For years, Erin Foster thought that her tumultuous dating life was keeping her career afloat. If nothing else, there is a lot of comedy to be wrung from a relationship gone wrong. But, as she tells Krista Smith on Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast, once she found a true partner in life, she had to rethink her approach to writing. Enter: Nobody Wants This.
Inspired by Foster’s real-life love story with her now-husband, the series stars Kristen Bell as Joanne, an agnostic Los Angeles dating and relationship podcaster, and Adam Brody as Noah, a dreamboat rabbi, who fall in love despite the forces working against their union. Joanne and past Erin had a lot in common.
“For a decade I had been writing from whatever was happening in my life. And every project had a real cynicism to it, because I felt cynical about relationships and myself and love,” she says. “It wasn’t very hopeful because that’s just the place that I was in. It was always about a woman sabotaging herself and self-destructing in some way and choosing the wrong things. And that was totally working for me in my career. So in some ways it was like art was imitating life and I was on this rinse and repeat situation in my life. And if I was on a bad date, I would think, ‘Oh, this is going to be really good to write about.’ I wouldn’t even care that my life was crumbling. I was excited to use it. And so when I met Simon, who is my husband now, honestly, I thought he was kind of killing my vibe.”
Quips Sara Foster, Erin’s sister/producing partner/business partner: “He was not good for our career.”
Ultimately, though, Erin realized there could be something “interesting and funny and compelling” about a healthy relationship. Healthy doesn’t necessarily equal boring, of course, because it can actually be incredibly fun to watch “two people falling for each other who should be together.”
It was easy to write about her relationship failures in the past because “being with the wrong person is actually really easy,” she says. “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.’ ”
It’s certainly hard — and terrifying — to write so openly about your own life, but there’s also something hard about doing it with your sister that the Fosters have finally figured out.
“It’s hard to not show up to work without having the foundation of 40 years together,” Sara says. “There’s a lot. And we’ve realized later in life that we had different childhoods.”
They might have grown up in the same house with the same loving parents, but they both coped with the tumult of their childhoods in different ways. Says Erin, “We had a complicated childhood. There was a lot of marriages, a lot of divorces, a lot of stepsiblings, a lot of half-siblings, a lot of people coming in and out. And it was complicated. Sara and I dealt with it in really different ways. She was the oldest in our household. I was the middle. Those two roles have very different paths.”
She continues, “Sara really went inward and she self-protected. Like, ‘I’m going to isolate myself and I’m going to put blinders on and I’m not going to deal with what’s happening in my house.’ I felt really abandoned by that because [she] was my big sister, so then I leaned on our little sister and I became her second mom. I loved being needed by someone and getting attention from her and teaching her things. It gave me purpose. I really loved it.”
Those complicated dynamics are reflected in the show — but so is the love. And ultimately, that’s at the core of Nobody Wants This and the Fosters’ other work. Says Sara, “It’s nice because we live in this hustle culture where everybody is just so thirsty. By the way, myself included. It’s like, nothing is enough. ‘I have to have a podcast. I have to have a brand. I have to have a this, I have to do a that or I’m failing.’ And I look at Erin and Erin’s not thirsty at all. … She deep down wants to cook for her husband, take care of her baby, and if the career works out, it works out. And I think that’s why it’s all working out.”
Listen to more of Sara and Erin Foster’s conversation with Krista Smith in their Skip Intro episode. Nobody Wants This is streaming now.
