“Say something rabbinical,” a woman says playfully to the cute rabbi she’s just spent the evening flirting with. It’s been too long since the pleasures of banter fueled a romantic comedy with the enthusiasm of something like “When Harry Met Sally.” But it’s all over the place in “Nobody Wants This,” one of the best shows on Netflix in recent memory.

Kristen Bell stars opposite Adam Brody as Joanne and Noah. They meet one night at a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills, with a sparkling view of the city below. They aren’t opposites so much as people with different backgrounds, but both occupy a similarly high-end strata of Los Angeles filled with spacious and pristine homes and zero worries about money. The casting has a meta quality to it; as actors, Bell and Brody embody a certain type of LA TV millennial, each having starred in series earlier in their careers (“Veronica Mars” and “The O.C.”) where the Southern California setting was essential to the storytelling. This feels like their natural environment.

She’s humorously caustic, unfiltered and agnostic (but vaguely Christian). By day, she hosts a podcast with her sister where they talk about their dating and sex lives. He’s a rabbi with a lowkey confidence (at a reform temple, by the looks of it) who is newly single, having just broken up with a longtime girlfriend, to the chagrin of his overbearing mother (Tovah Feldshuh).

There’s a palpable chemistry and they hit it off instantly. Is there really something there? Oh, yes. They have spark! They have rapport! They’re a two-person charm factory — deeply attracted to, and amused by, each other — and Bell and Brody have an easy touch that gives the comedy real buoyancy. They know how to convey excited longing with a look, while also leaving room for vulnerabilities and insecurities that feel organic to the characters.

The show is created by Erin Foster (daughter of Grammy-winning composer David Foster) and the premise is loosely based on her experiences dating her now-husband (a Jewish talent manager instead of a rabbi), but it also feels familiar enough to underscore how satisfying rom-coms can be when done right. There’s little in Foster’s resume — stalled attempts at an acting career, a short-lived mockumentary satirizing reality TV and, more recently, podcasting — to suggest she had it in her to make a series this good. That’s not a backhanded compliment but an argument in favor of streamers taking risks on untested talent (hopefully even those without a famous parent).

Scenes like the couple’s first kiss play out with real attention to build-up and follow-through and there’s a confidence in how Noah finesses the moment. The ice cream they’re eating gets placed down on the sidewalk and quickly forgotten. He tells her to put her bag down, too; there will be no juggling of anything but their anticipation. He takes her face in his hand and lingers a moment before going in, and all of these small gestures add up to something quietly thrilling that pops off the screen. That’s harder to accomplish than you’d think, but looking around at so many recent mediocre efforts drives it home. The episode is directed by Greg Mottola and it’s more than I expected from the director of “Superbad” and “Confess, Fletch.” A reminder of what someone can do when the material is good enough.

The central couple is surrounded by antic family members who are sometimes well-meaning, sometimes sabotaging, including her sister Morgan, who is somehow biting and wonderfully faux blasé all at once (Justine Lupe, best known as Connor Roy’s wife on “Succession”) and his brother Sasha (“Veep’s” Timothy Simons), an overgrown man-child who is forever riding the coattails of Noah’s laidback vibes.

Foster never pretends there’s anything weird or out of the ordinary for middle-aged people to be single, and at a time when too many comedies settle for lightly amusing, here’s a series with jokes. Legitimate jokes, not just ironic or absurd moments, but jokes. When Joanne picks up a call from an executive looking to acquire their podcast, she puts him on speaker and he asks: “Should we grab your sister, or does that not matter?” Morgan, right next to her, frantically jumps in: “Hi, I matter! Hi!” When the mothers at Noah’s temple clamor around him eager to boast about their children, one congregant tells him, “My son just finished his student film — it’s a documentary about the history of documentaries.”

The show has so much going for it. It also has some terrible notions about Jewish women that play into controlling and emasculating stereotypes. How did no one at any point in the creative process ask: Why are we writing them all as harpies? It’s a conspicuous issue, particularly in contrast to the men, who are portrayed as easygoing enough to tolerate and love these tyrants in their lives. Hollywood trafficking in cringey stereotypes is nothing new. You just hate to see it in such an otherwise sparkling comedy.

