![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/240652e32b3f63842d377daca5dcfdf5b5-notsuitableforwork.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Mindy Kaling\u2019s latest asks, \u201cWould you watch a sitcom about everyone you swipe past on Hinge?\u201d
\n Photo: Cara Howe\/Disney\n <\/p>\n
Back when the Mindy Kaling\u2013produced comedy Not Suitable for Work was first reported on in the hallowed pages of Deadline<\/a> in 2024, it was going by the title Murray Hill and came with a logline promising it would explore the lives of young people in \u201cManhattan\u2019s most glamorous neighborhood.\u201d Even if you\u2019ve never been forced to spend time in an East 30s sports bar filled with former business majors, you may be able to tell that that description of Murray Hill is a joke. The southern neighbor of Midtown East is best known for being the home of some of Manhattan\u2019s most \u2014 and this is a gender-neutral term \u2014 basic bitches, from just-out-of-college frat boys to aspiring influencers who don\u2019t necessarily have the trust funds to support life as West Village girls<\/a>. (There is some good food<\/a> to be found there, though that\u2019s not relevant to the stereotype.) Presumably, a show calling Murray Hill glamorous will poke fun at the lives of the young, ambitious, and cheugy, but to what extent? Sitcoms are meant to be about people you want to spend a lot of time with. Do you want to tune in to a show about the people you swipe past on Hinge?<\/p>\n Not Suitable for Work, the show Murray Hill eventually became, is still trying to calibrate the amount of parody it wants to contain. Created by Kaling and showrun by her regular collaborator Charlie Grandy, who worked on The Sex Lives of College Girls<\/a> and co-created the underloved Champions, the Hulu show does indeed center on a bunch of young people who live in apartments across the hall from one another in an arrangement that is as close as you can get to Friends before a copyright lawyer gets worried. The clique includes aspiring stylist Abby (Avantika Vandanapu, a standout from the Mean Girls musical movie<\/a>); Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), a med student with dreams of being an actor; Josh (Jack Martin), a nepo-baby son of a network executive who wants to make it in TV news; and two investment bankers: Davis (Will Angus), an overeager but good-hearted bro, and AJ (Ella Hunt, of Dickinson), a hardscrabble but adorkable Boston gal. They\u2019re introduced through a tangle of romantic interests: Davis develops an immediate crush on AJ at their shared workplace, though we discover she had a one-night stand with his roommate Josh back in college, and there\u2019s a bit of a slow burn happening between Abby and Kel. A series of pleasantly familiar comedians as guest and recurring actors complicate things\u00a0\u2014 Jay Ellis as Abby and Davis\u2019s mean but hot boss; Ego Nwodim as Kel\u2019s clingy but hot boss; Harry Richardson as a trendy actor whom Abby ends up working for. He\u2019s dumb but also hot! (And yes, it is funny to see Larry from The Gilded Age<\/a> do a Harry Styles parody.)<\/p>\n The tone of the first nine episodes veers wildly as the focus switches from character to character, story line to story line, and actor to actor, and that\u2019s true of pretty much any young-people-in-the-city show. Yet FX\u2019s Adults<\/a>, which shares a lot of DNA with Not Suitable for Work (both are cousins of New Girl, itself a descendant of Friends), came together much more quickly over the course of its first season and outstrips the newer show with stronger joke-writing and a briskly nihilistic sense of Gen-Z dread. Not Suitable for Work, by contrast, stretches for both satire and straightforward cuddliness. Abby\u2019s adventures in the universe of styling tend to be the strongest bits of the series because Avantika is a gifted comedic actor, and Constance Wu as her megalomaniac, oddball boss \u2014 she asks for a cigarette while in the hospital\u00a0\u2014\u00a0pulls off a surprisingly touching self-awareness about what it\u2019s like to have a promising mentee potentially outstrip you. Here, the show has the clearest sense of itself as a goofy farce of the most inane corners of celebrity culture, something Kaling herself admits to being fascinated by<\/a>, and you could refashion the whole thing into a series where Avantika runs Deuxmoi from her Murray Hill apartment or something.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, the show loses its grasp on what exactly it wants to say about these dweebs, if much at all. Any TV show about 20-something bankers is going to suffer in comparison to the sharpness of Industry<\/a>, but Not Suitable for Work\u2019s approach comes off as naive to the point of maudlin. In their office, AJ and Davis learn woke 1.0 life lessons about sexism in the workplace, leading to a nearly unbearable plotline where they rep a shapewear company that commits the crime of wasting Stephanie Hsu as a vengeful CEO. Josh and Kel\u2019s showbiz aspirations toggle uncertainly between farce and inspiration: Kaling and Grandy know enough about the universe of writers\u2019 rooms to get in some believable details about Josh\u2019s attempts to suck up to his pompous TV-anchor boss (played by a scenery-munching Victor Garber) and the head writer who actually steers the ship (Judy Gold), but we\u2019re also subjected to a little too much of him realizing that, gasp, he\u2019s been coasting along on a cloud of privilege this whole time. It\u2019s more fun to watch Kel suffer through a side gig as a substitute teacher for spoiled private-school kids than earnestly chase his dream as an actor. He ends up auditioning for the Jeremy O. Harris play Yell, about the playwright\u2019s time at Yale, and Harris does a cameo as himself; it\u2019s fitting because Harris and Kaling share similar Ivy League alumni traumas.<\/p>\n Though they\u2019re meant to have graduated from UPenn and UMich, the characters in Not Suitable for Work could easily have gone to the fictional Essex College of The Sex Lives of College Girls and before that hung out with the nerdy teens of Never Have I Ever in high school. Later, they\u2019ll grow up and try to manage sports franchises like Kate Hudson in Running Point. As a writer and producer, Kaling has assembled a nearly complete life cycle of shows with their own set of tropes, like the outsider girl who wants a gold star and an old-fashioned romance, or the white-bread and (often) white bro she can\u2019t help but love. This tension,\u00a0the push and pull between wanting to belong to a broadly popular, more powerful group and wanting to stand at a distance from it\u00a0\u2014 to critique, and in the process, to conquer it\u00a0\u2014\u00a0is reflected in the tonal instability of much of Kaling\u2019s work. The Sex Lives of College Girls, for instance, was stronger with its early, insider-y sense of what it\u2019s like to be a young woman finding yourself at an elite school but lost its bite (and a crucially acerbic lead performer<\/a>) when it headed toward wish fulfillment. Never Have I Ever went in a similar direction, as did The Mindy Project itself. The powerful desire to find a way to belong, even if it means making yourself boring \u2014 or admitting to yourself in the process that you want to be boring \u2014 lies at the root of Kaling\u2019s game as a writer and performer. Nobody on Not Suitable for Work thinks of themselves as edgier than average (there\u2019s a joke early on about how they know that none of them are cool enough to move to Brooklyn), but the show itself is torn between sending up and warmly embracing the normies. That\u2019s where the irony of the show\u2019s premise ends up sounding like an inadvertent confession. If your abiding artistic interest lies in the place where ambition collides with basicness, Murray Hill really must be the most compelling neighborhood in Manhattan.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n