‘Not Suitable for Work’ Review: Mindy Kaling’s Charming But Deliberately Retro New York Sitcom
Five twentysomething neighbors in Manhattan’s Murray Hill juggle dead-end jobs, romantic near-misses, and each other in this cheerfully old-fashioned new sitcom. On Hulu.
The romantic-professional sitcom about twentysomething friends in New York trying to make ends meet, fall in love, forge new friendships, and launch their careers is a cornerstone of American television comedy. Not Suitable for Work arrives as the latest entry in a tradition whose towering reference point is, without question, Friends. Created by Mindy Kaling, the series aims to update — moderately — the codes of that era to account for the decades that have passed, while remaining accessible to an audience a little older than its characters. Put another way: Not Suitable for Work is a show about young people, set in the world of Gen Z, designed to be watched by millennials who are no longer quite so young. And why not — even the older viewers who actually watched Friends the first time around.
The world the characters inhabit is that of 2025/26, and yet there’s no excess of screen time, no flood of hyper-current references, no Gen Z slang, no influencer subplots, no cultural codes that feel unmistakably of-the-moment. One could watch it while thinking of Working Girl — a film from the ’80s — and notice few fundamental differences: this is, at heart, a story of young people trying to make it and survive in New York. The most meaningful distinction is a multicultural, multiracial ensemble, but little else sets it apart from that template. Broad City, or Adults, feel considerably more contemporary by comparison.
What we have here is a single-camera sitcom without a laugh track but animated by the spirit of the old format. The five leads — three men and two women, all heterosexual, which itself feels like a period detail in today’s television landscape — live in facing apartments in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood. On one side are the men. There’s Josh (Jack Martin), a nepo baby and son of a media executive, freshly dumped by his girlfriend, who lands a spot in an investigative journalism program on the strength of his last name. Then Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), a medical student whose true passion is acting, who supplements his income as a substitute teacher. And Davis (Will Angus), firmly planted in the finance world and primarily preoccupied with finding a girlfriend.
Across the hall lives Abby (Avantika), assistant to a high-powered celebrity stylist (Constance Wu) whose near-exclusive client is Austin (Harry Richardson), identified only as «Cate Blanchett’s nephew.» Into this setup arrives AJ (Ella Hunt) — the catalyst for the entire series — a newcomer to the city heading into a finance job, nervous and uncertain about what lies ahead. As in all sitcoms, New York is basically a small town: she ends up working right next to Davis, it emerges she had a one-night stand with Josh back in college, and the man she nearly comes to blows with on the street (Jay Ellis) turns out, hours later, to be her new boss.
None of them are particularly thriving at work, and all of them are trying too hard — and yet somehow they still find time to socialize and get to know each other. Things start badly, as they tend to: neighbor friction, clashes with bosses and coworkers, trouble with the landlord, and most importantly friction among themselves. But gradually the tensions give way to something warmer, even if the romantic interests don’t entirely align. There’s no Central Perk equivalent yet, but a bar has emerged as the gathering spot, and no doubt something more will follow.
Everything operates within the cheerful unreality native to this kind of sitcom — one in which two groups of young people on modest salaries somehow afford more-than-decent apartments in Manhattan — but these are the genre conventions one willingly accepts. The series’ greatest asset is that its characters are, on the whole, genuinely likable; the performances are solid, and there’s real chemistry among the cast. If the show can sustain that, NSFW has the makings of a multi-season run. Whether it gets there will depend on whether viewers who are actually the age of these characters find this somewhat retro vision of their lives convincing. If they don’t connect, the nostalgic crowd — millennials firmly old enough to count themselves out of the target demo — almost certainly will.