But this isn’t where “Nobody Wants This” spends most of its time, and so much else about it works. Here’s what a healthy relationship looks like, while also having enough complications — both internal and external — to make their interplay, and the growing seriousness of their relationship, interesting enough for a 10-episode series.

From left: Kristen Bell as Joanne and Justine Lupe as Morgan in “Nobody Wants This.” (Hopper Stone/Netflix)

The couple’s issues, when they do arise, seem reasonable. They aren’t lying to, or cheating on, one another. They’re not caught up in rigid expectations around gender roles. Their banter isn’t about trading insults. She has anxieties about opening up, but she rises to the occasion. It’s refreshing! Figuring out how and when to give a partner grace is an ongoing process that tests all relationships. Joanne and Noah manage it with emotional intelligence and emotional intimacy, which is rare on TV. Lovers don’t have to be written as immature or cruel to create stakes or capture your attention. Joanne and Noah are fully realized characters who happen to be great screen company.

You can imagine some doubting Netflix executive thinking “Nobody wants this …” Foster has proven them wrong.

“Nobody Wants This” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Netflix

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Matt Boldy, sidelined on Sept. 22 by a lower body injury, went through his first full practice on Wednesday and is expected to be ready for the season opener Oct. 10 against Columbus at Xcel Energy Center.

“We expected him to be back. He’s on track,” coach John Hynes said. “To do it now, have a full skate — yesterday was kind of a morning skate type of thing — Today was a regular practice and went through all that, so that looks good.”

Boldy, 23, was part of the Wild’s best line last season — one of the best in the NHL — and has scored a combined 60 goals over the past two seasons. He practiced Wednesday with Marcus Johansson and center Joel Eriksson Ek.

With four five days before the Wild must pare down to 23 players, Marco Rossi has moved between Kirill Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello on the top line, and Ryan Hartman centered Marcus Foligno and Yakov Trenin on the third.

Although Boldy is on track to play the season opener against the Blue Jackets, he might not play in the final exhibition game Friday night in Chicago.

Jake Middleton, who missed Tuesday’s skate because of what Hynes called a bruise, practiced Wednesday. “For him to be able to come out and practice full today was positive,” the coach said.

Grosenick has surgery

Veteran goaltender Troy Grosenick, who signed a one-year, two-way contract with the Wild in July, had surgery Tuesday to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee and will miss the 2024-25 season.

According to the Wild, Grosenick is expected to make a full recovery and be ready for the start of the 2025-26 season.

Grosenick, 34, spent last season with the Milwaukee Admirals of the AHL and was expected to play for the Wild’s top affiliate in Iowa. He has played in four NHL games in his career, with San Jose in 2014-15 and Los Angeles in 2020-21.

With two published sequels ready and waiting, DreamWorks Animation has a franchise in the works with “The Wild Robot,” a big success in its first weekend. It’s good, too. Based on the first of three books by writer-illustrator Peter Brown, the feature runs on the same spirit of well-paced adventure and strategic shifts in mood found in the first “How to Train Your Dragon,” or in a more openly comic vein, the first “Kung Fu Panda.” DreamWorks also made the “Ice Age” movies, but those made their money with blander computer animation and a surfeit of noisy crisis. “The Wild Robot” is at least two steps up from there.

At the story’s center, there’s a sweetly determined “helper robot” designated Rozzum Unit 7134, washed ashore on what appears to be an island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The time is the near future but things on the island remain as they ever were: predators vs. prey, some living, some dying, cyclical weather extremes and migrations overhead. Roz has been programmed to complete tasks determined by its owner, only there is no owner here, only survival and wisecracking cliques among the various species. Meanwhile Roz, whose features include “instant physical mimicry,” gives machine learning and generative AI a good name, though later developments in “The Wild Robot” suggest an inevitable rise of the machines, potentially soul-killing and humanity-optional.

