Note: This story contains spoilers from “Not Suitable for Work” Season 1, Episode 9.
By the end of Season 1 of Hulu’s “Not Suitable for Work,” a love triangle is in full force between AJ (Ella Hunt), Josh (Jack Martin) and Davis (Will Angus).
After AJ and Josh set a New Years’ Eve hangout that blurred the lines of their friendship, the possibility of something more happening dissipates when Josh comes home to find AJ and Davis kissing — an ending showrunner Charlie Grandy and creator Mindy Kaling intentionally left “messy” as they set up for a potential second season (the show has yet to be renewed).
Whether the kiss was just a thank you for Davis coming to her defense with their boss, Bill (Jay Ellis) — to the point of losing his job — it’s not that clear cut. “Davis has been her champion for the entire season — it would be impossible not to develop feelings for someone like that, who … [has] been so in love with you and supportive of you and helpful throughout, no matter what,” Grandy told TheWrap.
For Josh, it’s not so much of a gut punch but more so a push to come to terms with his feelings for AJ, with Grandy noting Martin nails the “realization in the moment of, she was just a friend, but as soon as you see your best friend kissing her, it’s like ‘oh, no.’”
A similar realization happens across the city for Abby (Avantika Vandanapu) during a cast party to which Kel (Nicholas Duvernay) invited her, only to see he’s hitting it off with another girl. Of course some jealousy arises, but Grandy notes the moment also serves as a wake up call for Abby to see how how he’s matured into a “sweet confidant for her.”
“They really start out as enemies in Episodes 1 and 2 … and see them change in each other’s eyes over the course of the season, and I felt we did that effectively with Abby and Kel,” Grandy said. “He was just this cheesy guy who lived across the hall, who would relentlessly hit on her, but then over the course of the season she realized he was actually pretty wonderful.”
These tricky situations all buoy “Not Suitable for Work” right into a potential Season 2, laying the groundwork for what Kaling intended to be a 10-season arc.
“Mindy wrote the pilot wanting it to run for 10 seasons,” Grandy said. “That is really how it was designed in its DNA — to have it be season-long arcs, but to also have enough freedom to play and not have it be so aggressively arced out that you can’t just have standalone episodes, and where you can just introduce new characters and keep it alive for as long as you want, as long as the audience wants to see.”
And unlike a series set in high school or college, there’s no artificial time restrictions, with Grandy saying “we can just sort of follow them for as long as we compelling stories.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: There’s been a burst of shows depicting 20-somethings from “Adults” to “I Love LA.” How did you want to differentiate “Not Suitable for Work?”
Grandy: How we differentiate ourselves was to focus less on trying to capture the zeitgeist Gen Z attitudes — we really just focused on what was timeless to us and what we loved about that time in our lives, and stories that we felt would appeal to anyone, to any generation … either they’re nostalgic for that time in their lives, or they’re going through it now.
When Mindy pitched it to me she said, “When I moved to New York, I truly felt that if I did not become a professional copywriter, I would die,” and I really felt that same way too when I moved to New York after college, and that was kind of the compass point that we followed through the entire breaking of Season 1 … that was what we focused on, and we … didn’t want to pay attention to anything else. [It] was like, “let’s just tell stories that were true to us and hope that they’re true to everyone else.”
You pack a lot of growing dynamics into that first season alongside several workplaces. What was it like tackling that within this first nine-episode season?
It was hard to break, because we also have five incredible leads — to say nothing of all the incredible guests are able to hang out with us — you don’t want to give anyone their short script or anything, you want them all to have very complex, fun characters, great season-long arcs, great individual stories, so it was a real balancing act of saying, “okay, well, maybe in this episode Kel needs to have a bigger episode, so Davis is going to be a little bit lighter. Next episode will be more of an AJ episode.” It was a lot … keeping a lot of plates spinning and making sure that that one was well-serviced, while at the same time everyone got good stories.
But that was also something that … drew me to the project — instead of being a traditional hangout show, we got to follow these characters to very fleshed out workspaces and to see them outside of the friend group, and then when they brought that back to the friend dynamic was really exciting to me — that was the fresh take that we had on the traditional hangout show.
