Most writers draw inspiration from their own lives to craft their best work. Erin Foster may have gone above and beyond in chronicling her own personal, romantic journey in the critical and breakout hit “Nobody Wants This.” The Netflix series is now up for three Emmy Awards next month, including the very prestigious Outstanding Comedy Series category.
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Set in contemporary Los Angeles, “Nobody” follows the unexpected coupling of Joanna (Kristen Bell), a terminally single lifestyle podcaster, and Noah (Adam Brody), perhaps the hottest American rabbi in the history of television. Throughout the first season, as their family and friends try to make peace with this potential long-term relationship, the pair learn a ton about each other, and both have to decide if their differences matter when good, old-fashioned love is at play.
During our chat earlier this month, Foster, who also has a very successful podcast with her sister, reflects on the success of the show so far, years of being a working writer on shows no one heard of, when she knew Bell and Brody were going to work on screen, the inherent non-Burbank Los Angeles of it all, what to expect for season two (dropping in October), and much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: Congratulations on the Emmy nominations.
Erin Foster: Thank you.
Considering where you started with the show, and never knowing what’s going to happen, what did it mean to you to get that comedy series nod?
I mean, it is part of a swell of response to the show that kind of all sits in the category together. It all feels surreal to me. Watching the reaction to the show in itself was just bizarre because I had been obviously so close to it and I’ve been writing professionally for 13 years. And you can make a really good living writing on shows that don’t get awards or writing on shows that don’t get picked up. Again, making pilots that don’t go to series. You can have a good living that way, and there’s an amount of pride in that. That means you’re a working writer, and everybody knows that just because you haven’t had a hit show or you haven’t had a show stay on the air for five years or you haven’t had your own show, doesn’t mean you aren’t a talented, successful writer. It’s a weird industry that way, where success doesn’t really just mean awards and visibility. And so the amount of writers I know who, at a dinner party with someone’s relative, say, “I’m a writer,” and they go, “Oh, anything I’ve seen?” And you list five things, and they’re like, “I’ve never seen that, but I’ll look for it.” That’s part of the DNA of being a TV writer is having success that people aren’t really aware of. So,I was sort of used to that, and I was used to that feeling of thinking something seems like it could be special or different, and it doesn’t stand out. And so for this to be the thing that stands out, it’s just something I’ve never experienced.
There are so many new Netflix shows that it can be easy to dismiss them. But then I watched it and I literally could not stop binging it to the end. And that final episode and that last scene sequence is just so good. When you were breaking out the show, were there any specific moments, like the ending, that you wanted to make sure made the cut?
Yes. I mean, there were many. For me, my romance with my husband…I really identified as a single woman struggling to find the right person so much more than I identified with the happily married person. So, once I switched into that other lane, I still really connected with all of these millions of people across the world who couldn’t figure out what they were doing wrong and couldn’t figure out how to change their patterns and history. And so when I was making the show, it was really important to me to have these big romantic gestures come from the character Noah, but in really untraditional, romantic ways. “The Ick” [episode] was really important to me to have happen because although it’s a comedic episode, and it’s funny, it really represents this fear we have when we meet someone who’s willing to show up and wants to be a healthy partner and that we find something really stupid and we obsess over it. And decide that because of that thing, we can’t be with them anymore, and it’s a cop out, but we don’t know how to stop ourselves from doing it.
And I did that with my husband as I had done with many relationships. As soon as the person seemed interested and available and nice, I was like, “Well, they’ve got to be a huge loser, so I’m going to figure out what it is now.” And I tried to do it with my husband and it was the first time in my life that a man confidently stood in his truth, stood on business, as a kids say now, and was like, “I don’t know what this thing is that you’re doing, but I’m just going to let you do it and I’ll be here, come back when you’re ready.” And it sort of just woke me up out of this thing that I was doing. And I don’t know, I really wanted that moment to be exactly kind of how it turned out because it was really important to show Noah as a very strong person who could handle a woman like Joanne, because I think as women who are sort of naturally complicated people, we feel like we have two choices, like a strong man that’s going to torture us or a wimpy lovely, sweet, soft man who kind of can’t handle us and we don’t like those options.
