Erin Foster, the writer who turned her own conversion into Netflix’s Nobody Wants This

Erin Foster

Photo: TechCrunch / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 23, 1982 Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Screenwriter, television producer and actress
Known for	Cellular, Still Waiting…

Erin Foster spent her first decade in Hollywood playing girls who barely had names: a party guest here, a surf girl there, the blonde friend who leaves the scene before the plot starts. Then she wrote her own life into a script, the one where an agnostic podcaster falls for a rabbi, and Netflix turned it into Nobody Wants This, a romantic comedy with Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. The new season now on the platform has her in front of the camera on her own show, cast as the version of the heroine for whom nothing worked out. It is a neat joke about the distance she has travelled, and it lands just as she finds herself defending the series from inside its own cast.

Foster grew up close to fame without the money people assumed came with it. Her father is the record producer David Foster and her mother, Rebecca Dyer, was a model; Erin is the middle of their three daughters, between the actress Sara Foster and the stylist Jordan Foster. Her parents divorced when she was four, the sisters were raised by their mother, and Erin was later sent to boarding school in Switzerland. Her father’s later marriages brought step-siblings, the Jenner brothers and then Gigi and Bella Hadid. On her podcast she has talked about resenting a father who was busy raising other children, and about the rich-kid label the sisters never escaped: “We did not have a trust fund; we had to have a job.”

The job, at first, was acting. Born in Los Angeles on 23 August 1982, Foster worked through the 2000s in the small roles that keep a young actress in the union and out of the spotlight. She turned up in Judging Amy and Roswell, in a single episode of Gilmore Girls, in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Reno 911!, and in five episodes of The O.C. as Heather. There was a doctor in House, a guest part in Castle, and a surf girl in the 2004 thriller Cellular.

What did suggest it was the move into writing. In 2012 she joined the staff of the NBC sitcom The New Normal, and three years later she and Sara created Barely Famous for VH1, a mockumentary in which the two sisters played inflated versions of themselves, the fringe celebrity daughters forever angling for a reality show. It ran for two seasons, and its premise was sharper than its ratings: they were satirising the format that would have happily cast them, on a channel that lived off it.

The years that followed looked, from the outside, like a pivot away from television. The sisters became co-heads of creative at the dating app Bumble, launched the clothing label Favorite Daughter in 2020 and, a year later, The World’s First Podcast. In 2019 they had also signed a production deal with 20th Century Fox Television, and it was under that deal that Erin began developing a series about the most private turn in her own life. She had met the music manager Simon Tikhman at the gym; he is Jewish, she had been agnostic, and before their wedding in Nashville on New Year’s Eve 2019 she converted to Reform Judaism.

Netflix picked up the project in 2023, with Steven Levitan, the co-creator of Modern Family, as executive producer and Bell attached as star and producer. The working title was Shiksa, the Yiddish word for a non-Jewish woman. As Nobody Wants This it premiered in September 2024, with Foster and Craig DiGregorio as showrunners, Bell as the podcaster Joanne and Brody as Noah, a rabbi in line for promotion. In its second week it became Netflix’s most-watched English-language series, with 15.9 million views. The first season drew three nominations at the Primetime Emmys, for Outstanding Comedy Series and for both leads, and the show has been a Golden Globe contender for best musical or comedy series in consecutive years.

The autobiography is the selling point, and it is also where the criticism landed. Glamour’s Jessica Radloff wrote that the show’s Jewish women come off as controlling and marriage-hungry, there mainly to plan dinners and freeze out the outsider, and she objected to the casual use of “shiksa” in the pilot. Foster’s answer was that the lead character is a rabbi, “a hot, cool, young rabbi who smokes weed”, and that “we need positive Jewish stories right now.” Both things can be true. The series is warm about Judaism, but it is written from the convert’s chair, so the community she married into is seen, inevitably, through the eyes of the woman trying to get in. Netflix also handed the second season to new showrunners, Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, which left the story of Foster’s own life in other hands day to day while she stayed on as creator and executive producer.

The second season arrived on 23 October 2025 and Netflix renewed the show for a third in November. That season premiered on 22 October 2026 with new faces in the conversion storyline: Sarah Silverman as Rabbi Eden and Andrew Rannells as Sebastien, Joanne’s rival in the class. The proposal at its centre was drawn from Foster’s own engagement. In the fourth episode she plays Nicole, a terminally single, chaotic woman whom Deadline described as Joanne if everything had gone wrong. Brody, meanwhile, had told an interviewer that he supported a free Palestine, and Foster said on a podcast that she disagreed with him and that he was entitled to his opinion. She compared the set to “dinner tables around the world” where families argue.

Foster married Tikhman, the co-founder of the management company The Core Entertainment, who also assembled the soundtrack for the second season. Their daughter, Noa, was born in May 2024, and the family lives in Beverly Hills. Sara remains her business partner, co-host and producer, and the two run their projects through Fatigue Sisters Productions.

That company signed a multi-year overall deal with 20th Television in December 2024, and the sisters are developing a comedy based on Hotter in the Hamptons, the novel by the influencer Tinx. ABC has also named them guest investors on the eighteenth season of Shark Tank. As for the show that changed her career, Foster says there is more story to tell after the wedding, but Netflix has not ordered a fourth season, and she has said she is not getting too attached to one. For the first time she is writing a sequel to her own life without knowing who will want it.

Tags: actresses, Kristen Bell, screenwriters, Nobody Wants This, Adam Brody, Erin Foster

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