Everybody Wants Adam Brody
Try and resist his charm offensive!!!
The internet has discovered an emerging talent named Adam Brody. It’s like I woke up in 2003.
Twenty years ago, Brody became a household name — and Thinking Girl’s Heartthrob — with his breakout role as Seth Cohen in The O.C., which I watched religiously. I had a huge crush on Seth Cohen. He was a dreamboat. Self-deprecating. Smart. Sweet. Cute but not intimidating in a popped-collar Abercrombie catalogue sort of way. Seth Cohen read books like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. He was a kindred spirit, a nerd who didn’t try to hide how uncool he was. I had never seen anyone like him on TV before.
I remember my friend Dana telling me that her friend had seen Adam Brody riding the subway in New York. I responded to the story with perhaps too much enthusiasm. I probably said something like, “I want to see Adam Brody on the subway!!!”
Dana, the world’s least starstruck person, gently reminded me that Adam Brody was not Seth Cohen. That he was just a regular guy. That if I met him in real life, I’d fully separate the actor from his alter ego.
The O.C. premiered in 2003 and lost magic over the course of its four-year run. The storylines got stale and the cast, Brody included, looked ready to call it quits. By that time, I had viewed Brody through the lens of a skeptical journalist rather than a Seth Cohen fangirl. I met him briefly at a movie premiere party. He seemed like the hipster dudes in my East Village neighborhood: Slim-cut jeans? Check. Facial scruff? Check. An air of cool detachment? Check.
So Justin Theroux! (So not my type.) After The O.C., I stopped following Brody’s career. It is my job to follow actors’ careers, but I cannot tell you what Adam Brody did between 2007 and 2020, when he started popping up in impressive prestige fare like Promising Young Woman, Fleishman Is in Trouble and American Fiction. Last week, he staged his big rom-com comeback in Nobody Wants This — and now I was fully paying attention.
The Netflix series created by Erin Foster is a delight. Brody delivers his best-loved performance since leaving Seth Cohen behind. He plays fictional Los Angeles Rabbi Noah Roklov, a quick-witted charmer with a high degree of emotional intelligence. At a dinner party he meets Joanne (Kristen Bell), a sex and dating podcaster who’s niche-famous for sharing funny, ribald stories about the vapid men she meets on the apps. Noah and Joanne have instant chemistry that takes each by surprise. They banter playfully — the first hint of romantic love — and he engages her on a deeper intellectual level. When Noah walks Joanne to her car, she tells him, “You feel like someone whose parents are still married.”
She then confides that her mother Lynn (Stephanie Faracy), a divorcee with a bubbly Diane Keaton personality, was out “doing ayahuasca with her Uber driver.”
“You trying to highlight our differences?” Noah asks her.
“I guess I’m just testing you, seeing if I can say something that would scare you,” she explains.
“Oh, you scare me, Joanne. You do.”
“I do?”
“Yeah. You’re terrifying. You’re an unfiltered, complicated, vulnerable, beautiful woman.”
“I’m not vulnerable.”
“Walking into a party with a big-ass fur coat ’cause you’re scared not to be seen as special or different? Sorry, babe. You vulnerable.”
“What the fuck? You some sort of mind-reader?”
“I read your mind at the dinner when you were looking at me. It was very inappropriate.”
The twosome’s sparky, soulful verbal repartee leads to a serious relationship as they navigate family awkwardness. Along with the head rabbi at Noah’s temple, matriarch Bina (a mischievous Tovah Feldshuh) wants her son to marry a respectable Jewish woman; Joanne, who’s agnostic, must decide whether she should convert. Reality sets in: Can these crazy kids make this thing work?
Since Netflix released Nobody Wants This into the wild, Brody fans spanning generations X to Z have been shouting his praises from the rooftops of social media.
“House parties are back, Adam Brody is back, yearning is back, I’m gonna buy a rugby shirt, this is about to be the most 2004 ass fall you’ve ever seen,” wrote culture writer Elamin Abdelmahmoud via X.
The show “is huge for all of us who have been in love with Seth Cohen for 20 years,” podcaster Gibson Johns added.
