Mindy Kaling’s latest asks, “Would you watch a sitcom about everyone you swipe past on Hinge?”
Photo: Cara Howe/Disney
Back when the Mindy Kaling–produced comedy Not Suitable for Work was first reported on in the hallowed pages of Deadline in 2024, it was going by the title Murray Hill and came with a logline promising it would explore the lives of young people in “Manhattan’s most glamorous neighborhood.” Even if you’ve never been forced to spend time in an East 30s sports bar filled with former business majors, you may be able to tell that that description of Murray Hill is a joke. The southern neighbor of Midtown East is best known for being the home of some of Manhattan’s most — and this is a gender-neutral term — basic bitches, from just-out-of-college frat boys to aspiring influencers who don’t necessarily have the trust funds to support life as West Village girls. (There is some good food to be found there, though that’s not relevant to the stereotype.) Presumably, a show calling Murray Hill glamorous will poke fun at the lives of the young, ambitious, and cheugy, but to what extent? Sitcoms are meant to be about people you want to spend a lot of time with. Do you want to tune in to a show about the people you swipe past on Hinge?
Not Suitable for Work, the show Murray Hill eventually became, is still trying to calibrate the amount of parody it wants to contain. Created by Kaling and showrun by her regular collaborator Charlie Grandy, who worked on The Sex Lives of College Girls and co-created the underloved Champions, the Hulu show does indeed center on a bunch of young people who live in apartments across the hall from one another in an arrangement that is as close as you can get to Friends before a copyright lawyer gets worried. The clique includes aspiring stylist Abby (Avantika Vandanapu, a standout from the Mean Girls musical movie); Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), a med student with dreams of being an actor; Josh (Jack Martin), a nepo-baby son of a network executive who wants to make it in TV news; and two investment bankers: Davis (Will Angus), an overeager but good-hearted bro, and AJ (Ella Hunt, of Dickinson), a hardscrabble but adorkable Boston gal. They’re introduced through a tangle of romantic interests: Davis develops an immediate crush on AJ at their shared workplace, though we discover she had a one-night stand with his roommate Josh back in college, and there’s a bit of a slow burn happening between Abby and Kel. A series of pleasantly familiar comedians as guest and recurring actors complicate things — Jay Ellis as Abby and Davis’s mean but hot boss; Ego Nwodim as Kel’s clingy but hot boss; Harry Richardson as a trendy actor whom Abby ends up working for. He’s dumb but also hot! (And yes, it is funny to see Larry from The Gilded Age do a Harry Styles parody.)
The tone of the first nine episodes veers wildly as the focus switches from character to character, story line to story line, and actor to actor, and that’s true of pretty much any young-people-in-the-city show. Yet FX’s Adults, which shares a lot of DNA with Not Suitable for Work (both are cousins of New Girl, itself a descendant of Friends), came together much more quickly over the course of its first season and outstrips the newer show with stronger joke-writing and a briskly nihilistic sense of Gen-Z dread. Not Suitable for Work, by contrast, stretches for both satire and straightforward cuddliness. Abby’s adventures in the universe of styling tend to be the strongest bits of the series because Avantika is a gifted comedic actor, and Constance Wu as her megalomaniac, oddball boss — she asks for a cigarette while in the hospital — pulls off a surprisingly touching self-awareness about what it’s like to have a promising mentee potentially outstrip you. Here, the show has the clearest sense of itself as a goofy farce of the most inane corners of celebrity culture, something Kaling herself admits to being fascinated by, and you could refashion the whole thing into a series where Avantika runs Deuxmoi from her Murray Hill apartment or something.
Elsewhere, the show loses its grasp on what exactly it wants to say about these dweebs, if much at all. Any TV show about 20-something bankers is going to suffer in comparison to the sharpness of Industry, but Not Suitable for Work’s approach comes off as naive to the point of maudlin. In their office, AJ and Davis learn woke 1.0 life lessons about sexism in the workplace, leading to a nearly unbearable plotline where they rep a shapewear company that commits the crime of wasting Stephanie Hsu as a vengeful CEO. Josh and Kel’s showbiz aspirations toggle uncertainly between farce and inspiration: Kaling and Grandy know enough about the universe of writers’ rooms to get in some believable details about Josh’s attempts to suck up to his pompous TV-anchor boss (played by a scenery-munching Victor Garber) and the head writer who actually steers the ship (Judy Gold), but we’re also subjected to a little too much of him realizing that, gasp, he’s been coasting along on a cloud of privilege this whole time. It’s more fun to watch Kel suffer through a side gig as a substitute teacher for spoiled private-school kids than earnestly chase his dream as an actor. He ends up auditioning for the Jeremy O. Harris play Yell, about the playwright’s time at Yale, and Harris does a cameo as himself; it’s fitting because Harris and Kaling share similar Ivy League alumni traumas.
Though they’re meant to have graduated from UPenn and UMich, the characters in Not Suitable for Work could easily have gone to the fictional Essex College of The Sex Lives of College Girls and before that hung out with the nerdy teens of Never Have I Ever in high school. Later, they’ll grow up and try to manage sports franchises like Kate Hudson in Running Point. As a writer and producer, Kaling has assembled a nearly complete life cycle of shows with their own set of tropes, like the outsider girl who wants a gold star and an old-fashioned romance, or the white-bread and (often) white bro she can’t help but love. This tension, the push and pull between wanting to belong to a broadly popular, more powerful group and wanting to stand at a distance from it — to critique, and in the process, to conquer it — is reflected in the tonal instability of much of Kaling’s work. The Sex Lives of College Girls, for instance, was stronger with its early, insider-y sense of what it’s like to be a young woman finding yourself at an elite school but lost its bite (and a crucially acerbic lead performer) when it headed toward wish fulfillment. Never Have I Ever went in a similar direction, as did The Mindy Project itself. The powerful desire to find a way to belong, even if it means making yourself boring — or admitting to yourself in the process that you want to be boring — lies at the root of Kaling’s game as a writer and performer. Nobody on Not Suitable for Work thinks of themselves as edgier than average (there’s a joke early on about how they know that none of them are cool enough to move to Brooklyn), but the show itself is torn between sending up and warmly embracing the normies. That’s where the irony of the show’s premise ends up sounding like an inadvertent confession. If your abiding artistic interest lies in the place where ambition collides with basicness, Murray Hill really must be the most compelling neighborhood in Manhattan.
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