Mindy Kaling is moving through the stages of life. With Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever,” the comedy mogul took on high school; with HBO Max’s “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” she (literally) graduated to college. Hulu’s “Not Suitable for Work” — Kaling’s first show with sole creator credit since “The Mindy Project,” showrun by her longtime collaborator Charlie Grandy — continues this progression into the uncertain time after the diploma, with characters struggling to establish both careers and adult relationships. But while college shows are notoriously difficult to nail, making the three-season run of “Sex Lives” a notable achievement, and “Never Have I Ever” painted a specific portrait of an Indian American family in Los Angeles as narrated by John McEnroe, “Not Suitable for Work” is a bland take on a well-trodden setup. The glimmers of a more biting, memorable take on young people juggling jobs and love in New York City throughout the nine-episode season end up being just that: glimmers.
The series was originally titled “Murray Hill” after the notoriously basic (sorry, residents, you know it’s true!) neighborhood just south of midtown Manhattan. “I’m not cool enough for Brooklyn — they’d eat me alive!” says AJ (Ella Hunt), one of five ambitious singles split between two apartments across the hall from each other. AJ works long hours at an investment bank as a first-year associate with her neighbor Davis (Will Angus) and lives with aspiring celebrity stylist Abby (the mononymous Avantika). Davis rooms with his childhood friends Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), who quits medical school in the premiere to pursue his dream of acting, and Josh (Jack Martin), a journalist whose idealism and sense of ethics do not extend to using his media CEO dad to land a gig as a PA on a news show.
The friend group quickly forms a complex web of crushes that expand the love triangle to new frontiers of geometry. Davis, a bro-y romantic who tends to come on too strong, fixates on Abby, who once hooked up with Josh on a Model UN trip, but he doesn’t even recognize her — except that might not even matter, because she has a spark with her and Davis’s shark of a boss Bill (Jay Ellis, a Kaling-verse veteran who also appears in the Netflix basketball series “Running Point,” which she co-created). Kel has eyes for Abby, who’s busy trying to convince her client Austin Blanchett (Harry Richardson) — nephew of Cate, of course — to take fashion seriously, leaving Kel free to hit up his ex-hookup Kate (Ego Nwodim) for a subsequent teaching job. Chemistry does not necessarily abound, apart from Hunt and Ellis, but permutations certainly do.
In addition to the dating lives of its protagonists, “Not Suitable for Work” has to develop four separate professional environments, which is entirely too much for one breezy half-hour to do with much success. Placing AJ and Davis in the same infamously grueling rat race makes the bank the most fleshed-out of the secondary settings, though “Not Suitable for Work” sands the edges off the cutthroat world of finance with cutesy subplots like winning over a client who makes undergarments by having the entire deal team reveal their matching girdles. But while Josh is a magnet for easy jabs about NPR tote bags and Sierra Club memberships, there’s almost nothing in his storylines to suggest an aptitude for or even interest in the work of actual journalism. Instead, he spends his days placating vain anchor Wes (Victor Garber) and grouchy producer Paula (Judy Gold), a potential comment on the real work of television news that still feels lacking in substance.
Not all the work in a show with “work” in the title is without value. The banter between Kel and the bratty private school girls who know more about Jane Austen than he ever will is adorable, and Constance Wu is the best she’s been in years as Abby’s tyrannical, capricious boss Vanessa — a role that channels some of the prickly candor of her breakout role as an immigrant mom in “Fresh Off the Boat,” but with a chilly sheen of urban hauteur. Wu’s performance is a highlight that points to an underutilized tool in the arsenal of “Not Suitable for Work”: the show is at its most distinctive when it embraces how unappealing its characters can be.
No viewer will ever mistake the glossy “Not Suitable for Work” for the anti-glamour of “Girls,” though the former contains echoes of the latter in plot points like one sheltered character getting abruptly cut off from their parents’ financial support. But in its glimpses of the core quintet at their arrogant, entitled worst, “Not Suitable for Work” shows some grit it would be wise to double down on, the way Lena Dunham’s landmark series pierced the zeitgeist by lampooning millennial narcissism and self-pity. My ears perked up when Davis, whose full name is Davis Beau Bradley III, scoffs to a female friend: “Don’t be a bitch — you know I treat women well!”
The line is not quite an isolated incident. AJ cruelly tells her visiting mother that she can’t understand her child’s work stress “because you don’t have a career, you have a job”; Abby blames Kel for her own stupid blunder when she leaves an expensive item she doesn’t own on the train; Jack meets his dad for squash dates while he cosplays poverty. (Davis also gets another banger when Kel asks him to impersonate his nonexistent agent: “I”m an investment banker. You think I don’t know how to be unethical?”)
But such interludes add up to small specks of stormclouds in the show’s otherwise sunny skies. “Not Suitable for Work” never skewers its protagonists; it raises the salience of their less admirable qualities just enough that we chafe at being asked to spend time with them, yet not enough to make self-awareness a load-bearing part of its disposition. It’s too bad. The world hardly needs another “Friends” photocopy, and a little acidity can go a long way.
The first three episodes of “Not Suitable for Work” are now streaming on Hulu, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Tuesdays.
