has delivered a blunt verdict on Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom Not Suitable for Work, calling it a failed bid to build a new Friends. The show follows five friends split between two Manhattan apartments, but the review says the result tries hard and rarely shines.
That is why the not suitable for work cast is drawing attention now. The series arrives with AJ, Abby, Kel, Davis and Josh at the center of it, and the comparison is immediate: a young group in neighbouring Manhattan flats, a familiar setup and a benchmark that still looms more than three decades after Friends first aired.
AJ is an ambitious first-year analyst at a merchant bank, while Abby is her college pal. Kel is a medical student who wants to act, Davis is a people-pleaser with a hopeless romantic streak and Josh is a super-woke child of privilege. Elena, a dues-paying intern, is part of the wider setup too, even though the five-friend structure leaves her on the edge of the circle rather than in it.
Kaling has spent years working in the same broad lane. She began her writing and acting career on the US version of The Office, then went on to create Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls. Here, though, the joke engine is being judged against a very different standard. The pilot runs 46 minutes, the next episode 35, and later instalments are only a few minutes shorter, a pace that suggests the show is still searching for its rhythm.
The friction is not just about the length. The writing is being measured against a well-worn Manhattan-apartment formula, and the verdict is that the series cannot quite turn that setup into spark. Even with Kel fainting in dissection class and quitting med school, Josh landing his dream job as an investigative TV journalist at his father’s firm, and the painful fact that that post should have gone to Elena, the material is seen as effortful rather than electric.
There is also a sharper personal thread running through the pilot. Josh and AJ slept together at a drunken party, and he ghosted her before dawn. Abby’s client is Austin Blanchett, described as Cate’s nephew. Those details give the cast movement, but not the kind of comic lift that would erase the show’s larger problem: it is being compared with Friends, and it is not coming close to clearing that bar.
For now, the answer is plain. Not Suitable for Work has arrived as a new ensemble comedy with a recognizable TV pedigree behind it, but the first critical response says it is no instant classic. The open question is whether the shorter episodes and later turns can repair that first impression, or whether the show will stay trapped in the shadow of the apartment comedy it wants to become.
