‘Nobody Wants This’ Creator Erin Foster on Jewish Conversion

Six years ago, a guy Erin Foster had just started dating was meeting her mother for the first time and brought to the restaurant a bouquet of sunflowers large enough to command its own chair. “The flowers were so long, and they kept falling over,” says Foster. “Sitting there, I was like, Well, if someone cares this much, then that feels like a weakness.” She was 36 and had dated enough assholes, including a few celebrities, to know that she was the jerk in this case, but still, she recoiled from him on the car ride home. “There’s no hope for me,” she remembers thinking. “I am a human who got some bad wiring about what a relationship is supposed to look like, and I’m clearly sabotaging something.” When Foster, the creator and an executive producer of the Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This, first told her writers’ room this anecdote, the men were baffled, but the women immediately got it. “That made me feel like it was a good story to tell,” she says.

The scene gets worked into the sixth episode of the show, which stars elder-millennial network-TV statespeople Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. Bell plays Joanne, a jaded, agnostic podcast host who also doesn’t know what a good relationship is supposed to look like. Burned out by bad Raya dates, she inadvertently falls for a charming, well-adjusted rabbi named Noah, played by Brody, until he tries too hard to impress her parents. “I can’t believe I ever let him touch me with those giant-flower-holding hands,” she says to her younger sister, Morgan (Succession’s Justine Lupe), and they launch into all the random ways former boyfriends have given them “the ick.”

“I’ve always written something that’s stemmed from my life in some way,” Foster says. Now 42, she’s preparing chicken-lettuce cups in the kitchen of her West Hollywood apartment. A claw clip keeps her long blonde hair out of her face as she briefly puts on a pair of pink onion goggles. When her husband, Simon Tikhman, a 40-year-old record-label owner and talent manager, arrives home a few minutes later, he kisses Foster and their infant daughter, Noa, before joining the discussion. “I personally don’t remember the sunflowers being that big,” he says. “But I do remember driving home and thinking, It’s not about the flowers.”

Nobody Wants This is, in part, a love letter to Tikhman. But it’s also a breakthrough moment for Foster, who comes from Hollywood privilege (her father is Grammy-winning producer and composer David Foster) but hasn’t quite managed to find her niche. First, she tried acting, like her older sister, Sara. Then the pair started, in 2020, the clothing line Favorite Daughter and, in 2021, The World’s First Podcast, in which they candidly talk — and often argue — about everything: postpartum sex, cancel culture, Love Island, Foster’s ancient relationship with Chad Michael Murray, their mixed feelings about former stepmoms. But Nobody Wants This, with its nostalgia-inducing cast and caustic tone, is destined to be a weeknight binge for 30-somethings familiar with Call Her Daddy. Joanne second-guesses Noah’s good-guy persona, and Noah cares too much about what his congregation and his mother (a meddling Tovah Feldshuh) will think about him dating a so-called shiksa. Meanwhile, scene-stealers played by Lupe and Veep’s Timothy Simons, as Noah’s loudmouth older brother, Sasha, form an unlikely friendship and revel in the couple’s mishaps.

That Tikhman inspired this love story was both a gift and a complication. The pair met in 2018 at a gym where they would make out in the parking lot and then pretend not to know each other to prevent their romance from becoming gossip among the trainers. The day after the sunflower incident, Foster went there worried that things had officially soured. “Simon was like, ‘Get over it,’” she says. “‘I’m supposed to care what your parents think because I want to marry you.’” She pauses. “I was so in love with him at that moment.”

Foster likes to marvel at how normal Tikhman is, which he used to interpret as her calling him “basic” and find mildly insulting. Brody, whose character is loosely inspired by Tikhman, said that before the script was even finished, Foster told him, “We’re actually having a little trouble — not trouble, but we just haven’t really found Noah’s baggage yet.” Tikhman is not a rabbi, but he is Jewish. His parents emigrated from the former Soviet Union to San Francisco in 1979, and he holds them in high regard. To this day, it pains him to recall how once, in seventh grade, he told his mom to be quiet — a story he shares at Foster’s urging and which she remains bewildered by. “I can’t even repeat the things that I’ve said to my parents,” she says.

