If you’ve ever sat through a meeting wondering whether anyone actually knows what they’re doing, or been caught in a meeting where there is just too much jargon being used, then Not Suitable for Work will probably feel uncomfortably familiar.
Mindy Kaling’s latest comedy doesn’t reinvent the workplace sitcom, it doesn’t need to because there are so many of them. Instead, it captures something that feels particularly contemporary, a generation entering careers that demand absolute commitment while offering very little certainty in return.
Set among five ambitious twenty-somethings in Manhattan’s Murray Hill, the series follows young professionals trying to build careers, friendships and romantic lives while navigating workplaces that are as performative as they are productive. The premise sounds familiar, and in some ways it is. There are echoes of Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation and even The Office. But Kaling has always been less interested in the workplace itself than in the people trying to survive inside it. As a
What immediately stands out is how recognisable these characters feel. They aren’t caricatures of Gen Z, they’re capable, anxious, ambitious and permanently exhausted. They care deeply about succeeding while quietly wondering whether the success they’re chasing is actually worth it.
The comedy comes less from outrageous situations than from the tiny absurdities of modern professional life, such as networking events becoming emotional minefields. Every coffee meeting feels like a job interview disguised as friendship.
The show also understands that today’s workplace has become performative. Everyone is expected to have a personal brand, a side hustle, emotional intelligence, professional confidence and an active social life. Somewhere between LinkedIn optimism and late-night anxiety lies the reality that Kaling mines consistently for laughs.
That’s where Not Suitable for Work feels particularly timely.
We’re living through a moment when artificial intelligence is reshaping work almost weekly. Graduate jobs are going to become less predictable. Entire professions are questioning what uniquely human contribution still matters. Against that backdrop, Kaling’s comedy isn’t really about offices at all. It’s about identity.
Who are you when your job title doesn’t define you? How much of yourself do you leave at work? And what happens when the career you’ve spent years preparing for turns out to be something entirely different?
Those questions quietly sit beneath almost every episode.
The ensemble cast carries the material well, particularly Ella Hunt and Avantika, whose friendship grounds the series emotionally even when the plotting occasionally becomes formulaic. Their chemistry keeps the show from becoming simply another romantic comedy with office desks instead of coffee shops.
That’s not to say everything works. Some critics have argued that the series leans too heavily on sitcom formulas established by earlier New York ensemble comedies, and there are certainly moments where the jokes don’t land as sharply as Kaling’s previous work, such as The Office. The opening episodes struggle to balance romance, career satire and ensemble storytelling, leaving the pacing uneven.
But even when the comedy misses, the observations usually don’t, that’s because Kaling understands ambition better than most television writers. Her characters aren’t lazy stereotypes waiting to discover themselves. They work incredibly hard. They simply discover that achievement doesn’t automatically answer life’s bigger questions.
Watching the series through that lens, it becomes something more than another workplace comedy.
It becomes a portrait of a generation trying to build meaningful lives in an economy that constantly tells them to optimise everything. Work has become identity. Productivity has become virtue. Rest almost feels irresponsible.
That feels remarkably familiar in an age shaped not only by corporate culture but by AI itself. The question isn’t simply whether machines will do more of our work. It’s whether we’ll remember that our value was never meant to come solely from work in the first place.
That’s where Not Suitable for Work quietly earns its title. It’s not merely suggesting that office life is chaotic. It’s asking whether the way we’ve organised work has become unsuitable for being fully human.
For viewers interested only in laugh-out-loud comedy, there are sharper sitcoms available, but for anyone who has ever questioned the strange bargain modern work asks of us, Mindy Kaling has created something thoughtful beneath the humour.
The jokes may not always be memorable, but the questions certainly are.
This post is from Adrian Drayton’s Substack The Long Conversation writes about where faith meets culture.
