Published Oct 5th, 2024 12:05PM EDT
Before Erin Foster met and married her husband Simon, her bad luck with romance had at least one redeeming quality: It provided a constant stream of material she could mine for her work as a TV producer and writer. You’d think that falling in love and entering into a beautiful, healthy relationship might be the worst thing that could happen to a cynical writer’s sharp edges — but you’d be wrong. Foster’s new Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This, one of the biggest TV shows on all of streaming this week according to Reelgood, is proof of that.
Being with the wrong person, Foster said during an interview for Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast, is certainly easy. “You can blame them for everything. When someone’s cheating, lying, betraying you, not holding up their end — everything is their fault, and you’re perfect. And then you get together with someone who is healthy and loving and emotionally present, and you realize that you are not perfect and that you can’t storm out of a room in an argument. You can’t say nasty shit to them when you’re fighting. You have to be a real person and it’s way harder. And I was like, ‘OK, that’s interesting to write about.’ ”
Her 10-episode Nobody Wants This, which racked up 45.7 million hours of viewership in its first four days of availability, stars Kristen Bell and Adam Brody in a kind of opposites-attract romance — in which Bell, an agnostic podcaster, falls in love with Brody’s hip and unconventional Jewish rabbi.
With that kind of premise, it’s easy to see why the show has a near-perfect 95% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing — and why it’s likewise resonating with viewers who’ve praised everything from its overall sense of fun to the sparkling chemistry between Bell and Brody. Raved one user on X about the show: “guys i started watching “nobody wants this” on netflix and oh my god i haven’t felt this level of butterflies in so long like i feel sick i wanna be in love so bad.”
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With that kind of response from critics and fans, no wonder Reelgood has the show at #1 this week. Reelgood, by the way, monitors 20 million viewing decisions each month across every streaming platform in the US, from Apple TV+ to Max, Peacock, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount+. For the 7-day period that ended on Oct. 2, the 10 TV shows that topped Reelgood’s latest weekly ranking are as follows:
- Nobody Wants This (Netflix)
- The Penguin (HBO/Max)
- High Potential (Hulu)
- Agatha All Along (Disney+)
- From (Prime Video)
- Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
- The Old Man (FX/Hulu)
- Grotesquerie (FX/Hulu)
- Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
- Matlock (Paramount+)
As always, there are several other great shows on the Reelgood ranking this week, like FX’s top-tier spy drama The Old Man as well as Apple TV+’s own spy drama Slow Horses, which is arguably the best show, period, on Apple’s streaming service.
Looking ahead, meanwhile, next week brings some major new releases that I’m sure will probably make their way onto the Reelgood charts — including Prime Video’s Citadel: Diana (Oct. 10), Netflix’s Outer Banks (Oct. 10), and Apple’s Disclaimer (Oct. 11). The latter, from director and five-time Academy Award winner Alfonso Cuarón, is especially one to keep an eye on — I’m expecting this one, which stars Cate Blanchett and is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Renée Knight, to be quite a major release, indeed.