There are very few in the middle.
Very few in the middle.
But would you say you found one? Is that your husband in real life, then?
I found one, but I mean, of course, for me, he’s my only person, right? The perfect match, but I don’t believe he can be the only one that exists in the world. So, it was sort of trying to highlight this third option that e.xists
You’ve worked on many shows before. It’s also one thing to believe Adam and Kristen will have chemistry together. But you still don’t know until they get on set or in front of a camera. Was there one scene or a moment on set where maybe you just exhaled and went, “Yes, they’ve got it, it’s going to work“?
I would say in the pilot, when they’re walking to the car from the party and they’ve just met, that scene was another one that was really important to me to have it be exactly how it is in the script. And I just felt the ease between the two of them, and I felt they had really undeniable chemistry. And that is something where I kind of got lucky because Kristen and Adam aren’t people who are auditioning. They’re not going into a room and letting me decide. It’s like you offer them the role, and so the chemistry is an important part of this, and I don’t care how good of an actor you are, you can’t always fake that. So in that sense, it was a really lucky happenstance that they, I mean, of course they’re both really talented, but they also have great chemistry.
As someone who’s lived in LA for way too long and considers it home, I feel like I’ve seen so few television shows that capture the East Side of the city like you guys did, and it felt very intentional. Was that your direction?
Well, it was my direction that I really, really wanted to shoot on location. Just as somebody who’s made TV shows and watches, how quickly you can cut corners on sets and how fake things start to look, I just didn’t want that. And as many times as I was assured it wouldn’t happen, I just didn’t trust anybody. And I said, I don’t want fake light coming through the window where you can tell you’re on a stage. I just hate it. I just am averse to it. So, I really pushed for shooting on location. And then once I got my way, we had to decide where these two people are from and where they live, and we did a real study on where they would live. I thought about the show “Love,” which also really took place in LA and showed a different side of LA. They had Burbank, and they had a lot of Silver Lake. I was just like, I don’t really want to see Burbank on TV.
Me either.
I do not want to go to Burbank in real life.
No, exactly. [Laughs.]
And I didn’t think that Joanne was Silver Lake because that’s just a very specific, very East Side type person, and she watches reality TV. She’s not above that. I mean, I’m more basic than Joanne. I live in West Hollywood, and I felt like we could do better than that. She doesn’t need to be as basic as I am.
Hey, I live in West Hollywood. It’s not basic! Only the people who visit are basic.
I do too, but I wanted her to have a little. The people we see out in West Hollywood, I wanted her to have a little more edge than that, but not too much.
We’ve got the Design District right over here. We’ve got this little strip here. It’s happening.
[We realize we are neighbors and, no, we’re not telling you where we live.]
So, I thought like, O.K., Noah grew up rich. That’s intentional. He has immigrant parents who made it. And so I thought maybe Hancock Park is where he grew up, or Sherman Oaks. Both of those felt like you could do sort of different versions of immigrant parents. And so his parents’ house actually is more in the Valley, it’s in Sherman Oaks. And then it felt very Lynn [Stephanie Faracy] to have her little bungalow house in Carthay Circle. So yeah, it was very intentional. What parts of LA do I want to see that we have not really seen so much of? We’ve seen the reservoir in Silver Lake. She’s certainly not Echo Park. It was all very intentional.
Should we expect more of that in season two?
Definitely more of it, but also, season one shows are really hard. There’s so much that’s pushing up against you. It’s like planning a wedding. It’s designed to break you. And so season two, we had more breathing room and we had more time to think things through a little bit. And so season two, we really go out of our way to highlight small businesses in LA and local businesses.
That’s fantastic.
So, every time you see anyone have takeout food or a coffee cup or anything like that, it’s an intentional business.