Foster grew up in Malibu and Calabasas, the middle daughter from David’s second marriage to former model Rebecca Dyer. (David is now married to American Idol alum Katharine McPhee, who is one year and seven months younger than Erin.) “Life was chaotic when I was a kid,” says Foster. “To me, normal is exotic.” So during those furtive makeout sessions, when Tikhman told Foster that his wife would need to be Jewish, she was open to converting: “I was like, ‘You want me? Great. It’d be fun to be part of something.’”

Tikhman is a co-founder of the Core Entertainment, a talent-management company that handles Nickelback and up-and-coming country stars such as Bailey Zimmerman and Nate Smith. When he met Foster, he says, “I was at a point in my life where I was just having fun.” Foster stops dicing carrots. “Fuckboy energy,” she interjects. “Off the record,” says Tikhman, cradling Noa. “On the record,” she shoots back.

Deciding which parts of their life can be turned into content is probably where the pair differ the most. “It’s ingrained in our culture to keep things private,” says Tikhman. Foster reminds him of the time he once disclosed his mom’s high blood pressure to her as though it were a state secret. Meanwhile, she says, “I always feel like the best way to connect with someone is to say everything.” The collision of their worlds was immediate and inspiring to Foster, who had been trying to get a television series off the ground for almost a decade. So she started toying with an idea for a show about their relationship.

She just neglected to tell him about it.

At her wedding.
Photo: Allan Zepeda

A few days earlier, Foster is at her kitchen table nursing Noa and workshopping another pitch over Zoom when I arrive. “I have something that’s more important than all of you,” she says, jumping off the call. She changes into a yellow pin-striped button-up shirt from her clothing line and a baby-blue baseball hat that reads FAKE RELATIONSHIP from 831 Stories, a women-run company in which the Foster sisters invested as part of what she calls their “accidental empire.”

We’re heading to Great White, a trendy café with locations across the city. Foster and Tikhman are living in West Hollywood until they finish renovating their Hancock Park home, but the apartment has sentimental value because it’s where Noa was born. As we leave, she nods to the living room with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. “I tried to give birth right over there in a tub, and it just didn’t happen,” she says.

Before pursuing TV writing, Foster was an irresolute actress with a few lines in early-aughts TV shows. “It was the path of least resistance,” she says. “I don’t look back feeling proud.” She had a small but important arc on The O.C. as Marissa Cooper’s hood-rat bully and was in the car that infamously killed off the character. “I had a different nose and different hair, and I’m hoping he never finds out,” she says when I ask if their O.C. connection was why she cast Brody. “Oh my God, the iconic car crash!” says Brody when I check if he remembered her. “I thought it was her sister?” He signed on soon after he read the script. “I thought it was incredibly charming, and I hadn’t had the opportunity really to play a romantic lead in a long time,” he says. “I relished the opportunity to play a goof or a dork.”

Foster started writing around 2012, encouraged by her stint as a columnist for HelloGiggles, the women’s site co-founded by her good friend Sophia Rivka Rossi. “Oh my God, I have a skill set,” she remembers thinking. “I really want to lean into that.” Her manager, Oly Obst, who serves as an executive producer on Nobody Wants This, taught her how to write a script, and she briefly joined the room on Ryan Murphy’s short-lived 2012 NBC sitcom, The New Normal. The last time she got close to having a show green-lit was in 2018 with a pilot called Daddy Issues, starring herself and Don Johnson as her father, who begins dating her best friend. It wasn’t picked up. “I was sort of like, Am I even a writer?” she says. “Do I only write people in my life exactly how they are?” (She has elsewhere clarified that Daddy Issues was not based on her dad’s relationship with McPhee. Despite the fact that it never aired, the project did score Foster and Sara a development deal with 20th Television.)

