I enjoy Mindy Kaling. I like the things she’s produced so far. I like her as a talent. So whenever I hear she has a new show, I do admittedly have a piqued interest. Not Suitable for Work immediately hit a snag with advocates for people with allergies, since one of the episodes has a rather unfortunate take on someone having an allergic reaction, which admittedly is not the way I think anyone should present something like that. Granted, this isn’t a children’s television series, which would make it even worse if they were trying to sell that kind of messaging to kids who are incredibly impressionable. But that doesn’t necessarily excuse how it’s represented here either. So if you know this show as the program that sparked backlash from the allergy community, well, it deserved it. Sorry, Mindy, but it did. I don’t even have allergies, and that episode made me cringe.

The series revolves around three guys and two girls, because apparently nobody ever wants to do the three guys, three girls thing like Friends again. Everybody is so afraid of being compared directly to Friends. But this is basically another variation on that formula, and everybody just so happens to live in New York. Last year Hulu launched Adults, which is already coming back for a second season, and now we have Not Suitable for Work, another series about a group of twenty-somethings trying to figure out romance, careers, and adulthood in the Big Apple. It’s familiar territory, and the show never really tries to convince you otherwise.

Living together are Josh, played by Jack Martin, Kel, played by Nicholas Duvernay, and Davis, played by Will Angus. Josh comes from a wealthy family and works as a production assistant at a television news company connected to his father, meaning he can’t really escape the privilege that surrounds him. Kel begins the series on the path toward medical school before realizing that maybe medicine isn’t actually the future he wants, despite his sister pursuing the same career. Davis works in financial acquisitions under an intimidating executive nicknamed Bill the Butcher, played by Jay Ellis, a clear nod to the infamous historical figure and Gangs of New York. Across the hall live Abby, played by Avantika, and AJ, played by Ella Hunt. Abby is a budding stylist trying to establish herself in the fashion industry, while AJ works with Davis at the financial acquisitions company run by Bill the Butcher. Abby is also living in an apartment that was technically leased by her ex-boyfriend before he moved out, forcing her to dodge the property manager while pretending that everything is perfectly normal.

Over the course of the season, everyone experiences some level of personal growth. Careers change, promotions happen, relationships begin and end, and naturally some members of this group fall for each other while others find romance outside their immediate circle. Davis works alongside AJ at Bill the Butcher’s company, where Bill naturally becomes a potential love interest for her while Davis begins questioning his own feelings for the new girl. Josh is a little lighter on the romance front, although I did love his obsession with Broadcast News. I’m a fan of that film too, so every time he brought it up it made me smile, especially when he eventually chooses to stay home and watch it instead of doing something else. His larger arc is really about recognizing the privilege he’s always had and eventually learning what life looks like without it. After a falling out with his father, he temporarily loses access to everything that made him the pampered guy he had become accustomed to being. By the end of the season, he discovers that he actually is capable of making it on his own. Even though he and his father reconcile, it isn’t because of money. It’s because of something more meaningful. If there is a second season, I’d be curious to see whether he slips back into that comfortable lifestyle or continues carving out his own path.

Kel probably has the strongest storyline because his career path actually resembles what a lot of young adults go through today. After walking away from medical school, much to the disappointment of his parents and sister, he bounces from job to job while trying to establish himself as an actor. In the meantime, he takes a teaching position at a private school where he’s constantly outmatched by an unbelievably judgmental group of girls who completely dominate him. Honestly, those students were hilarious. Their sarcastic comments and complete lack of intimidation made for some of the funniest moments of the season. My hot take is that I almost don’t want Kel’s acting career to take off because I’d rather watch him go back to teaching. We spend far more entertaining time with him in that classroom than we ever do watching him chase auditions, and I found myself wanting more of those interactions.

Abby’s storyline eventually leads her to styling an A-list celebrity who begins taking an interest in her, despite not caring much about fashion himself. It’s obvious his intentions aren’t exactly professional, while Abby tries her hardest to keep things that way. AJ faces a similar dilemma with Bill the Butcher as their professional relationship begins drifting toward something more personal. For a series called Not Suitable for Work, though, it doesn’t consistently explore workplace relationships across the entire cast. Instead, it falls into a lot of the familiar sitcom habits we’ve seen for decades. Everyone somehow lives in apartments they probably couldn’t afford, everyone spends their free time doing the sort of quintessential New York activities we’ve watched on television a thousand times before, and I couldn’t help wondering why these stories always have to be set in Manhattan. There are so many fascinating cities across the country, and it feels like television keeps returning to the exact same backdrop. If you look at the Real Housewives franchise, they seem to understand that there are interesting people and stories in cities all across the country. Just changing the location could have made this show feel more distinctive instead of giving us the same tired interactions with New York that we’ve seen in nearly every other show ever. Even Hulu itself is doubling down on it, considering I’ll be watching the second season of Adults in a couple of months, another show on the same service with an incredibly similar premise.

