Not Suitable for Work enters Hulu’s comedy lineup with the confidence of a show that knows exactly which couch it wants viewers to sink into. Created by Mindy Kaling, the series follows five young adults living across the hall from one another in Murray Hill, New York, where ambition, bad timing, romantic confusion, and suspiciously spacious apartments collide.
The setup is almost aggressively familiar. AJ, played by Ella Hunt, arrives from Boston for a finance job and moves in with her college friend Abby, played by Avantika, who works for a demanding celebrity stylist. Across the hall live Davis, a romantically frantic finance worker; Kel, a former med student drawn toward acting; and Josh, a media heir trying to build a journalism career without leaning on his father’s name. Spoiler: the leaning happens.
The show is quick, bright, sweet-tempered, and built for comfort. It wants to capture Gen Z adulthood, yet its rhythm often feels borrowed from an older sitcom shelf. This is a show about young people in 2026 that sometimes behaves like it still has a Blockbuster card in a drawer somewhere.
Manhattan by Way of Sitcom Memory
The Murray Hill setting gives Not Suitable for Work a specific flavor. It is not the scrappy New York of collapsing radiators, mystery stains, and rent paid through a combination of freelance invoices and divine intervention. This Manhattan is clean, attractive, professionally lit, and weirdly cooperative. People may be stressed, but the skyline is always ready for its close-up.
That fantasy has a long TV history. The two-apartment hallway structure recalls classic ensemble sitcom architecture, where geography becomes destiny. Put attractive young people near each other, give them jobs they are barely prepared for, then wait for poor decisions to knock on the door. It worked for Friends. It powered New Girl. It gave How I Met Your Mother years of romantic circuitry. Not Suitable for Work knows this lineage and leans into it with a neatness that feels both cozy and slightly frozen in time.
The tension comes from the series’ attempt to speak to young adulthood while avoiding many of its sharpest pressures. Dating apps barely shape the characters’ love lives. Gig work, debt, rent terror, queer social circles, and the bleak entry-level job market hover outside the frame like extras who missed their call time. AI and internet conspiracy culture appear, but they function closer to episode seasoning than structural threat.
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That gives the show a strange split identity. On one level, its distance from modern dread is part of its appeal. Who really wants a sitcom where every episode ends with someone refreshing a loan repayment page? Still, a comedy about early careers and young ambition loses some bite when its world sands down the panic that defines so much of that stage. The result is escapism with a very nice wardrobe and a slight fear of its own timestamp.
A Cast With Spark, Searching for a Fuller Group Current
The cast gives Not Suitable for Work much of its buoyancy. Ella Hunt makes AJ one of the show’s clearest anchors, playing her as guarded, sharp, anxious, and eager to be taken seriously before she has fully learned how to breathe in a room. AJ’s finance job supplies pressure, but her romantic entanglements carry much of the season’s momentum. She is often positioned as the character everyone either wants, misunderstands, or underestimates.
Avantika brings an appealing screen brightness to Abby, whose job as assistant to celebrity stylist Vanessa places her inside a world of glamour built on petty humiliations. Abby’s work life has a strong comic premise: proximity to beauty, fame, and status, paired with tasks that reduce her to an overqualified errand machine.
Her attraction to actor Austin Blanchett is easy to predict, but it does help expose the show’s interest in blurred professional lines. The issue is that Abby and AJ’s friendship, which should feel like bedrock, sometimes plays closer to polite dorm nostalgia. Their bond needs messier texture, the kind that suggests years of bad outfits, worse boyfriends, and one fight neither of them mentions anymore.
Across the hall, the men fare better as a comic unit. Will Angus gives Davis the show’s most elastic energy. Davis is needy, lovesick, intense, and at times one heartfelt rejection away from becoming a dating-app cautionary tale. Angus makes him funny without fully softening the discomfort, which gives the character useful friction. He is a sitcom doofus with a warning label.
Nicholas Duvernay’s Kel has the warmest arc. His decision to move away from medicine and toward acting gives him a believable identity conflict, especially through his family expectations. His substitute-teaching storyline at a private girls’ school is one of the season’s sharper comic lanes, partly because it places him in a room where his charm has limited market value. Teen girls are a brutal focus group.
Jack Martin’s Josh could have been unbearable: rich, sheltered, morally fluent, practically helpless. Instead, Martin finds a softness in him. Josh wants to be an idealistic journalist, yet he keeps treating nepotism like a mildly embarrassing rideshare. His scenes work best when the show punctures his self-image without turning him into a cartoon villain.
The supporting cast gives the world extra snap. Constance Wu’s Vanessa brings icy comic pressure, Jay Ellis gives Bill a polished menace, Victor Garber’s Wes Dryden adds media-world authority, and Judy Gold’s Paula supplies the kind of hard-earned exasperation Josh badly needs. Michael Benjamin Washington’s Antoine brings welcome eccentricity to a setting that can feel overly buffed.
A hangout sitcom lives on chemistry. The men develop a looser rhythm as the season moves, helped by rituals like “Steak and Tears,” a phrase so ridiculous it loops back to sincere. The full group works best during set pieces that force everyone into the same social pressure cooker, such as dinner-party chaos or temporary roommate upheaval. Those scenes hint at the show Not Suitable for Work could become if it trusted hanging out as much as it trusts plot.
Romance, Work, and the Problem of Too Many Sitcoms at Once
Romance supplies the show’s engine, and the engine rarely idles. Crushes misfire, old hookups resurface, professional lines blur, and slow-burn pairings get carefully arranged for future use. AJ becomes the busiest romantic figure, moving through overlapping possibilities that keep the story active. In theory, that should give the season a fizzy rom-com pulse.
