Adam Brody Breaks Down ‘Nobody Wants This’ Success on Jimmy Kimmel
Adam Brody has spent the last two years hearing strangers shout at him on the street — and he came prepared to talk about it on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday night, just over a week before the October 22 premiere of Nobody Wants This' third season on Netflix. In the appearance, the actor said he'd initially sensed the comedy would find a broad audience, but that the range of people who bring it up still surprises him. On a recent trip to Scotland, where his wife was filming, high school field-hockey players approached him about the series, and later that same day, a table of men in their seventies at a lunch restaurant mentioned it too. He took it as evidence that Nobody Wants This is not a niche hit with a single demographic but a genuinely worldwide one.
That reach is backed by hard data. The first season premiered September 26, 2024, and opened with 10.3 million views in its first four days, per Netflix's Top 10 figures reported by Variety, eventually racking up 15.9 million in its second week. Season 2 arrived October 23, 2025, opened to 8.6 million views in four days, and finished 2025's second half with 30 million views in Netflix's own engagement report. Created by Erin Foster, the show earned three Emmy nominations in 2025 — Outstanding Comedy Series, plus lead actor and lead actress nods for Brody and Kristen Bell — and six Golden Globe nominations across 2025 and 2026 without a win. Netflix renewed it for Season 3 on November 4, 2025, twelve days after Season 2 debuted, and the new batch runs ten half-hour episodes.
The interview's lighter stretch revealed something about how the show lands at home. Brody said his children, ages six and eleven, know he's on the show and simply don't care — though his daughter does light up about the fact that he works with Anna, and his wife, Leighton Meester, guest-starred in Season 2 as a mommy influencer with a childhood grudge against Bell's Joanne. What did register with the kids was darker: Brody showed them a clip from Scream 4, in which he appeared as Deputy Hoss and was killed by Ghostface, and his six-year-old has now decided to dress as Ghostface for Halloween. "He murdered daddy," Brody summed up, with the deadpan timing his fans know from the show.
There was also a reminder of the road to the rabbi role, which fits the rest of his life better than it might seem. Brody said he flirted with acting at twelve, did a single school play as a paperboy in an adult production, found it unsatisfying, and stepped away for years — during which he worked as a janitor at a local swimming pool (he was too small to hold the leaf blower), a car wash, Einstein's Bagels, surf shops, a hotel minibar restocker, and a supermarket he got fired from. His last job before acting, he said, was at a Blockbuster, a detail confirmed back in a 2023 Associated Press interview and one he acknowledged his eleven-year-old can't quite process. The one piece of childhood nostalgia he did hand down: a first concert at age twelve, front row at a local hip-hop radio show — the year, he figured, was 1992, which would put Kriss Kross at the peak of their run. Between the Blockbuster shifts and the Ghostface demise, the guy now famous as the hot rabbi on Netflix has a résumé that reads less like a star's and more like the plot of his own show's underdog charm.
