Mindy Kaling has a gift and I mean this genuinely for making you feel like everything is going to be fine. Her shows exist in a version of the world where people are messy and ambitious and occasionally catastrophic, but the sun always comes out, the right person always shows up at the right time, and New York City glitters like it owes you something. I’ve enjoyed that quality in her work before. In Not Suitable for Work, her new Hulu comedy, it starts to feel like a problem.
The show follows five twenty-somethings in adjacent Murray Hill apartments two women on one side of the hall, three men on the other all trying to figure out what they’re doing with their lives while also figuring out who they want to do it with. That’s the whole architecture. AJ (Ella Hunt) is a first-year analyst at a cutthroat investment bank, the kind of person who treats a coffee cart insult like a diplomatic incident.
Her college roommate Abby (Avantika) is grinding through an apprenticeship under a celebrity stylist so demanding she makes Miranda Priestly look like a life coach. Across the hall: Josh (Jack Martin), the network CEO’s son playing at social conscience; Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), a med student who’d rather be acting; and Davis (Will Angus), a finance bro with the emotional transparency of a golden retriever.
I watched all nine episodes. I don’t regret it. But I kept waiting for the show to exhale to stop being careful and let something actually go wrong.
Because the premise has real teeth, if the writers wanted to use them. Abby gets asked, at one point, to iron her boss’s socks. Individually. While Constance Wu’s Vanessa watches with the kind of detached authority that makes your skin crawl. It’s the funniest, sharpest moment in the season, and it lasts maybe forty seconds. What it opens the specific humiliation of being young and talented and completely at someone else’s mercy the show doesn’t pursue. It moves on. Something lighter comes along.
Hunt and Avantika are good together in a way that feels genuinely unforced. There’s a scene late night, their apartment, both of them exhausted and a little defeated where their friendship feels like it has actual history behind it. Hunt plays AJ’s intensity without making you want to shake her, which is a harder trick than it sounds.
And Avantika has this quality on screen, a brightness, an alertness, that makes you feel like her character deserves more than she’s getting. From the show, I mean. The show gives her a movie-star love interest (Harry Richardson, very handsome, functioning mostly as a plot device) and a boss played by Constance Wu who is the most watchable person in any scene she’s in. That should be enough material for a full arc. It isn’t, quite.
Jay Ellis plays AJ’s manager, Bill Gibson successful, intimidating, complicated in ways the show gestures toward without fully committing to and the tension between him and Hunt is the closest the season gets to genuine romantic electricity. You feel something happening there. The problem is the show keeps cutting away from it, filling time with subplots that don’t earn their runtime. Kel teaching at a prep school, for instance. It’s fine. It has funny moments. Ego Nwodim shows up and is, as she always is, completely committed to whatever the material asks of her. But it feels like a detour the season could have survived without.
The men, generally, are the show’s weaker half. Martin does what he can with Josh, who starts the season as a sanctimonious nepo baby and gradually softens into someone the show wants you to root for. The softening happens a little too smoothly. Duvernay is charming but adrift. Angus has moments Davis’s need to be loved is played with a kind of earnestness that occasionally lands as something more than a joke but the character doesn’t get much room to develop.
And this is where I keep landing with Not Suitable for Work: it’s a show that likes its characters too much to make them genuinely suffer. Which sounds like a strange complaint. But the hangout comedies that last the ones people rewatch on sick days and Sunday afternoons for the rest of their lives tend to have at least one quality this show is missing. They’re willing to be a little cruel. Friends would humiliate Ross for entire episodes.
New Girl let Schmidt be irredeemable and then somehow made you love him anyway. The characters in this show get embarrassed and then immediately rescued. The city, which should feel indifferent and enormous and occasionally hostile, feels like it’s rooting for everyone.
I don’t think Kaling has lost her instincts. I think she’s playing it safe, and playing it safe in a hangout comedy is like ordering plain pasta technically fine, ultimately unsatisfying. The show has warmth. It has two leads with genuine chemistry. It has Constance Wu making a demeaning boss feel genuinely dangerous with about fifteen minutes of screen time.
Victor Garber shows up in a supporting role and briefly makes you feel like you’re watching a different, slightly better show which is a quality Garber has had for forty years and apparently cannot suppress even when the material doesn’t require it.
What Not Suitable for Work is, at its most honest, is a perfectly decent way to spend nine hours. It’s comfortable. The apartments are beautiful. Everyone is attractive and eventually okay. There’s nothing wrong with it, exactly. But I kept thinking about that sock. The ironing of it. The indignity, the quiet fury on Avantika’s face in that moment the whole trapped, furious experience of being twenty-something and brilliant and still answering to someone who treats you like furniture.
Not Suitable for Work TV Parents Guide
Rating: TV-14
Violence & Intensity: None to speak of. The tension here is entirely professional and romantic a demanding boss, a difficult workplace, a complicated love interest. Nobody gets hurt in any physical sense.
Language: Mild. The usual “damn,” “hell,” “ass,” occasional stronger words scattered through. Constance Wu’s boss character speaks to her assistant with a particular brand of cold, professional cruelty that’s more unsettling than any profanity, and honestly worth a conversation with younger viewers about workplace dynamics.
Sexual Content / Nudity: Flirtation and slow-burn romance throughout. Kissing. Strongly implied attraction. Nothing explicit, no nudity. The NSFW in the title is a joke more than a description.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Social drinking is woven into the fabric of the show bars, apartments, unwinding after work. It’s normalized and constant but never the point of a scene. No drug use, no smoking.
Age Recommendation: 14 and up comfortably. There’s nothing here that would harm a younger viewer, but the workplace humor, the romantic push-pull, and the particular exhaustion of early-career ambition will land much better for viewers who’ve had at least a taste of adult professional life. High schoolers can watch it. They’ll enjoy it more in five years.
Highly Recommended: Beef Season 2 Parents Guide