We watched the first five episodes of “Nobody Wants This” last night. There are ten altogether, so one more night should do it. Don’t congratulate us for watching 5 episodes; they are each only about 25 minutes long.

You may have read about the show. Adam Brody is a rabbi and, by the way, is Jewish. He has to be Jewish – for one thing, he’s a rabbi (one day, there will be gentile rabbis, I am sure, but not yet – as far as I know). For another, his mother is Tovah Feldshuh. She could not have gentile kids if she tried (and who knows? perhaps she has tried).

He falls in love with Kristen Bell. Now, I don’t know Kristen Bell (never met her), and I don’t know Adam Brody (never met him), but they make a cute couple, so I wish them luck. The problem is that Kristen Bell is not only not Jewish (this gives Tovah Feldshuh enormous problems, as you might imagine), but she is a sex podcaster. What is a sex podcaster, you ask? A sex podcaster is a podcast host who talks about her personal sexual and dating experiences (the worse, the better for the podcast) and interviews experts in the subject. Kristen’s character’s name, by the way, is Joanne, but Kristen fits a sex podcaster better, I think, so I will stick with it. Adam’s character’s name is Noah. I see little difference between those two names.

Adam is the associate rabbi at Temple Chai. It is somewhere in southern California. The senior rabbi, of course, is Rabbi Cohen. Adam is in line for a promotion (if we know what that promotion is, I missed it, and he didn’t tell that to Kristen, who found it out by accident and didn’t seem to care one way or another). But, truth be known, at 44, Adam is a bit old to be an associate rabbi under Rabbi Cohen. Although his congregation seems to like him, he seems to lack ambition. Kristen at 41 is a bit old to be a sex podcaster, too, but they both looks ten years younger than they really are, so we can get beyond this.

In case you are wondering, it seems that Adam is concerned that his congregation might not accept a rabbi with a shiksa girlfriend, much less wife. He knows that his mother Tovah won’t and he knows that his father will never say anything to make it seem that he has an independent mind. If you are married to Tovah, you tow the line. Clearly.

But Adam promises he will never hide Kristen and he spends half of the first five episodes hiding her in plain sight. At his temple, at the Jewish camp where he gives a class, in a very public restaurant with the Grand Poobah of the podcast world. You get the picture.

Oh, yes. Adam has a brother. Now they are nothing like each other, so one of them must be adopted. I vote for the older brother. His name is Sasha since Tovah and Adam’s dad are Soviet refugees. He is the “loser sibling”, and Kristen has a “loser sibling”, too, who shares her podcasts. The difference is that Sasha is really a loser and whats-her-name (she made a great impression on me) is not. But that’s a detail. Don’t worry about it.

And, oh, yes, there is another complication. For three years, Adam has been with Esther, who is as Jewish as Kristen is not, but he breaks up with her, shocking the entire Jewish world. Especially shocking Esther, her parents (also Sovietniks) and his parents and, probably, even Rabbi Cohen (although he doesn’t show it).

It’s a cute show (with some of the situations purely ridiculous, like when Adam brings Kristen to the camp in Ojai and then tries to hide her in their cabin, but has to deal with her escape and her joining a candle making class and confiding in a bunch of 13 year old girls), and we will watch the other five episodes, I am (somewhat) certain.

Rabbis with unusual girl friends must be the thing in show biz, these days. You might (I know you don’t, but you might) remember the film we saw live at the JCC several months ago, called “The Two Temples”. That was another rabbi, also an overage associate rabbi, but a guy with some emotional issues, who worked at a different temple in a different time zone, and who fell in love with his old music teacher from high school. I don’t remember the names exactly, but she was something like Mrs. O’Connell, and after some emotional get-togethers, she decided she wanted to have a bat mitzvah.

He, too, was supposed to marry a Jewish girl, the daughter of the senior rabbi, who had been living in “the city”, but was willing to return to this upstate town to be a rebbetzin, and they had a ten minute affair, but his heart was with O’Connell (probably 20 years older than he), and everyone – including of course his parents (not from the USSR) – were shocked.

Then, it turned out that O’Connell was her married name and she was really Susie Schwartz (or some such thing) and that might have helped for twenty minutes of the film or so, until it turned out that her father might have been Sidney Schwartz, but her mother had been Angelina Santa Maria, or some such thing, and everything was off.

While “Nobody Wants This” has ten episodes, and makes you make a minyan of choices, “The Two Temples” hit you all at once as a 90 minute film. Which is better is hard to say.

For centuries or millennia, perhaps, rabbis have had to marry Jews. But inspired by media such as this (or perhaps the other way round), in June of this year the Reform Movement announced that it is acceptable for rabbis to be “in relationships” with non-Jews. So, when I say that one day there will be gentile rabbis, who can say I am wrong?