It’s not an easy time for Netflix.
They’re going through some corporate woes, and executive shuffles. The stock price is in a struggle right now.
So they need a hit, out of the box.
Until recently, that was assured for tomorrow. “Nobody Wants This” is coming back for a third season. The first two seasons were incredibly popular. The romcom about a rabbi and a shiksa picked up Emmy nominations.
But then one of its stars made a big mistake and put his foot in it, as they say.
Adam Brody, who plays the rabbi, answered a question from a magazine reporter about the Israel-Hamas-Palestine situation.
When asked, Brody told GQ: “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine. It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago.”
The explosion that followed was as loud as anything in the actual war. Brody, a Jew in real life playing a rabbi, was telling his American audience that Israel was committing genocide.
That might seem right to Hannah Einbeinder or Susan Sarandon, but the middle class suburban audience that supports “Nobody Wants This” and Israel through UJA and other organizations, did not want this.
Viewers of the Netflix show hit social media with a bang. They swore to boycott the series. The rabbi who serves as a consultant to the show criticized Broday and called him a lightweight anyway.
Steve Leder said on Instagram that Brody’s statements were “truly shocking,” “flippant” and “disgusting,” asserting his own view that “there is no genocide in Gaza.”
“You, by your own admission, are a relatively ignorant Jew, and your ignorance really showed the other day,” said Leder. “If you’re going to use a word like ‘genocide,’ you ought to know what it means.”
See his post below.
So when season 3 drops tomorrow, are the fans coming back? You’d think in anticipation that “Nobody Wants This” would be back in the Netflix top 10. Fans usually want to catch up right before a new season is delivered. But the show is not on the list, which is a little eyebrow raising.
One criticism of Brody is that when he spoke, he’d never said a word about the October 7th attack that killed 1,200 innocent Jews — or the kidnapping, rape, and torture. Since his genocide remark broke, he hasn’t made an effort to clear it up, or apologize in anyway. That was certainly a PR decision. Now we’ll see how it goes tomorrow and this weekend.
