The title of creator Mindy Kaling’s Not Suitable for Work is a bit of a misnomer. Apart from some halfhearted f-bombs and demure sex scenes, there’s nothing particularly risqué about the Hulu series. And there’s nothing particularly interesting about it either.
This is cozy, ambient television designed to distract viewers from the monotony of their own nine-to-five grind as they follow a multicultural band of likeable heterosexual characters juggling their professional and romantic relationships in adjacent, impeccably decorated New York City apartments. They all have the hots for either each other, their bosses, or their clients, and pretty soon the love triangles start to overlap with one another.
Not Suitable for Work’s premise owes much to its sitcom forebears, but there’s something at least timely about this iteration of the formula. Statistically, Gen Z and young millennials are more likely to reject company policies around dating co-workers than their older counterparts. As hopeless romantic Davis (Will Angus) says to his sexual harassment training leader in the show’s opening scene, “Are you telling me that if there’s a conflict between work and love, you expect me to pledge my loyalty to work?”
Would that the series had delved more deeply into that cultural dilemma, but it’s just fodder for some rote plotlines revolving around forbidden love, whether it be peppy investment banker AJ (Ella Hunt) and her ball-busting manager (Jay Ellis), or savvy stylist’s assistant Abhinaya (Avantika) and her movie-star client (Harry Richardson), the nephew of Cate Blanchett in one of the show’s admittedly amusing running gags. And while the series boasts the winsome hangout vibes and adorkable humor of Kaling’s The Mindy Project and The Sex Lives of College Girls, it plays it too safe and comes across as bloodless as a result.
The problem, plainly, is that this sitcom is heavy on situation but light on comedy. The title’s double entendre suggests something messier than what’s on offer, as the characters are actually rather put-together and prone to getting their way in the end. The rhythm of the dialogue often approximates the loose, amoebic shape of a joke, but the punchlines are either flavorless or nonexistent. “I looked at my student loan balance and genuinely scared myself,” AJ says in the lengthy pilot, which is full of contrivances (in a city of eight million, apparently everyone has history with one another) and lazy expositional dialogue (“It’s crazy that the stylist you used to stalk on Instagram in college is now your boss,” says one best friend to another).
Things pick up a bit as the season ambles along, the professional/relational boundaries blur, and the characters begin to differentiate themselves. Hyperconscious nepo baby Josh (Jack Martin), in particular, scores some chuckles with privileged asides that undermine the struggling journalist vibe he’s curated. When med student turned actor Kel (Nicholas Duvernay) walks in on Josh in the bathroom and asks what he’s doing, he responds with perfectly smarmy innocence, “It’s Saturday, I’m cleaning my squash shoes.”
At the end of a long day at the office, Not Suitable for Work is escapist fare that emerges less like the imagining of a genuine creative force and more like a cut-and-paste consumer product concocted in a McKinsey boardroom. It’s not irritating enough to warrant full-throated derision but not funny, endearing, or memorable enough to recommend around the water cooler.
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