A tragic accident, glancingly and deftly depicted, sets the narrative course. With its living relatives gone, a newly hatched gosling, later named Brightbill, becomes the charge of Roz. The coolly perplexed but resourceful robot gets some help from Fink the fox, described at one point as “a local goose expert,” though it’s primarily in a gustatory way. Roz’s hard-wired need to succeed focuses on feeding and caring for this orphaned bird, teaching Brightbill to swim and, when the weather turns chilly, to join the great migration.

“I do not have the programming to be a mother,” she says at one point. This is “The Wild Robot’s” sweet spot.  Every current, former or potential parent in the audience can recognize what this fledgling parental unit is going through.

Many aspects of director and co-writer Chris Sanders’ adaptation hold different keys to the relative success of the whole. There’s enough motivated story, helped by that story’s shift from island to utopian urban setting, to sustain 100 minutes easily, even through the final third. The voice work’s unassumingly choice, led by Lupita Nyong’o as Roz. She finds carefully delineated gradations between factory-fresh, insistently upbeat impersonality and the wiser being we see learning to feel before our eyes. Pedro Pascal (as the fox) make a fine, artful dodger of a tough guy who’s hurting inside. And the supporting ranks include Catherine O’Hara (Pinktail, overworked motherhood incarnate, in possum form) and Bill Nighy, in retrospect the optimal choice to voice a long-necked goose named, of course, Longneck.

Recently making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, “The Wild Robot” already has been pumped up into the contradictory “instant classic” stratosphere. I understand the enthusiasm, or most of it, I guess, especially given the mellow, less photorealistic, more painterly visual landscapes, and Sanders’ assured tear-duct massage technique. If it’s unfortunate the animation doesn’t retaining more than a trace of the woodcut simplicity and charm of Peter Brown’s book drawings, well, that was unlikely to get by at this particular studio. The Roz robot design itself, simple and effective enough, lacks a special element of surprise, instead recalling elements of “Wall-E” (more in the character situation than the visualization) to “Big Hero 6” to the swift-moving BB-8 introduced in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Also, the first 20 or 30 minutes of “The Wild Robot” threatens to settle for a lesser DreamWorks sprint through calamities. But just in time, it calms down and finds the rhythmic change-ups crucial to this tale.

Kindness, as Fink notes early on, is not a survival skill. He’s basing his worldview on the only, lonely life he has known. Roz learns and teaches otherwise, and that sounds pretty good right about now.

“The Wild Robot” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for action/peril and thematic elements)

Running time: 1:41

How to watch: Now in theaters

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

The Twins will have new voices leading their hitters next season after a late-season collapse cost hitting coaches David Popkins and Rudy Hernandez and assistant hitting coach Derek Shomon their jobs.

Those three, along with assistant bench coach/infield coach Tony Diaz, will not return to the major league staff as the Twins shake things up following their disappointing end to the 2024 season. The Twins expect the rest of their coaches to return to manager Rocco Baldelli’s staff in 2025.

The three hitting coaches’ dismissals from the major league staff came after the Twins slumped down the stretch from mid-August on.

In the final month of the season, when the Twins were fighting to make the playoffs, which they ultimately missed by four games, Twins hit .218 with a .285 on-base percentage and .338 team slugging percentage. They averaged just 3.48 runs per game.

The Twins were without two of their top hitters — Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton — for some of that stretch but also saw late-season dramatic drop offs from some of those whom they were relying upon, including Royce Lewis.

Popkins had been in his job for the last three seasons and Shomon the last two. Hernandez, meanwhile, was the longest tenured member of the major league staff, hired as part of Paul Molitor’s coaching staff ahead of the 2015 season. He had served in a number of roles within the Twins organization over the past 29 years.

Diaz, who joined the Twins alongside Baldelli for the 2019 season, served as the team’s third base coach for three years before moving into his assistant bench coach role three seasons ago.

Their dismissals will mark the most turnover the coaching staff has seen in one offseason since 2018, when the Twins replaced Molitor with Baldelli as manager and flipped over nearly the entire staff.