Mindy Kaling’s hangout comedies have been hit or miss, even sometimes during the run of a particular series. Most of the time it’s because everyone in the cast is being given clever lines, but they’re not funny unless delivered perfectly. In the case of her new series, Not Suitable For Work, the lines the cast are given aren’t even that clever.
Opening Shot: The camera shows a shot of a finance worker’s active computer screen, then we pan up to one of the workers on a headset, being asked questions about office relationships via Zoom.
The Gist: Davis Beau Bradley Barrett III (Will Angus) is a young finance bro who seems to think that it’s no problem to hit on and date people at work, which isn’t the answer the woman asking the questions is looking for. When he’s home, he brings an expertly-crafted coffee drink to the woman he’s dating — a result of barista training — and he sees a sticky note that’s essentially dumping him.
Davis thinks he’s a catch, but his roommates, Kel Washington (Nicholas Duvernay) and Josh Teitelbaum (Jack Martin) thinks he tries way too hard. The three of them live in a nice apartment in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood. Kel is a med student who would rather be an actor, especially when he passes out as he sees a cadaver for the first time. Josh wants to get a job as a PA for his favorite news program, hosted by Wes Dryden (Victor Garber). He doesn’t want to name-drop the fact that his father is the network’s CEO.
Across the hall, Abhinaya ‘Abby’ Chilukuri (Avantika) is living in her apartment even though the lease is in her ex-boyfriend’s name. She is an assistant to a star stylist, Vanessa Hsu (Constance Wu), who is generally hard-driven and demanding of her employees. Moving into the apartment is Abby’s best friend, AJ Pascarelli (Ella Hunt), who is coming down from Boston for her first finance job. She ends up working on the same team as Davis, who immediately crushes on her when he sees her in a sleek black dress in the lobby. But he vows not to show his lust right away.
AJ gets into an argument with a man on line at a coffee truck the day before she starts, and she finds out that the man is her work-obsessed boss Bill Gibson (Jay Ellis). AJ is surprised that Josh doesn’t recognize her, as they slept together once during their college years. Josh is looked at with disdain by Paula (Judy Gold), the producer at the Wes Dryden Show, but when he runs into Dryden in the hall and drops his last name, he gets the job. He tries to get Abby and AJ evicted due to “rent fraud,” but then the girlfriend he was going to move in with across the hall dumps him.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Not Suitable For Work, created by Mindy Kaling — her frequent collaborator, Charlie Grandy, is the showrunner — is in the same “20-somethings in New York” vein as Friends and How I Met Your Mother, among so many other shows.
Our Take: There’s nothing particularly original about Not Suitable For Work — even the arrangement of the main cast, with two women and three men, is the same as the two shows we mentioned above. That would be OK, given that it’s supposed to be a “20-somethings in New York” show for 2026, not 1994 or 2005, if it was funny or the main characters had any kind of charisma for viewers to latch onto. Unfortunately, the first episode is laugh-free and the characters are about as bland as it gets.
What’s interesting about the disappointing first episode is that we can’t quite put our finger on what’s the biggest failure about it. Is it unfunny because the characters are bland? Or are the characters bland because the lines they’re given don’t even rise to chuckle-worthy status? It’s not like the characters themselves are particularly obnoxious or insufferable, like we’ve seen on so many “20-somethings in the city” comedies over the past decade. But it also seems like whatever character quirks Kaling, Grandy and company have given them aren’t interesting enough to define them as characters.
The first episode also takes an interminably long time to mix and mingle this group, throwing them together after AJ starts a fire with her cheap flat iron. Then the romantic complications start immediately: Davis falls hard for AJ, but AJ still wonders why Josh ghosted her. Kel constantly crushes on Abby, but when Abby dresses a high-profile client, they vibe. It sets up an entire season of these various pairings being teased and tortured, with people coming close and then being driven apart. But when characters are this boring, those will-they-won’t-they stories become more annoying than watchable.
Performance Worth Watching: To be brutally honest, we’d rather see a sitcom involving Constance Wu’s Vanessa, Judy Gold’s Paula and Jay Ellis’ Bill than anything involving the primary five characters.
Sex And Skin: Josh and the girlfriend who will eventually dump him have sex, but she keeps her bra on, for some reason.
Parting Shot: Despite telling Antoine (Michael Benjamin Washington), the landlord, to not kick out Abby and AJ, an eviction notice is posted on their door.
Sleeper Star: We thought it was mildly amusing when Garber’s Wes Dryden wanted to put out a memo about people using the office microwave to warm up fish.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You’re both criminals. No wonder why trust is eroding in our society,” Josh says to AJ and Abby about their “rent fraud.” Hilarious, right?
Our Call: SKIP IT. Could Not Suitable For Work get better once the writers figure out who these characters are? Sure. But the show is starting from such an annoyingly unfunny place that it may take the entire season for that to happen, and by then most viewers will have checked out.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
