PLOT: Follows five work-obsessed twenty-somethings who strive for professional success and, if they have time, personal happiness, in Manhattan.
REVIEW: Sitcoms have primarily come in two flavors: single-camera and multi-camera. Over the years, trends have shifted between the two, with certain iconic series standing out in both formats. Friends remains one of the benchmarks of the multi-camera sitcom, while New Girl brought a similar energy in the single-camera approach. Mindy Kaling, the veteran writer from The Office and the creator of The Mindy Project, attempts to deliver the generational voice that Friends represented for twenty-somethings in the Nineties, as New Girl did for Millennials, in the new series Not Suitable For Work. Featuring an ensemble cast of Gen Z actors, Not Suitable For Work is a decent attempt to capture the dialogue, energy, and voice of the newest twenty-somethings in New York City’s concrete jungle. While it has moments here and there, this series cannot quite match what made the aforementioned comedies so popular with audiences despite a capable cast of fresh faces.
Not Suitable For Work follows five characters living and working in different jobs in Manhattan. Davis (Will Angus) is a financial analyst working at a large firm and is a hopeless romantic looking for the right woman, but often overdoes it. Kel (Nicholas Duvernay) is in medical school but yearns to be an actor. They are roommates with Josh Teitelbaum (Jack Martin), an entitled son of a wealthy CEO who is also the epitome of a social justice warrior. The three guys live across the hall from aspiring fashion designer Abby (Avantika), who welcomes her new roommate, AJ Pascarelli (Ella Hunt), who is starting work at the same firm as Davis. AJ and Josh share a past fling, which factors into the plot as the guys and gals miscommunicate romantically throughout the season. The series also introduces us to various bosses at their jobs, including journalist Wes Dryden (Victor Garber), fashion icon and horrible boss Vanessa Hsu (Constance Wu), and Wolf of Wall Street alpha male Bill Gibson (Jay Ellis).
Across the nine episodes made available for this review, the main ensemble faces work and unexpected challenges, including interactions with customers, projects that go far beyond business hours, and the chain of command, along with the pitfalls of circumventing it. As a workplace sitcom, Not Suitable For Work skewers office dynamics through the lens of a younger generation, but because most of the supporting cast is not as fleshed out or three-dimensional as the protagonists, these episodic subplots often fall flat. There are certainly funny moments like Kel’s medical school teacher struggling with him fainting in the morgue or Abby having chemistry with client Austin Blanchett (Harry Richardson), but the standouts are Josh’s attempts to curry favor with Wes Dryden to the chagrin of his direct supervisor Paula (Judy Gold) and the romantic entanglements between AJ and her coworkers. Because the series is so heavily skewed towards the workplace, it can sometimes undermine itself when it follows the characters after work.
Both Friends and New Girl paired up members of the friend group amongst each other, notably Ross and Rachel, Chandler and Monica, as well as Nick and Jess, and Schmidt and CeCe, but these pairings were fostered across multiple seasons to help us appreciate and like the characters before they started falling for each other. Not Suitable For Work is so desperate to pair up characters that all they end up doing is reverse the crushes from the first episode to the last, leaving the inverse dynamic for a potential second season. The trouble is that most of the characters don’t become likable until the end of the season. Jack Martin’s Josh is something of an entitled douche at the beginning of the season, and Kel seems like a ditz without direction, whereas Abby and AJ are the characters I liked watching the most, and they are also the ones who make the poorest decisions. Both Avantika and Ella Hunt are the most charismatic members of the cast, but also play characters saddled with cliche plotlines through the season.
Creator Mindy Kaling, who wrote the first episode and co-wrote the second with showrunner Charlie Grandy, knows the ins and outs of sitcoms. Her experience speaks for itself, but her work creating Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls rings truer than this show. Even her Netflix series, Running Point, has a more dynamic structure than this one. Not Suitable For Work mines the classic sitcom format but with an aim towards the slang and tropes of Gen Y and Z. Not nearly as reliant on slang terms as much as stereotypes and cliches, this series mocks the older generation for being stuck in their ways while trying to push hard on the current generation’s opposition by doing the exact same thing. Charlie Grandy has worked on Mindy Kaling’s previous projects, including her animated series Velma, but he still falls prey to the mistakes so many failed comedies make by letting this series be just like every other show rather than investing in original laughs or storylines.
Not Suitable For Work benefits from the freedom to air on a streaming platform, which allows for profanity and sexual content, but it still plays by the conventions of typical sitcoms, down to the act structure and commercial breaks. The series is funny at times, but spends far too much time trying to differentiate itself from every other comedy on the air rather than just being funny. A series that takes nine episodes for you to really begin to care about the main characters has spent eight episodes too many. It could be that I am not the target audience for a series like Not Suitable For Work, but I have found many other films and series made by and for younger generations to be much more fun to watch than this one. I have liked most of Mindy Kaling’s previous projects, but this series is just not as good as it could have been.
Not Suitable For Work premieres on June 2nd on Hulu.
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