Not Suitable for Work: Smooth-brained sitcom about 20-somethings designed to appeal to 40-somethings

When Friends ended in 2004, it had become such a cultural phenomenon it cemented one of the most enduring templates on American TV.

That of the 20-somethings hang-out sitcom.

It could have a distinct premise – The Big Bang Theory’s four nerds live opposite a “hot girl” or New Girl’s set-up of a woman moving into an apartment of dudes – but it didn’t have to. It could be as freewheeling as Friends or Living Single.

As long as it followed the core organising principle of a focused group of mix-gender characters, preferably between four and six, whose lives revolved around each other.

The formula often featured a big city, usually New York such as in How I Met Your Mother, lived together or near each other, most of them would have jobs in an industry that TV knows how to fake (media, finance, fashion), and there would inevitably be some cross-dating within the cohort.

In that post-Friends era, the likes of How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, and Happy Endings, and in an adjacent space with Girls and Broad City, the 20-somethings hangout sitcom was in full swing.

The Mindy Project was also in that mix, but its characters were in their 30s, already established professionals who seemingly had at least a few more things worked out.

They didn’t have housemates anymore, which took away one of the TV mechanisms of solving the problem of why these characters were always together. That’s why there are so many workplace sitcoms when it comes to characters 30 and above.

Mindy Kaling created The Mindy Project based on a love of sitcoms with ambitious women, and crafted the character after her own late mother, who was an OBGYN. She then made Never Have I Ever as a way to tap into her own high school experiences while The Sex Lives of College Girls came from her university days.

Her new series, Not Suitable for Work, plugs that decade in between, when, after college, Kaling arrived in New York City in the early 2000s to work in comedy and TV, adrift in a big city.

Perhaps that explains why that even though Not Suitable for Work is set in the present day, it has a throwback feel to that earlier post-Friends era of the genre.

The series doesn’t have a laugh track, but there is a staginess or artificiality to it – not exactly a strict set-up and punchline structure, but it feels very held-together. Too slick.

Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing if that’s what you’re in the mood for nostalgia vibes.

Certainly don’t expect the chaotic looseness of something such as Adults (a 2025 sitcom about 20-something housemates in, you guessed it, New York City), which feels as if it evolved from Broad City, whereas Not Suitable for Work comes from the stilted tradition of Friends.

Like its genre predecessors, Not Suitable for Work is less about the what (story, plot) and more about the who (characters).

The series is centred on five characters: AJ (Ella Hunt), an ambitious and sharp first-year analyst at an investment bank, who has moved to New York and lives with her friend Abby (Avantika Vandanapu), a bright go-getter assistant to a demanding celebrity stylist.

AJ and Abby live across the hall from three guys, Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), a med student who quits school to pursue his dream of acting, Davis (Will Angus), an intense finance dude who wants nothing more than to be a boyfriend guy, and Josh (Jack Martin), a nepo baby who dropped his media mogul father’s name to land a job as a production assistant working for a famed TV anchor.

There are supporting characters in the leads’ lives including co-workers, fleeting love interests and a fictional nephew of Cate Blanchett, played by the likes Harry Richardson, Constance Wu, Victor Garber, May Hong, Greg Germann and Ego Ewodim. Most notably, there’s Jay Ellis, who plays AJ and Davis’s ruthless and charismatic boss.

The success of Not Suitable for Work hinges on whether the character mix works, whether you want to follow these people as they navigate all those young adult challenges.

Across the first season’s nine episodes, it takes a little bedding in but the series finds its rhythm about halfway through.

There are still some character kinks to smooth out – for example, Josh goes on about the virtues of journalism but never seems to actually do any – but there’s potential here for a second season to delve deeper.

In particular, Abby the stylist and Kel the aspiring actor have story arcs worth following.

There are some genuine laugh-out-loud moments, but you do wonder if Not Suitable for Work is arriving at the wrong moment, too late in the evolution of TV comedy.

It doesn’t grapple with youth anxieties now – usual caveat of everyone’s Manhattan apartments are too light-filled, spacious and nice – and seems deliberately disengaged with politics, climate, technological revolution, or the economic reality of starting a career during AI-obsessed late-stage capitalism circa 2026, save for a few gags involving bagging up free food from a work function.

A series like this feels designed to appeal to people who were in their 20s years ago, probably around the time Kaling was, and want to watch something with a rose-tinted view of their youth, and that lets them forget for a moment the stress of children, mortgages, ageing parents and mid-level careers.

It’s hard to see what this show offers to people who are actually in their 20s now.

Smooth-brained? Most definitely. But if you know that going in, and you don’t expect anything other than a chill, tune-out experience, Not Suitable for Work is exactly that.

Not Suitable for Work is streaming on Disney+