For those who spent their teens and early 20s bingeing shows like Friends and New Girl and How I Met Your Mother, there’s much to recommend Not Suitable for Work, Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom for Hulu.
Its basic formula — 20somethings in the big city plus early-career woes plus romantic entanglements — is a classic for a reason. Its ensemble is broadly appealing, stuffed with fresh faces you might sorta recognize but who haven’t broken out big just yet. Its vibe is reliably funny, lightly sweet and generally chill. In short, it’s a nice hang.
Not Suitable for Work
The Bottom Line
A throwback, for better or for worse.
Airdate: Tuesday, June 2 (Hulu)
Cast: Ella Hunt, Avantika, Will Angus, Jack Martin, Nicholas Duvernay, Jay Ellis
Creator: Mindy Kaling
It is also, as the references above might suggest, something of a throwback. Despite being set in present-day New York, the show’s vision of love and career feels rooted somewhere in the 2000s, or even the 1990s. And while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — a bit of escapism is crucial for a comfort watch — it means that for a show about Gen Z, Not Suitable for Work feels oddly Millennial.
The premise is timelessly simple. In one of those improbably spacious, impossibly affordable Manhattan apartment buildings that only exist in the fantasies of TV writers, two young women live across the hall from three young men. Sometimes, the men have crushes on the women. Sometimes, the women have crushes on the men. (In another old-timey touch, all these people are strictly hetero.) Inconveniently for them but conveniently for a comedy that clearly hopes to run for many seasons to come, those crushes rarely seem to line up at the right time.
Meanwhile, all five are struggling with the usual indignities of low-level work. Davis (Will Angus) and AJ (Ella Hunt, Dickinson) are junior financial analysts putting in 80-hour weeks for a demanding boss (Jay Ellis). Abby (Avantika, 2024’s Mean Girls) is the assistant to a celebrity stylist (Constance Wu) who keeps her on thankless grunt work. Kel (Nicholas Duvernay, The White Lotus) is a med school dropout working as a substitute teacher while he pursues his acting dreams. And Josh (Jack Martin, La Brea) is the son of a network CEO, who’s nepo-babied his way into a PA position on an investigative news show.
If none of that sounds especially new or original, it isn’t. In contrast to shows like FX’s Adults or HBO’s I Love LA, which reach for a specifically Gen Z zeitgeist with storylines about influencers or sexual experimentation, Not Suitable for Work barely even tries to pretend it’s keeping up with the times. It feels like a 40something’s idea of what being a young, career-minded New Yorker in the 2020s might look like, which I say as a 40something who spent a lot of this show feeling nostalgic for my own days as a young, career-minded New Yorker in the 2000s.
Despite the fact that most of these people are single and eager to mingle, dating apps are barely mentioned. Despite the fact that they’re occasionally under-employed, no one raises gig work or content creation as a way to make money, or bemoans the horrific state of the entry-level job market. Despite the fact that they were all born in the 2000s, one regrets a tattoo she got for One Direction, a band that broke up in 2016.
On the rare occasions the series does touch upon more current concerns — as when Kel auditions for what turns out to be an AI motion-capture gig, or Josh is tasked with combating Reddit conspiracy theories that his boss, the Anderson Cooper-esque Wes Dryden (Victor Garber), is actually dead — the storylines peter out unsatisfyingly.
But what Not Suitable for Work lacks in of-the-moment freshness, it makes up for in comfort-food familiarity. Chief among its assets is a very solid cast, who share the sort of affable chemistry that makes you want to flop down on the couch right alongside them. It’s especially nice, in the age of hand-wringing over the male loneliness epidemic, to see a depiction of three dudes tight enough to share a tradition called “Steak and Tears,” in which they take each other out to fancy restaurants whenever one of them needs to drown their sorrows in martinis (or passionfruit cosmos) after receiving bad news.
The series’ affection for these ambitious but frequently misguided characters is likewise endearing, even if it sometimes extends further than I’m willing to follow. I can handle warming toward a rich kid whose only solution for any work-related issue is calling up his dad, since Martin imbues Josh with enough softness that his heart always feels like it’s in the right place. I was less sold on Davis, a nice-guy romantic who seems roughly one manosphere podcast away from teetering into incel-adjacent bitterness (or would, if such podcasts seemed to exist in this universe), and whose Adam Devine-like over-the-top energy is geared toward a broader show.
The emphasis on the characters’ love lives provides Not Suitable for Work with plenty of narrative momentum, yielding the sort of juicy twists that would have the group chat lighting up with side-eye emojis if these were our own friends. (AJ, for example, gets not one, not two, but three serious potential love interests over the season’s nine half-hours, each overlapping in messy ways.) If the romantic focus comes at the expense of the friendship- and group-based dynamics the show will need to sustain itself in the long run, once every possible heterosexual ship has been exhausted — well, that just gives the series more room to grow should it get a second season.
It should, if the TV gods are just. Not Suitable for Work goes down remarkably easy, with its likable ensemble, sharply written jokes and even tone, never tilting too far in the direction of edginess or profundity or sentimentality. That it’s able to do so only because these characters rarely seem to be confronting actual problems with lasting consequences might be a drawback for those seeking realer, more relatable fare. For those just looking to get lost in a fantasy world that certainly doesn’t exist anymore — if it ever did — it carries a certain old-fashioned appeal.
