with the two of them marrying on a Malibu beach without telling their families. On paper, it's the most stable the show has ever been—and some of the spark and fizz had evaporated by now. The attention slowly turned to Sasha, separated from Esther and sitting with the residue of a fractured marriage while she moves on, and to the complicated new feelings he has for Morgan.

Morgan and Sasha, a fan wish for a long time, finally get a perfect romcom episode to themselves, a trip to New York for her Watch What Happens Live appearance, a day with no one interrupting, and the night the show had been building to for three seasons. Then Morgan bolts, leaving the city, and Sasha, behind, and that's enough for Sasha to take a few steps back, realising he can't deal with any more uncertainty and unpredictability in his life. By the finale, she's ready to try, but he gently turns her down.

Season 4 has officially been greenlit, and the collective guess is that Morgan and Sasha will finally have their moment, because what is more pleasing than angst, yearning, separation, and watching a couple finally find their way to each other (if at all, that is)? And that brings us to the real question: would people rather watch all that drama than something stable and extremely safe, like Joanne and Noah?

There's always something delicious about volatility, after all. We millennials are the same generation who sat through 11 seasons of Grey's Anatomy watching Derek Shepherd and Meredith Grey suffer every conceivable problem in existence, a hospital gunman, a plane crash, an ex-wife, a drowning, only for Derek to die, rather unceremoniously, in Season 11. We're also the generation that lived through One Tree Hill, where even the "stable" couple, Nathan and Haley, had issues every season, teetered towards separation, and then, finally, reconciled.

But those were the days of 22-episode seasons, when romances were allowed to build slowly and shows had the luxury of filler: Episodes where you could watch the characters enjoy themselves and do nothing much, without a plot point in sight. That filler was where the stable couple lived. It's where you saw them cook dinner, bicker about laundry and be happy in a way that didn't need a crisis to justify its screen time.

It's now the era of streaming, and Nobody Wants This gets ten half-hours a season. Every episode has to count, has to have something going on—storytelling aside. In that economy, a happy couple is a problem to be solved by Episode 10. So the writers manufacture wrinkles, and we can feel the manufacturing.

So, are we bored by stable romances, or just by ones written with nowhere left to go? It’s the latter. Perhaps, what wears us is out, is stability written as a holding pattern, a couple circling the runway while the show waits for something else to happen. Television has proven the opposite more than once.

Coach and Tami Taylor spent five seasons of Friday Night Lights married, and their marriage was the most gripping thing on the show, because the conflict never came from whether they’d stay together. It came from two people who loved each other wanting different things. Joanne and Noah have that material sitting right there: a newly converted wife, a Rabbi husband, and two families who weren’t told about the wedding. The Season 1 spark can still be rekindled. But with only ten episodes and a crowded house of subplots, how is the million-dollar question.

Morgan and Sasha get to be the yearning. Joanne and Noah should get to be the marriage. The honeymoon is over and the house is set up; the question for Season 4 is whether the show trusts that watching two people choose each other on an ordinary Tuesday is enough to hold our attention. Done well, it always has been.