We see things between AJ and Bill get serious rather quickly before ultimately coming to a close. I’m curious about tackling that in this first season, rather than having that one be the slower burn?
We wanted to just come out of the gate swinging in Season 1 and tell a real complete story and take AJ on this real journey … she’s had this desire, she wants to succeed, but then love gets in the way. But, of course, the worst possible thing that happens, that was all for naught, and she has her heart broken, and then she has to pick herself up and go back to work, and sort of have a personal achievement taking some PTO finally. The only way we could do it was to have a complete relationship. Obviously you have an actor as good as Jay Ellis and a character as fun as Bill, though we’ve sort of told a complete season-long story, that doesn’t mean that we won’t have Bill still in the show in the ether.
How did you want to set up that end for AJ and Bill to be devastating but not necessarily detrimental to her work?
That speech that he gives AJ at the door — as hard as it is, as much of a blast of cold water as it is — I felt there is a real truth to it, and, to me, it felt like the bookend …. when he’s talking about what it takes to succeed … and he’s just being brutally honest in a way that I don’t think you hear until you get out of college and you’re actually experiencing it.
He feels such a connection to AJ, really sees that they’re the same person, and has lived enough to know that that is why this probably can’t work, at least not at this time in their lives, and that she will need someone who is going to be there to kind of take care of her, so she can do everything that she wants to do. It was this very practical speech that I liked, that’s so hard to hear, and it’s so devastating, but it wasn’t mean or callous, it was just the truth, which really to me summed up who Bill was.
I was glad to see Constance Wu come back. Why did you want to have Abby working under her rather than trying to make it on her own?
The NSFW of her arc [was] when she was unfaithful to her boss, and kind of went behind her boss’s back with another client and got burned, and she tried to take on too much too soon — which also felt very real. She tried it on her own, and it just hadn’t worked, and she realized she needed to go back to where she started, and to build herself back up, and that Vanessa saw that that she’d sort of been brought to her lowest moment and learned the lesson she needed to learn, so she could truly grow, and that was the time to come back and help her.
In Davis being so wonderful to AJ, he got himself out of a job. What are you hoping to explore with him in a potential next season?
He needs to be validated by other people … by his friends, by his relationships, by work, that’s just how he defines himself. His continuing evolution will be his ability to just have faith himself and to believe in himself and to not … define himself the way he wants to not necessarily be defined by all these external factors.
How did some of those guest spots come together? You had everyone from Gigi Hadid to Jeremy O’Harris to Hari Nef to Hannah Berner and Paige De Sorbo.
That was the reason we wanted to be in New York. We really begged and pleaded, and had our incredible line producer Ayesha Rokadia make the numbers work, because we knew that the actors that we wanted to work with were mostly in New York, and if we could just make it very easy for them to send a car to pick them up and take them home, then it would be a lot easier than having to fly them out to LA … and that just becomes a huge imposition.
We’ve worked with Constance before on “Velma,” Victor was just someone we’ve always loved and we reached out to him. So many people were just their actors that we love, and we reached out and said, “hey, is there any way you would want to do this?” Hannah and Paige … We were trying to think of just someone cool, elegant that Josh would know that would be exciting for Wes.
You started out with nine episodes this season. Are you hoping for about the same episode count, or to crank it up a bit for next season?
It was technically 10 half-hours. The pilot … it’s not an hour, but it counted as two episodes, so it would be 10. I think our dream would honestly be to do 18 this at that point. I mean, Mindy and I both started in network television doing 22, 24, 26 episode seasons … I think it can really help in that you just have more time again. We have such fleshed out workplaces to spend more time with each character, and to not have so aggressively get through all of the amount of story that we want to … but again, hey, if they give us three episodes, I’ll be happy.
“Not Suitable for Work” is now streaming on Hulu.
The post ‘Not Suitable for Work’ Boss Unpacks Finale’s Messy Love Triangle Cliffhanger and Hopes for 10 Seasons appeared first on TheWrap.
