All the straight women I know are hanging on the same guy right now. Friends repeat it to me in bars, in my cell phone chats, and even strangers remind me of it every time I open the networks. Everyone pines for Noah Roklov, Adam Brody’s character in the series Nobody wants this, the Netflix romantic comedy turned into the phenomenon that no one saw coming in the era of female boredom with men. Ten chapters that do not reach 30 minutes have been enough to combat pessimism and restore female faith in the possibility of hetero romance.
Adam Brody’s rizz in this show is off the charts. It’s like Seth Cohen grew a beard and realized how fine he was and sent an entire generation of OC girls into heat pic.twitter.com/JwyAmM58ip
— Emily Bernstein (@emilybern) September 29, 2024
Nobody wants this is about the infatuation between Noah, a witty, open-minded rabbi, and Joanne (Kristen Bell), a podcaster agnostic who triumphs with the program she records with her sister talking about sex and the contemporary hell of dating culture. As the title of the series indicates, everything will go against him: Noah has just broken up a lifelong relationship with a good Jewish girl who, on paper, was the ideal in his religious community, and Joanne must deal with her backpack. of insecurities and his distance from Noah’s family and work conventions.
As far as we are concerned here, Judaism is the least important thing. It doesn’t matter that the fiction is inspired by the story of conversion for the love of its creator (Erin Foster) nor that it is an evolution of the religious taboo of The thorn bird or that unbridgeable erotic-sexual gap that was experienced with the priest of Fleabag. In Nobody wants this Sex between the protagonists is practiced with regularity and satisfaction from the beginning. Those scenes are not, precisely, to blame for this hang-up shared with its male protagonist.
“Adam Brody has cured all the girls who were told they were ‘too much’” (50,000 likes subscribe to the sentence in X). “I’m obsessed with how Noah holds Joanne’s face when he kisses her” (7,000 hearts of approval). While, Vanity Fair writes that “Adam Brody begins his era as a rabbi “hot” (“good guy”). What does that man have that the rest don’t?
If Brody is the new boyfriend of the internet it is because for many thirtysomethings and women in their 40s he is not even Adam Brody. In his head he will always be Seth Cohen, the character from the teenage series The O.C. whom he played and who became infatuated with an entire generation of girls eager to find a handsome, smart, funny and decent guy: a good guy. Brody also fits the parameters that cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen has stipulated in her “unified theory of male triumph.” In addition to the fact that their clothes fit well and they have a sense of humor, the interviews and public interactions of the new leading men must reveal, according to this theory, that the actor “loves it.” they like women” in real life. And not only on the sexual level. These are not men who know they can control or dominate them. Like Ryan Gosling, like Glenn Powell or like Paul Mescal, Adam Brody is part of that league whose members appreciate women, enjoy their company, understand them, listen to them and, what is essential: have a genuinely good time with them.
Why is half the internet swooning over the way Adam Brody holds his face when he kisses? The series is not particularly brilliant and is loaded with clichés, but things are so weak in terms of female heterosexuality that it is not surprising that many have been left breathless by seeing a man hold a woman’s shoulders and say, looking at her the eyes “I can handle you” (“I can handle you”). A new formula that buries the “marry me” and that, why fool ourselves, sounds much more satisfactory.