The subject of her famous father looms over our lunch. Growing up, Foster says, her dad was around a lot but in the studio much of the time. He discouraged her from pursuing music after three months of piano lessons. “I was doing it to have a connection to him,” she says. “And when he said, ‘You don’t have it, and it’s okay,’ it kind of set me free.” His job was obviously not without perks. Foster remembers being so excited when he worked on a few songs with Madonna shortly after she appeared at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards wearing the famous blue satin Gucci shirt with a black bra. Foster begged her mother to buy her a similar blue shirt so she could go to her father’s place after school to meet the Queen of Pop. “In my seventh-grade brain, she was going to think I had good style and want to be friends,” she says. “Safe to say the shirt was not a hit. I don’t think she noticed it or cared.”

Foster says she is less defensive about her family connections now. “There’s an advantage, which is being comfortable in those rooms,” she admits. “It might be interesting for someone to take a meeting with so-and-so’s daughter. And it’s intimidating meeting with someone powerful in the entertainment industry. When you grow up exposed to those things — I had this confidence in my ability that I probably shouldn’t have had.”

She remembers bombing an early pitch for a script called How to Raise a Boyfriend, which was based on a book but also on her failure to turn guys with “goatees and roommates” into stable life partners. When asked in the meeting how it would end, she said she wasn’t sure, which was true in both an existential and literal sense. The feedback was terse: “You should know what you’re pitching.” She also worked on a script called Lezzie, which secured her representation with CAA, about “a girl who becomes a lesbian and thinks it’s really cool, and it becomes really performative for her,” says Foster, who dated celebrity DJ and Lindsay Lohan ex Samantha Ronson in 2011. “Which is not something I thought I was doing at the time.”

Then came Barely Famous. The VH1 reality-show spoof, which aired from 2015 to 2016, was the Foster sisters’ response to repeated requests to do an actual reality show, perhaps to close the link between their family and a cabal of adjacent programming that included Keeping Up With the Kardashians. (Foster’s dad is the ex-husband of both Linda Thompson, mother of Brandon and Brody Jenner, and Yolanda Hadid, mother of Gigi and Bella, who did time on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.) She and Sara depicted themselves as shallow socialites desperate for relevance. They enlisted cameos from friends including Courteney Cox and Chris Martin, and the show found its groove in a scathing second season. In one episode, Erin thinks she might be pregnant by either Zach Braff or the valet who parked their car. “Having Zach Braff’s baby is plan A,” says Sara to the cameras. “Having the valet’s baby is Planned Parenthood.”

“Did you watch it for the first time prepping for today?” asks Foster. I did. She laughs. “No one was watching it,” she says. “We would get the ratings, and there’s a long list of a hundred shows that includes 2 a.m. cartoons, and we were at the bottom of that list.” She drags a taro chip through some guacamole. “Some people thought it was a reality, and that was devastating to us.”

Barely Famous was quickly canceled, but it marked the beginning of a prolific professional collaboration between Foster and her sister. They talk daily, briefly worked together at Bumble, and have invested in various start-ups, and Sara serves as an executive producer on all of Erin’s 20th Television projects. In fact, it was Sara who, in her words, “stalked” Modern Family co-creator Steven Levitan at the members-only club San Vicente Bungalows several years ago to ask him to come onboard as an executive producer of Nobody Wants This, which he did. “I thought, Let’s go find somebody who can give us an even better chance of getting bought,” says Sara.

The sisters weren’t always close, which they delve into from time to time on their podcast. While Erin bonded with their little sister, Jordan, she was jealous of Sara. “The beginning of Sara’s life was just so fucking blessed,” Erin says. “It was like every door opened for her and then the door would slam in my face.” Sara was smart and popular and more successful as an actress; she was in the 2004 cult hit D.E.B.S. and joined the 2008 reboot of 90210 in its second season. “I think Erin dramatizes the situation,” says Sara over the phone. “I was lacking a big sister to help me through the dynamics of our family. It’s taken a lot of therapy for me to understand her story and for her to understand mine.”

