Watching Not Suitable for Work, a new Hulu sitcom from Mindy Kaling, I found myself thinking, improbably, of Richard Nixon. Elected vice president at 39, Nixon was famously described as “an old man’s idea of a young man.” Suitable, a postcollegiate roommate comedy in the tradition of Friends and New Girl, is an older person’s idea of a show about young adults. The cast is relevant and the scripts peppered with internet slang. But the characters bear so little resemblance to the Gen Z we know, they might as well be at Central Perk in 1994.
Like so many shows of this sort, Suitable, premiering with three episodes on June 2, is set in New York. Unlike the boho types of Girls and last year’s Adults, who scrape by in the outer boroughs, however, these pals live in Manhattan’s fratty Murray Hill neighborhood. “I’m not cool enough for Brooklyn,” frets first-year investment banker AJ (Ella Hunt), in a lament as dated as a Sex and the City bisexuality plot. She’s moving in with her best friend, Abby (Avantika), the enterprising assistant of a bratty stylist (Constance Wu). Across the hall are their love interests. Reluctant med student Kel (Nicholas Duvernay) longs to be an actor. Josh (Jack Martin) has the politics of a middle-aged liberal (Obama poster, NPR merch) and the entitlement to use his mogul dad’s clout to get hired by the Anderson-Cooper-esque cable news host (Victor Garber) he idolizes. A bumbling version of a romcom loverboy, Davis (Will Angus) falls hard for AJ, who also happens to work with him.
That these characters are what boomers would call squares and millennials basic isn’t a bad thing. Artsy, young urbanites are overrepresented on TV; Industry even makes finance bros look cool, for psychos. Hunt, Avantika, and Angus are especially good as overgrown kids trying, to varying extents, to hide their softness beneath ambition. Even when the jokes fall flat, as they often do, the cast’s charm keeps episodes breezy.
Yet this friend group isn’t just out of step with the generational zeitgeist. They also exist in an alternate universe where, strained references to looksmaxxing techniques and already-archaic Labubu jokes aside, the Gen Z young-adult experience isn’t much different from the Gen X model. Is the economy a nightmare? Is AI eliminating precisely the entry-level, white-collar jobs these recent grads are able to easily lock down? Is anyone besides, we’re told, Josh’s boss queer? Not in this neck of the multiverse!
Nor, it seems, did the great workplace reckoning that was #MeToo ever happen. As its title suggests, Suitable is invested in its characters’ professional lives, and particularly how they’re complicated by matters of the heart. It opens with Davis failing a sexual-misconduct training and Abby being exhorted not to sleep with famous clients. Three of the five leads are eventually entangled in work-related love triangles. AJ’s involves her managing director (Jay Ellis from Insecure), a cutthroat who loves his job so much, it’s hard to believe he would consider jeopardizing it by pursuing an underling. A generous interpretation of all this would be that Kaling— who’d been on a hot streak with Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls, and Running Point—is saying every generation has to make its own mistakes, no matter the institutional guardrails. That may well be true. But it doesn’t mean TV scripts should sound as oblivious as the green characters that populate them.
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