Mindy Kaling's 'Not Suitable For Work' Delivers Her Signature Blend of Romance and Ambition
Photo Credit: JC Olivera/Deadline via Getty Images
One thing about me: I’m going to watch the heck out of a Mindy Kaling show. Since The Mindy Project, Kaling has been one of the few television masterminds who have consistently delivered romance on our small screens. The Mindy Project, Four Weddings And A Funeral, Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls and Running Point could all be classified as romantic comedies. And in their own unique, incredibly Kaling ways, they’re all great (I said what I said). Now, romance is having a moment onscreen, Kaling is back with another sitcom that would be incomplete without its love stories.
Not Suitable For Work premiered on Hulu earlier this month and so far, people are sleeping on how good it is. The show follows five ambitious twenty-somethings navigating the messy overlap of career ambition, friendship, romance, and personal reinvention in Manhattan. I devoured the series in one sitting and it's an entertaining, funny, refreshing watch. The romances dominating TV right now are brooding, sexy, and serious. This series is the exact opposite. It follows Adults and I Love LA in delivering a comedy about a group of young friends messily figuring out life, but its clumsy commentary on work and love feels fresh. Plus, each of Not Suitable For Work's leads feel real and rounded — there are no token sidekicks.
This ensemble is made up of AJ Pascarelli (Ella Hunt), a driven first-year investment analyst trying to prove herself in the high-stakes world of finance; her best friend Abby Chilukuri (Avantika), a fashion-obsessed assistant to a demanding celebrity stylist; Davis Beau Bradley Barrett III (Will Angus), a hopeless romantic whose finance bro bravado masks a surprisingly earnest search for love; Josh Teitelbaum (Jack Martin), an idealistic aspiring journalist with plenty of opinions; and Kel Washington (Nicholas Duvernay), a medical student balancing professional expectations with dreams of becoming an actor. Rounding out the cast is Jay Ellis as Bill Gibson, AJ’s charismatic boss, alongside recurring players including Constance Wu, Victor Garber, Ego Nwodim, and Judy Gold. Equal parts workplace comedy, romantic chaos, and coming-of-age story, the series feels like Mindy Kaling’s sharpest exploration yet of what it means to be young, ambitious, and slightly lost in New York.
Photo Courtesy of Hulu
Below, I talked to Kaling over Zoom about what ingredients she always sprinkles into her shows, why Jay Ellis is so good at playing jerks, yearning versus sex on TV, and the feedback she gets on her representations of South Asian women.
A Mindy Kaling show is always going to give us romance. You're going to give us competency porn, and you're going to give us a white man we root for against our better judgment —
Mindy Kaling: I love competency porn, that makes me so happy.
What would you say are the core tenets of a Mindy Kaling show?
MK: The core tenets of a Mindy Kaling show… I think there are people with a chip on their shoulder. I think ambition is a big part of it, and I think another part of it is people who think they know exactly what they need, but the audience is like, I am not so sure about that. Usually children of immigrants are portrayed. I really find that juicy. I love the friction of the certain expectations that you have as a child of immigrants, and how you're going to defy it or fall in line.
As a child of immigrants and of an immigrant doctor, I really felt Kel’s storyline.
MK: I'm so happy you said that, because researching what it's like to be the child of a Nigerian immigrant was so interesting to me — how specific that is, just how much expectations there are. That was really fun, and as an Indian American with a parent who's a doctor, the push towards medical school and the disappointment, and not showing any interest in that at all. I do love dramatizing that.
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There's a lot of very high production value sex on TV now that there wasn't when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. In my shows, I feel like you see a lot of characters who are horny or wanting intimacy, but they don't always get it.