Much of Foster’s early adulthood played out like a milder version of her Barely Famous character with her dating a series of “shitty people,” she says, while Sara was until recently with the former tennis player Tommy Haas and is co-parenting their two children. And then Erin met Simon. “Everything calmed down, and I felt really happy,” says Foster. At the same time, she knew happiness was not particularly funny or creatively fertile. It was the Fosters’ manager, Obst, who pushed her to sell the idea for a series about her conversion, which was first called Shiksa. When she began work on it right before the pandemic, she finally mentioned it to Tikhman: “He was like, ‘Wait, sorry — you’re writing a show making fun of my family?’”

On set with Adam Brody and Kristen Bell.
Photo: Adam Rose/Netflix

Originally, Foster wrote Nobody Wants This with the intention of starring in it herself. But Netflix wanted Bell. “Kristen said, ‘I don’t want to take a role away from you,’ and I was like, ‘First of all, Netflix isn’t really offering me the role, and more importantly, I’m trying to get pregnant,’” says Foster, who endured 20 rounds of IVF before having Noa earlier this year. She thought Bell would do a good job. “I really, really did not want Joanne to be the fuckup woman where you meet her and she’s hung-over with mascara running down her face. Kristen is not an edgy person. She has an inherent warmth about her.”

In the show, Noah’s parents are appalled when their rabbi son starts dating Joanne. Foster stresses that her husband’s parents were never unwelcoming, but they were skeptical, especially after she went to synagogue with them for a Rosh Hashanah service and afterward admitted that she “wasn’t that moved.” In fact, she’d begun itching to look at her phone around hour two, which she refrained from mentioning, but still, she says, “I knew immediately I’d made a mistake.” The couple went home and fought.

“I didn’t handle that as well as I could’ve,” Tikhman says. “I’m with someone who needs the truth, and … temple can be very boring.” Prior to their wedding on New Year’s Eve in 2019, they both attended eight weeks of Choosing Judaism classes, and Foster quickly embraced the religion, specifically Tikhman’s Reform denomination. She liked being encouraged to doubt and ask questions, she liked that their rabbi told them their discussions during the car ride home were the most important part of conversion, and she particularly liked hearing that converts were closest to God. She shoots a mock-superior look at Tikhman. “It felt like they appreciated my spirit as, opposed to wanting to quiet it,” she says. “And that felt really cool to me to be accepted that way.”

Foster’s enthusiasm was what convinced Tikhman that Shiksa, as he still calls it, was coming from a respectful place. “Her voice is such an honest voice,” he says. “I know when she says things, it would be a disservice to tell her not to. But I also know Erin knows where the line is.” It helped that the characters bear little resemblance to his own family. While Tikhman says “there is no one funnier in the world” than Simons, Tikhman insists his own brother has “literally zero” similarities to his counterpart on the show. “I intentionally made characters different so I wouldn’t get divorced,” says Foster.

To prepare for filming, the couple joined the cast for a production of Just for Us, Alex Edelman’s one-man comedy about infiltrating a group of white supremacists in Queens. Edelman’s examination of Jewish-ness and victimhood echoes the final stages of Foster’s conversion, when her rabbi asked her, “Are you ready to be hated?” She pauses. “And I was like, Hated? It’s 2019. People don’t hate Jewish people.” Foster wears a Star of David necklace along with one that spells NOA in Hebrew. She says she hasn’t personally experienced antisemitism but acknowledges that Nobody Wants This is premiering in a different moment, weeks before the first anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel and amid desperate calls for a cease-fire in Gaza. “This show is not meant to be any kind of commentary on what’s happening in the world,” she says. “I really hope people don’t expect it. I didn’t grow up Jewish, I did not grow up in Israel, so I don’t think that it’s responsible for me to try to tell that story.”

If Netflix green-lights a second season, Foster hopes to explore more of the conversion experience, a narrative that probably hasn’t been centered like this since Charlotte married Harry in the final season of Sex and the City. “I am used to writing about all the things that are going wrong in my life,” says Foster. “My manager always says that sometimes when you’re succeeding, it feels like you’re being beaten to death with your dreams.”