Nobody Wants This: A List of Things I Don't Get

Am I the only person on earth who just doesn’t quite get the hype when it comes to the new “rom com” series, Nobody Wants This? What am I missing here? Is it a heart or a brain or both? For two weeks I’ve been tentatively asking people about it, hoping that one - just one other person - would turn around and say to me, ‘yeah…don’t get it either.’

But nobody did. I am alone with this quirk. Like a someone with a really niche and totally unacceptable fetish - sex with pandas, for example - or a penchant for doing untoward things with the pointy end of a garden gnome.

The more people I asked about Nobody Wants This, and the more people who ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT, the more I felt like some sort of social deviant, searching for other members of a secret club. Not loving Nobody Wants This was akin to not loving Dame Judy Dench, or hating Mary Berry: it became clear that my sort (the sort who just didn’t get the excitement about “the kiss”) were not welcome in polite society.

Why are you so cynical when it comes to people being happy? cried one friend. This is like the time you rated those three weddings you’d been to on a scale of 1-10 for boringness!

I knew you’d say you hated it, said another. You’re just doing this because everyone else likes it so much!

Nobody responded positively to my criticisms of the show - in fact at times the conversations began to feel dangerous. As though my reputation might be resting upon thin ice. I began to ease into my enquiries more tentatively, skulking about the subject with all the furtiveness of an MP looking for a drugs hook-up.

‘Can I ask….do you like romantic comedies that make you want to turn your eyeballs back to front so that you can watch the back of your head instead?’

To be clear: I didn’t ever say that I hated it. I don’t even actively dislike Nobody Wants This. It’s beautifully produced, brilliantly written and all of the streets are snazzily lit and empty of anything distasteful, like litter, or people who don’t look very good. So far, so perfect. And anyway, I’m not even in the right place to have made a proper call on the show yet, because I’ve only just finished episode three!

There are just elements of the show that vex me and nobody else seems to share my pain. So I’m beginning to think that the problem isn’t the show: it’s me.

None of this helped, perhaps, by the ongoing issue that I seem to have with hype in general: it immediately turns me into a cynical old bat. Had I gone into watching NWT completely blind then I would have happily trundled my way through it, laughing out loud at the bits that really are incredibly funny (the text messages being read aloud by the car’s infotainment system made me laugh so violently I thought I’d cracked a rib) and making vague, very weak appreciative sounds at the supposedly romantic moments whilst also scrolling Vinted for second-hand jeans.

But I didn’t go into it blind: I went into it having read at least five thousand Instagram posts and online articles about how it was virtually world-ending and life-changing and how Seth from the OC was the sexiest man alive. I thought that I would be another one of the people who had found it world-ending and life-changing and I am left feeling ever so slightly inadequate and uncool.

Here’s a list of things I don’t quite get about the first three episodes of Nobody Wants This: