Like everyone else, I spent this weekend binge-watching Netflix’s new 10-part rom-com series, Nobody Wants This.
Starring Kristen Bell as Joanne, the perennially single co-host of a podcast about sex (from which the show gets its name, Nobody Wants This) and Adam Brody as Noah, a recently single rabbi, it follows their relationship as they find themselves inexplicably drawn together despite being worlds apart (hence it being dubbed our generation’s When Harry Met Sally). And while yes, I was charmed by a grown-up Seth Cohen (what self-respecting millennial fangirl wouldn’t be?!), what struck me most about the show was that it so accurately depicts the realities of dating in your late thirties and early forties – a theme not often explored in any truly authentic way on screen.
Both aged 44 in real life, the age of their characters was also important to Bell and Brody, who didn’t want to pretend to be decades younger, as is so often the case in Hollywood. Speaking on Bell’s husband Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, Brody explained: “I’m very comfortable with my age. I just don’t want to pretend that I’m 10 years younger. I want you to reconcile that you’re casting me and you’ve got to account for the amount of time that this person has been on this earth and why they are in this position.”
As a 36-year-old single woman, I also appreciated that their characters’ ages weren’t ever a major plot point – or even referred to – either. More often than not, when dating in midlife is explored on screen, it’s seen as a last-chance-saloon type of thing. At least one of the characters is divorced or widowed, for example, and are now having another crack at this romance thing (see: 2013’s Enough Said, or 1998’s You’ve Got Mail). Or it’s an age-gap thing, such as in the recent Anne Hathaway film, The Idea of You, in which she plays a forty-something single mum dating a twenty-year-old Harry Styles-esque popstar (which is also so unrealistic as to be frankly annoying). Worse still, it’s played for laughs: enter The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
But what if that isn’t everybody’s experience? What if some people in their late thirties or early forties are just still single? Like Joanne and Noah are? And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them, thank you very much.
Hopper Stone/Netflix