Somewhere in a Warner Bros. vault, the ghost of Friends rattles its golden chains and demands tribute. Every few years a new show answers the call, arranges six photogenic 20-somethings against a Manhattan skyline, and prays the lightning strikes twice. Not Suitable for Work, Mindy Kaling‘s glossy new Hulu hangout, hears that summons loud and clear — then shows up to the séance in a pomegranate Dolce & Gabbana suit, looking fantastic and faintly puzzled about which decade it wandered into.
The setup arrives pre-assembled, straight from the IKEA flat-pack of the genre. Five work-obsessed kids crowd two apartments across a Murray Hill hallway. Murray Hill is, by the way, Manhattan’s most aggressively fine neighborhood. The sitcom equivalent of beige. Abby (Avantika), an aspiring celebrity stylist, toils under a monstrous boss, a gleefully venomous Constance Wu. Her college roommate AJ (Ella Hunt) lands in the city with a new banking job and an instant feud with a coffee-cart boomer who bribes a barista five hundred dollars to deny her a latte.
Across the hall lurk the boys. There’s Davis (Will Angus), a finance himbo who treats sexual-harassment training as an optional elective. Kel (Nicholas Duvernay) is a med student moonlighting as an actor who bombs an audition for Questlove, because Kaling enjoys flexing her contacts. And finally, Josh (Jack Martin), a trust-fund nepo baby who lands a journalism gig the honest way. (His father runs the network).
Hire power.
Kaling pitches all this as the capstone of a loose trilogy. Never Have I Ever took high school, The Sex Lives of College Girls handled the dorms, and Not Suitable for Work graduates the whole anxious cohort into the post-diploma fog where rent comes due and dignity turns optional. The ambition reads clearly, of course. Build the NYC sitcom for a generation raised on group chats and burnout. Charlie Grandy showruns from the very Warner Bros. lot that minted Friends, and you can feel the entire production reaching for that bottled lightning.
The premiere keeps four separate workplaces spinning, which runs roughly three more than a breezy half-hour can comfortably juggle. It’s no surprise, then, that the premiere has some extra runtime to set the stakes. AJ and Davis grind away on the same finance floor under managing director Bill Gibson — Jay Ellis — who, in the episode’s tidiest bit of cosmic cruelty, turns out to be AJ’s coffee-cart nemesis. Josh charms his way onto The Wes Dryden Show, where Victor Garber‘s silver-fox host hires him for his surname while Judy Gold’s producer glowers.
Abby, meanwhile, salvages a celebrity fitting and drapes a Blanchett nephew in that show-stopping pomegranate suit. The sprawl flatters the guest bench and strands the leads in separate cubicles, which becomes the season’s central tension: a hangout show where the gang keeps clocking out on one another.
Is Not Suitable for Work the NYC New Girl?
It’s easy to give a show like this a polite shrug, but count me with the optimists. Not Suitable for Work moves with a surprising intentionality. It’s witty, quick, sharp, and engineered for the species of binge where you resurface at 2 a.m. wondering where your weekend went. The closest cousin lands less at Friends or How I Met Your Mother and more at New Girl, that loft-comedy holy text. Here updated with Gen Z dialect and an NYC buzz-pop energy that LA could never quite match.
Avantika walks away with the whole thing, equal parts steel and panic. Wu, while probably over-cast for a side role like this, chews scenery like it owes her money. And Martin lands his one-liners with fail-upward confidence and likable unlikability. The jokes connect at a brisk clip, and the half-hours breeze on by.
The real engine, though, runs on romance, and Kaling plots her dominoes with patience. Turns out Josh ghosted AJ after a college one-night stand and earns a slow-motion comeuppance. Davis catches feelings the instant AJ enters his workplace. Abby trades scorching eye contact with her Blanchett over a styling emergency.
The bottom line.
The geometry, for the most part, crackles. It also doubles as the show’s flashing yellow light. The day every domino finally topples, Not Suitable for Work faces the exact riddle that sinks its forebears. Because what remains once the chase ends? The fix demands a pivot, and the premiere plays coy about whether Kaling already has one or two loaded in the chamber.
And for a comedy that premiered smack in the middle of Pride month, the hetero romance runs aggressively, almost defiantly straight. Every pairing a tidy boy-meets-girl unit, the whole horny ecosystem humming along like a 1998 rerun with sharper lighting. Call it an observation more than a verdict. The same energy clings to the boys, who skew odious early. Davis and Josh both arrive pre-loaded with redemption arcs visible from the lobby. Your mileage depends entirely on your appetite for watching privileged men slowly evolve into people.
And yet I stayed hooked, which counts for nearly everything in a genre built on the pleasure of good company. In other words, Not Suitable for Work clocks in as comfort food cooked by real talent. It’s a bingeworthy premiere that earns its spot on the couch while quietly daring itself to grow sharper.
The first three episodes of Not Suitable For Work are available to stream now on Hulu.
Images courtesy of Hulu.
REVIEW RATING
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Not Suitable For Work Premiere - 7.5/10
7.5/10
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
