Meet Me at Crafty

Welcome to the wild and wonderful era of Emmy Awards: Phase 1, a time before nomination voting when the arbitrary rules governing what is timely are set aside, and we can discuss projects that were released weeks or months earlier and deserve to be top of mind again. Nobody Wants This premiered on Netflix September 26, 2024.

Who else but Maura Corey could have so skillfully mastered the tone of Netflix hit Nobody Wants This in its first episode? Her career has encompassed everything from the Oscars (for which she earned three Emmy Award nominations) to commercials and unscripted to the tonal tightrope of AMC’s Kevin Can Fuck Himself. And all of it came to bear on her work on Nobody Wants This.

 “I started in commercials, where it’s 900 frames of a story, so you really get into sound design,” Corey says. “And then when I got into unscripted, it taught me how to look at footage as a whole. You have to think of creative ways to make a story come alive, because the footage can be boring. So when I moved into scripted, all of that knowledge of how to look at story, not just as a script but as a full storytelling process, that’s where I feel like the culmination of your skillsets and all the tools in your toolbox come into play the longer you edit.”

Nobody Wants This pulls from all of that in its first episode, as audiences meet podcast host Joanne (Kristen Bell) and rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) shortly before and after they meet each other at a party. The show is very funny, but it’s also very romantic—and neither comes at the expense of the other.

A lot of that is casting and chemistry, of course—but there’s also Corey’s eye for the telling detail. And not just what is intended to be used. “ They shoot four to five days for a comedy, so it’s not a ton of footage when it comes down to it,” she says. “Because they shoot so fast, you really do have to mine the material from even before they call action to after they call cut. So there are times where you use stuff that maybe wasn’t intended to be in the scene, but because the actors just have a good reaction on their face, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s it.’ Even though they didn’t mean maybe to do that, but they’re still in character. You use every frame that you can.”

Corey points to some reaction shots she included—a squint of the eyes from Bell, an appraising double take from Michael Hitchcock—but she’s also the mastermind behind the montage during the Matzah Ballers’ basketball game and the one who spotted the moment during Joanne and Adam’s meet-cute where Brody struggled to open a bottle of wine and the actors improvised.

The key to the show’s success is its groundedness, something Corey recognized would be necessary from the start. If Nobody Wants This is heightened, it’s heightened reality—everyone is better looking, funnier, more vulnerable than in real life. But there’s none of the over-the-top artificiality that can mar other rom-coms. (I just rewatched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Back-Up Plan, and Failure to Launch as a triple feature during a hangover; I know what over-the-top artificiality looks like.)

 “If you’ve met [show creator] Erin Foster, she’s pretty close to [Joanne],” Corey says. “She’s funny, she’s smart, she’s quirky. Everything that Joanne is a little bit. When I read the script, I was talking to everybody, [saying], ‘If we ground this and make it feel real, this romance is gonna be really like.’  We wanted to make sure you feel that these characters are people that you know and that are vulnerable and that are funny, but live in our world.”

That world is proudly Los Angeles, and not the usual L.A. that gets shorthanded as the Hollywood sign and the Capitol Building. The L.A. of Nobody Wants This is more East Side than beachy, and the entire dreamy landscape comes to life thanks to some stylish and stylized interstitials that show things like gasp! a city bus. (Yes, L.A. has public transit.)

 “When you put a pilot together, it’s really fast and furious, and so you need some material to tie and stitch in locations and feeling,” Corey says. “And one of our producers, Craig DiGregorio, who I did Kevin Can F Himself with, he said, ‘I don’t know, man. I’m tired of the same old B roll.’” So the team set out and filmed an Angeleno’s L.A. that has little to do with the usual tourist stops. “And if you notice, it’s a little off speed, so it feels a little dreamy, but it’s also not pretty or composed,” Corey says. “And I intentionally jump cut some stuff. We wanted to give it a feel of immediacy, but also dreaming.”

Maura Corey is a three-time Emmy nominee and two-time ACE Eddie Award nominee, including a nod for her work on the Nobody Wants This pilot (the episode she submitted for Emmys consideration). Her credits include Gen V, Acapulco, Teachers, and Key & Peele. Her go-to at crafty is string cheese.