You put your heart and soul into this show. It came from a personal place. How anxious were you before it dropped on Netflix?
Yes. Well, so Netflix knows what they’re doing and they’re not idiots. They know what you’re thinking before you’ve even thought it. And so they find ways to do this early data. Certain people have access, early access to shows, and they get feedback on it. And so they had done a lot of internal stuff that was super positive. It wasn’t like this is going to be the biggest hit of the year. There’s no way to really know that. But it was like “We’re feeling like this is going to do really well.” And then the trailer coming out really kind of indicated a lot to me about how excited people were to see Adam and Kristen together. So that felt like a big indicator. But I had a baby right before the show came out, my first child, and my water broke early the week after we finished shooting and started editing. And so I was kind of in this haze of being a new mom when it came out, and I was in this cocoon of chaos. And I think it was kind of a blessing because it was a huge distraction from all the stuff that was going on around the show, and also extremely humbling to have this show hit big while somebody was turning my life upside down and not letting me sleep. Yeah, I was nervous, but it kind of quickly revealed itself to be doing well fast, and that kind of shocked me.
Was it like a delayed “Oh wait, this was a massive hit?” Was it something you realized a couple of weeks later, or was it something you took in at the time?
Well, you have to understand that when you’re at the center of it, of course, your friend’s mom is going to tell you how much she loves it because she knows you’re associated with it. I can’t have a real view of what it’s like in the world outside of myself because everyone who talks to me is going to tell me when somebody’s seen it. So it’s hard for me to understand if someone in France is enjoying it, having no connection to me. So it was hard, but I was impressed with how nice the reviews were. Even when it became popular, that’s a really easy time to just find things to s**t on. And it felt like people on the internet were being really nice about it. And that kind of shocked me because I was getting my thick skin ready for all the attacks, and people were mostly really. nice
I remember watching the final episode and being like, “I do not know what that song is. I’m Shazam-ing that song.” It’s “See Her Out” by Francis In The Lights. Was that a track your music supervisor found, was a favorite of yours? How did that song get in the final episode?
No, it was actually, I’m making sure I get the information correct right now because I want to make sure I get the name. It was not our music supervisors, and it was not me. It was our editor, Keenan [Hiett]. He put the song into his edit of the first kiss in the second episode, and we were watching it like, “Holy s**t, what is the song? It’s so perfect.” And usually, the music that goes into the editor’s edit is like a placeholder, and then you find something else, and we could never beat it. And thally wish I could remember who it was who suggested we use the same song at the end. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t our music supervisors. It was like one of the producers or maybe an editor who was like, “Let’s use the same song at the end.” And that song was just perfect. I mean, it was just beyond.
My last question for you is, I saw you did an interview a couple of months ago. You were talking about the differences between season one and season two, and you described season two being centered on “how did they” and that season two would be “how will they” meaning how will they get married? How will they stay together? Can you expand on that?
Well, at the end of season one, he chooses her. And so season two picks up pretty much right after that, not the same night, but around that time of like, “O.K., now how do we do that? What does that look like? Right. I’ve put my career on the line, I’ve paused things for you.” And that’s a lot of pressure on a relationship. And so it’s like, “What is our relationship going to look like, and can we do this forever in real life?” I think that once you get past those initial weeks or early months of being insatiable for each other and not being rational about anything, then you kind of have to look at, do our friends like each other? Do our families get along? Do we want to spend a week the same way? What do we do with these hours? We’re not young, so where’s this going? And that is a really interesting part of a relationship to examine. And so that’s really what Season two is.
In a perfect world, season two is a massive hit. Have you already thought about future seasons?
I mean, you can’t help yourself but think ahead a little bit. But I typically don’t get too far ahead of myself. I don’t have five seasons planned in my mind because I like to see how the audiences react to something. I mean, I’ve done it one time. So, season one, I saw how the reaction was on the internet, and it helped inform what stories I wanted to tell in season two.
“Nobody Wants This” season one is available on Netflix. Season two drops on Oct. 23.
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