In practice, the show sometimes mistakes arrangement for chemistry. Many pairings are legible on paper, yet the charge between them feels muted. Characters say the right things, glance at the right moments, and occupy the right corners of the frame, but the air rarely changes temperature. For a series this invested in romantic confusion, it could use a little danger, or at least the sense that someone might make a spectacularly bad choice for reasons that are not purely structural.
The workplace material has a similar problem of abundance. AJ and Davis operate inside finance under Bill. Abby deals with celebrity styling and Vanessa’s demands. Kel tries acting while teaching at a private school. Josh works at an investigative news program under Wes and Paula. Each arena has enough material for its own comedy. Packed together, they pull attention away from the central group.
Kel’s teaching arc stands out because it gives him immediate comic resistance and real emotional payoff. The private-school students are funny because they are not impressed by him, and the storyline lets him grow through humiliation rather than speeches. Josh’s relationship with Paula also works because it places his privilege next to someone with institutional memory and limited patience for rich-boy self-discovery. Their scenes have the friction the show needs.
AJ’s finance arc creates pressure and professional stakes, though the workplace romance angle strains credibility. Abby’s celebrity-stylist plot has glamour, cruelty, and a strong assistant-from-hell frame, yet its romantic turn feels too neatly packaged. The season moves briskly across nine episodes, which helps the lighter material, but some threads stretch thin before snapping back into place with sitcom convenience.
The finale leaves romantic threads suspended, clearly setting the table for another season. That is standard sitcom practice, of course. Still, the first season often feels like a long pilot for a show that becomes clearer whenever the five leads stop chasing separate plots and start irritating each other in the same room.
Quips, Polish, and the Fear of Real Mess
The comic voice of Not Suitable for Work is fast, reference-heavy, and built around embarrassment, ambition, class anxiety, workplace incompetence, and romantic delusion. The jokes land unevenly. Some work because the actors sell them with precision.
Some feel written in highlighter, especially when the show reaches for youth slang or pop-cultural currency. The funniest moments tend to come from character flaws rather than punchline machinery: Davis’s overcaffeinated longing, Josh’s clueless privilege, Kel’s ego meeting a classroom of unimpressed students.
The direction and editing keep the series moving with a clean, frictionless pace. Scenes rarely sag, and the half-hour format suits the material far better once the season settles. Visually, the show is glossy to a fault. Apartments glow. Outfits coordinate. Manhattan looks expensive, flattering, and emotionally sanitized. That polish gives the series comfort-watch appeal, but it also makes the characters’ problems feel lightly vacuum-sealed.
Culturally, the show lands at a curious point in TV comedy. Streamers have spent years chasing the next great young-adult ensemble, often pushing toward harsher realism, messier sex, sharper politics, or ironic self-awareness. Not Suitable for Work moves in the opposite direction.
It wants the warmth of a classic hangout sitcom, the pace of a modern streaming comedy, and the social vocabulary of a generation it does not fully observe. That combination can feel dated, yet there is something oddly refreshing about its refusal to punish every character for being sincere.
The show’s most promising idea is friendship as a refuge from ambition. These characters are all trying to become impressive before they become honest with themselves. That is a smart emotional spine for a sitcom. Now the series has to decide if it wants to keep polishing the apartment windows, or finally let some real New York dirt blow in.
Not Suitable for Work is a workplace and coming-of-age comedy series that premiered on June 2, 2026. Created by Mindy Kaling, the series follows five work-obsessed twenty-somethings as they navigate high-stakes professional ambitions, complex corporate hierarchies, and messy personal relationships while living across the hall from one another in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood. Audiences in the United States can stream the series exclusively on Hulu, while international viewers can watch it via Disney+.
Where to Watch Not Suitable for Work Online
Full Credits
Title: Not Suitable for Work
Distributor: Hulu, Disney+
Release date: June 2, 2026
Rating: TV-14
Running time: 31–46 minutes per episode
Director: Greg Mottola, Lila Neugebauer
Writers: Mindy Kaling, Charlie Grandy, Sarah Tapscott, Marina Cockenberg, Beth Appel, Matthew Warburton, Kate Lindenburg
Producers and Executive Producers: Mindy Kaling, Charlie Grandy, Howard Klein, Greg Mottola
Cast: Ella Hunt, Avantika Vandanapu, Will Angus, Jack Martin, Nicholas Duvernay, Jay Ellis, Ego Nwodim, Constance Wu
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Adrian Peng Correia, Shannon Madden
Editors: Mat Greenleaf, Elizabeth Merrick
Composer: Gabriel Mann
The Review
Not Suitable for Work
Not Suitable for Work is a breezy, polished sitcom with an appealing cast, sharp supporting turns, and enough romantic confusion to keep its nine episodes moving. Its biggest issue is a strange disconnect between its Gen Z premise and its older sitcom instincts. The workplace plots can crowd the friendships, and several romances need stronger heat. Still, the series has charm, pace, and room to grow if it lets the core five spend more time together.
PROS
- Likable ensemble cast
- Strong comic support from Paula, Antoine, Vanessa, and Bill
- Kel’s teaching arc brings warmth and humor
- Breezy pacing across nine episodes
- Comfortable hangout-sitcom appeal
CONS
- Gen Z details often feel dated
- Some romantic pairings lack spark
- Too many workplace plots split focus
- AJ and Abby’s friendship needs more texture
- Glossy setting softens the show’s sharper themes