Another online critic, Meecham Meriweather, posted a screenshot of Noah telling Joanne “I can handle you,” and remarked, “Adam Brody healed all the girls who have ever been told they were ‘too much’ when he said this. I cried actually.”
One woman joked that Nobody Wants This is Fleabag “for mentally stable people.”
I must add that Foster and her writer’s room are especially good at presenting Adult Children of Divorce in a warm, realistic light: Many of us are clear-eyed and march to our own beat. The key to our heart is having a sense of humor because having a sense of humor is the key to life.
That said, I must also acknowledge the writers’ problematic depiction of Jewish women. Bina is an overbearing troublemaker who smiles while telling Joanne she’ll never end up with Noah. Concurrently, Noah’s sister-in-law Esther (the stunning Jackie Tohn) is catty and hateful toward Joanne and her sister, Morgan (the Phoebe Buffay-coded Justine Lupe), calling each a “whore.”
“While it offers up the fantasy of the ideal Jewish man in Noah, the series seems to loathe Jewish women, who are portrayed as nags, harpies, and the ultimate villains of this story,” Esther Zuckerman wrote in Time magazine, criticizing Foster for “dealing in cheap stereotypes for lame jokes instead of offering up nuanced depictions of complicated women. Joanne and Morgan are allowed to be misguided but lovable. Their opponents are simply mean.”
Foster, who converted to Judaism before marrying husband Simon Tikhman, has since responded in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, arguing, “I think we need positive Jewish stories right now. I think it’s interesting when people focus on, ‘Oh, this is a stereotype of Jewish people,’ when you have a rabbi as the lead. A hot, cool, young rabbi who smokes weed. That’s the antithesis of how people view a Jewish rabbi, right? If I made the Jewish parents, like, two granola hippies on a farm, then someone would write, ‘I’ve never met a Jewish person like that before. You clearly don’t know how to write Jewish people, you don’t know what you’re doing, and that doesn’t represent us well.’”
One thing everyone seems to agree on: Adam Brody’s hotness. Most actors think romantic comedies are beneath them. They’re afraid to look silly and wimpy. They want to be taken seriously (while affecting a Justin Theroux nonchalance off-camera). Brody, now 44 years old and a married father of two, seems to have accepted his Seth Cohen legacy and leaned into his gifts for playing swoon-worthy leading men.
Recently, Brody told Vanity Fair that the characters he chooses to play will become “progressively more generous and self-aware” as he ages. “This could either be because I’m old and I’m slowing down,” he said. “Or because I’m wise and I’m grounded and confident.”
YOU’VE GOT BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
When Nora Ephron directed Sleepless in Seattle, she gave each actor a book that related to their character. Tom Hanks received a volume about the Brooklyn Bridge, a nod to Sam Baldwin’s architect job. Bill Pullman, who played sickly Walter, got David McCullough’s Teddy Roosevelt biography Mornings on Horseback. “Because [Roosevelt] had allergies,” Pullman told me for my book I’ll Have What She’s Having. “She wanted me to know that great men have allergies. Right away she was looking to ennoble all the things about [Walter] and what she liked about him.”
Because it’s Meg Ryan Fall, and because I never found out which tomes Nora hand-picked for the You’ve Got Mail cast, I’ve attempted to match her film’s cozy, bookish characters with some brand-new titles:
Kathleen Kelly: I think she’d be reading Ina Garten’s memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens.
Joe Fox: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss.
Frank Navasky: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Patricia Eden: All Fours by Miranda July.
Christina Plutzker: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.
Birdie Conrad: Connie: A Memoir by Connie Chung.
How’d I do? LMK in the comments! Also, big shoutout to L.A. design guru Ali LaBelle for including this newsletter in her fabulous “Fall A to Z” list. I was surprised and honored! And thanks to Ali, some of you are new here. Thank you so much for subscribing. Please don’t hesitate to say hello.
Warmly,
Erin
Oh you TOTALLY nailed what this cast would be reading (while also cluing me in to the Friss book, which sounds interesting so thank you!) And VERY much appreciate this Ode to Adam Brody newsletter. I'm sure this was a fun one to research!
Living for the Brody-saince, especially paired with Kristen Bell. Two of my faves.