A new review of Mindy Kaling’s sitcom Not Suitable For Work lands hard on a show built to look like a modern Friends. Set around five friends split between two apartments across a hallway in Manhattan, the series is judged to be trying for that old ensemble bounce and missing it.
That verdict matters now because the series is being introduced into a television landscape where any roomful of twenty-somethings in New York is still measured against Friends, more than three decades after it launched in 1994. The new show’s pilot runs 46 minutes, the next episode 35, and the later installments only a few minutes less, giving the comedy plenty of time to establish itself before the jokes are even being weighed.
Inside that setup, AJ is an ambitious first-year analyst at a merchant bank who moves in with her college pal Abby after her boyfriend moves out. Kel is a medical student who wants to be an actor, even though his immigrant parents expect him to become a doctor. Davis is a people-pleaser and undying romantic, Josh is a super woke child of privilege chasing an investigative TV journalist job at his father’s firm, and Elena is a dues-paying intern.
The review’s sharpest detail is Kel, who quits medical school after fainting in dissection class. It should be the kind of turn that gives an ensemble comedy a fresh hook, but the criticism goes elsewhere: the scripts rarely shine, and the dialogue does not snap or zing. AJ and Josh already have a buried complication too, having slept together at a drunken party before he ghosted her at dawn, yet even that kind of built-in messiness does not seem to have produced the kind of comic charge the show needs.
That is the problem hanging over Not Suitable For Work. It is clearly positioned as a Friends-like group comedy, with two apartments, romantic drift and a cast built around five main friends, including two people of colour, but the comparison does it no favors. The review’s sense is that the show tries hard and still comes off soft, more borrowed than alive.
For Kaling, who has already worked on the US version of The Office and created Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls, the review is a reminder that a familiar formula is not the same thing as a working one. What remains unanswered is whether the series improves once it gets past the pilot and into its shorter episodes, or whether this first pass is already the shape of the whole thing.
