In the new Netflix basketball comedy “Running Point,” Kate Hudson’s Isla Gordon is engaged to the nicest of all nice Jewish boys, and he’s played by a pretty familiar face: Max Greenfield, aka Schmidt from “New Girl.”
While Schmidt brought us some of the best Jewish TV lines of all times (“Judaism, son!”) he is, admittedly, a bit of a (lovable!) uptight douche. That is not the case with Greenflied’s Lev Levenson (the cutest version of Jewy McJew we’ve heard) in “Running Point,” a pediatrician who is wholly devoted to the woman in his life and the most patient of patient (Jewish!) saints.
When Isla’s brother, Cam (a very funny Justin Theroux), who runs the family business, a basketball team named the LA Waves, reveals that he is a drug addict and needs to go into rehab, he leaves Isla to take over his job. And Lev is her number one cheerleader.
Isla, a rebellious child relegated to work on the team’s “charitable projects,” has a real passion for basketball and has always dreamed of getting this job, and unlike her younger brothers — clueless Ness (Scott MacArthur), and Waves’ uptight finance chief Sandy (Drew Tarver) — Lev has full faith in her.
When we first meet him in the show’s second episode, Isla introduces him as her boyfriend of six years and fiancé of three. As he helps her bandage an injured finger, he lovingly calls her “the smartest Gordon,” and tells her there’s nothing she can do because “you are motherfucking Isla Gordon.” He’s a patient mensch who also saves kids’ lives. How much better than that can it get?
In the show’s fifth episode, with the incredibly Jewish title “Beshert,” Isla and Lev finally celebrate their engagement party, and the blonde-haired nepo baby realizes she drunkenly promised Lev that she would convert to Judaism for him. Isla is bewildered by her inebriated past self’s commitment, but she is not one to back off from a challenge. She decides to start wearing a Jewish star necklace, and when her brothers confront her about her conversion, her commitment to her new faith and Jewish identity goes into overdrive (that mostly includes watching old “Sex and the City” episodes with Charlotte and Harry, lots of “Curb,” chatting people up about lox and namedropping the famous Jewish contacts on her phone).
Kate Hudson’s isla Gordon with a Jewish star necklace (Netflix)
At their engagement party, Isla gets overwhelmed when Lev shares the most darling of impromptu engagement speeches (even if it does have the word “shiksa” in it!). He tells the crowd, which includes his Jewish parents (who were, earlier in the episode, stereotypically kvetchy about luggage space on their flight over from New York) about the Yiddish word bashert (in the episode it is spelled “beshert,” but we are going to go with bashert here, apologies to Lev). He defines the word as “inevitable,” but it’s actually literally the Ashkenazi Jewish tongue’s word for “destiny.”
He goes on to define bashert as the belief that for every one, there is a “pre-ordained person,” a soulmate. He shared that when he was riding his bike as a kid “to shul,” using the term for synagogue (also the Yiddish word for school, fun fact!) from his childhood home in a Scarsdale, New York cul-de-sac, he never imagined that he would end up with a “smoking hot shiksa from Brentwood,” but that he is so very glad he did. As an aside, he jokes, “And the shiksa thing is about to change by the way, don’t worry Mom.” He then waxes romantic about how he wants to get old and wrinkly and “way way way too tan” with Isla, and how there’s nothing that makes him happier than the thought of having dinner with her for every single night for the rest of his life.
That prospect of eternal commitment freaks out the former party girl, who dreads being like her philandering father. The evening, of course, ends in chaos, because Isla’s family is incredibly chaotic, but Isla’s freakout doesn’t go unnoticed, though Lev does seem to misattribute her stress to the fact that she doesn’t really want to convert. He tells her that she doesn’t have to, and that he only wants her to convert if she does it for herself, though they both agree in the most funny of ways about raising Jewish kids (Isla couldn’t care less, and Lev’s mother couldn’t care more). The way the episode paints conversion and intermarriage is quite lovely, at least to this Jewish viewer, because it just isn’t that big a deal — not to Lev or to Isla, at least. They’re both happy to be flexible towards each other. And when the night ends, Isla kisses him and tells him: “I love you, my bashert.”
This isn’t to say that there’s no drama between Isla and Lev, but he does remain, throughout the whole first season, a very wholesome, nice NJB (that’s nice Jewish boy). As for Isla? She’s a delightful hot mess, and Jewish actress Kate Hudson (the daughter of the legendary Goldie Hawn, so like her character, a very charming “nepo baby”) is just so funny in this role. The entire show, written by and from the creative team of Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen, feels like a comedic slam dunk in this particularly difficult Jewish week, full of funny, ridiculous, and heartfelt moments.