The only real standout performance for me came from Avantika as Abby. She brings an energy to the character that feels genuinely engaging as Abby races around trying to build a career for herself while holding onto some pretty unrealistic expectations about what that career will actually involve. The other four leads never quite reached that same level for me. The series also falls into an odd middle ground with its romantic storylines. It’s somewhere between the old sitcom model, where single characters cycled through a different date every episode, and something like Sex and the City, where Carrie might have a boyfriend for an entire season before they broke up, she moved on to someone else, or she went back to Mr. Big for whatever continued to happen on Sex and the City. Here, the relationships are clearly meant to last longer than a single episode, but they also don’t feel like they’re designed to survive beyond one season. The show makes very little effort to convince us that these characters who aren’t series regulars will remain important later, making many of the romances feel temporary before they’ve even had a chance to develop.

Looking at Not Suitable for Work and thinking about the things Mindy Kaling has done before, especially Never Have I Ever, which lasted longer at Netflix than I suspect this series will at Hulu, that show had a clear identity. It felt unique. Even though we’d all seen teen comedies before, Never Have I Ever brought a fresh perspective because Mindy Kaling put so much of herself into it. The same was true with The Mindy Project, where she was actually on screen. There was a lot of herself in that show. Here, I didn’t feel her at all. This doesn’t feel like a series created by Mindy Kaling. It doesn’t feel like she was ever in the writers’ room or had anything meaningful to say about what was happening. It simply feels like another sitcom following a formula we’ve already seen dozens of times before and doing a rather mediocre job of it.

This is a show that desperately needed a breakout in the cast. It needed more than just Avantika. It needed that spark where you immediately fall in love with an ensemble because of how perfectly they complement one another. Think about any great friendship sitcom and every character has a distinct personality. There’s always one who’s a little more normal, someone who’s incredibly weird, someone who’s uptight, someone who’s the comic relief, someone who’s the ladies’ man, or someone who’s more likely to turn every night into a party. Their personalities bounce off each other because they’re different, while still supporting one another as friends. Here, I felt like the three guys were all slight variations of the same person. They had different careers, but I didn’t feel any of them were dramatically different from the others. The same goes for AJ and Abby. They aren’t wildly different either, and they complement each other mostly through how strikingly similar they can feel. Instead of creating a diverse group of personalities, the show unifies everyone far too much, and that ultimately makes the ensemble duller and less memorable.

When I asked myself whether I recommend Not Suitable for Work, I honestly struggled to come up with a compelling reason to do so. It isn’t terrible, but it also doesn’t distinguish itself in any meaningful way. Another thing I realized is that if this show were canceled tomorrow, I wouldn’t really care. Usually I’m disappointed when I invest an entire season into something only to see it disappear, but if this never came back, I don’t think I’d miss it. At the same time, it’s also not bad enough for me to say definitively that I wouldn’t watch a second season. I’d just hope it had grown and learned a few lessons, perhaps starting with how to make allergies humorous in a way that doesn’t come across as insensitive. For anyone wondering what all the controversy was about, one of the guys refuses to admit he has allergies because he thinks people with allergies are weak. He then ends up eating food he’s allergic to in an attempt to impress a woman, repeatedly running to the bathroom, swallowing antihistamines, and injecting himself with EpiPens. It’s supposed to be funny. It really isn’t.

There is audio description, and it’s fine. I’m generally a little kinder to sitcoms because they’re so dialogue-heavy that there’s rarely much room for description in the first place. It definitely misses visual information from time to time. There’s even a big deal made about a coffee spill that isn’t described until the characters mention it afterward. Moments like that happen throughout the season, where something has clearly occurred and I didn’t know about it. I think the narration is human, but I honestly don’t know, because Disney and Hulu don’t credit either the company that produced the track or the narrator. In an era where Disney has been leaning into synthetic voices, that makes me increasingly wary. Even if this is a human-produced track, it’s still just fine, nothing exceptional. More importantly, if there were problems with the track, who exactly am I supposed to contact? Without credits, I’d be complaining to Hulu or Disney, and they likely wouldn’t even know who produced it or what I was talking about. Nothing would ever get done. When production companies and narrators receive proper credit, it’s much easier to provide feedback directly to the people responsible and give them an opportunity to fix something on their end. That transparency is one of the best ways to ensure we continue receiving high-quality audio description.

Not Suitable for Work is suitable enough for streaming. It’s just not suitable enough to earn a spot near the top of your watch list. I wish Mindy Kaling had taken more of an interest in her own series and forced more of her perspective onto the show, because every time she’s put more of herself into something, it has panned out in her favor. Here, I couldn’t see or feel her creative voice anywhere, and I think the show suffers because of it. Not Suitable for Work is simply another streaming sitcom arriving in an endless sea of shows constantly premiering, and while it’s perfectly watchable, it’s also perfectly fine if it gets buried beneath everything else and you never end up watching it.Rotten: 5.6/10