‘Not Suitable for Work’ Shows How Gen Z Yearns For A Modern Day ‘Friends’

Gen Z has been asking for a new Friends for years, usually loudly, always online, and with the specific energy of a generation that grew up watching reruns of a show set in apartments they will never afford in a city that has since priced them out entirely. The demand is real even if the nostalgia is technically inherited. What they want is not Friends specifically. What they want is what Friends gave people: a group of young, funny, complicated people navigating work and love and life in a big city together, the kind of show you put on when you need to feel like someone out there is figuring it out too.

Mindy Kaling heard the assignment. Not Suitable For Work, her new Hulu series that premiered June 2, is about as direct an answer to that demand as anyone has attempted in years.

Photo Credit: Disney

Not Suitable for Work, created by Mindy Kaling, centers on five twentysomethings in Manhattan who aspire to both professional success and personal happiness. Ella Hunt plays AJ Pascarelli, a charming but intense first-year analyst at the most prestigious investment bank in New York. Avantika Vandanapu plays Abhinaya “Abby” Chilukuri, AJ’s fashion-obsessed, savvy best friend and roommate who works as an assistant to a demanding celebrity stylist. Will Angus plays Davis Beau Bradley Barrett III, AJ’s co-worker and next-door neighbor, a lovesick and endearingly clueless presence who has been called the show’s standout by early critics. Jack Martin plays Josh Teitelbaum, Davis’s roommate and the group’s sardonic anchor. Nicholas Duvernay rounds out the five as the fifth member of the ensemble, completing a cast that feels deliberately assembled to represent the actual makeup of a 2026 New York friend group rather than a 1994 one.

The show was originally titled ‘Murray Hill’, after the Manhattan neighborhood where the five central characters live, before Hulu executive Craig Erwich pushed for the name change to Not Suitable For Work. Kaling has since acknowledged that the title is a little misleading. It does not quite fit the show as it is not racy and there is virtually no sex in it. There is some office stuff but it is not really a workplace show either. It is, at its core, a hangout show, and it lives or dies on whether you want to spend time with these people.

Photo Credit: Disney

The demand for a modern Friends is not really about Friends. It is about a specific thing that prestige television, for all its brilliance, stopped providing: the easy show. The one you watch without reading a recap. The one that asks nothing of you except to sit down and feel something comfortable and human.

Avantika Vandanapu, who plays Abby on the show, put it well: “Mindy does ‘easy show’ really well, and by ‘easy,’ I mean, ‘I am sitting on my couch, and I need to put something on and feel good.’ I think that’s what makes her content unique in the current landscape, it’s hard to find shows like that where you also get characters that feel well thought-out and not just surface level.”

The landscape that comment is describing is real. Streaming has given us extraordinary television, the kind that demands full attention and rewards it with something close to an experience. What it has not given us, at least not consistently, is comfort television with actual craft behind it. The hangout comedy, the genre that produced Friends, Seinfeld, New Girl, and How I Met Your Mother, has been largely absent from the conversation for years. NSFW is a genuine attempt to bring it back, and the timing could not be better.

Jack Martin, who plays Josh Teitelbaum on the show, noted the broader Gen Z context that NSFW captures: “The median homeowner age is, what, 59 now? The Gen Z experience is that everyone is roommates, and they meet by being roommates for this long. Work is taking over your life, and you’re trying to progress and that’s not even really working. That is what the show communicates so well.”

That is exactly the energy Friends captured for its own generation, young people who were broke and ambitious and figuring out their lives while also being each other’s primary support system. The specifics are different. The feeling is the same.

NSFW has been performing well on Hulu’s daily top ten since its premiere, and has been consistently ranking high on Disney+/Hulu’s Daily Top 10 in the U.S., bolstering the show’s chances for a Season 2 renewal. The audience clearly wants what it is offering. The question some critics have raised is whether the show is fully delivering it yet.

The most generous reading of NSFW’s first season is that it is doing what most great ensemble comedies do in their first nine episodes: finding itself. Friends was not Friends in season one either. The Mindy Project, Kaling’s last solo creation, took time to settle into what it wanted to be before becoming one of the more genuinely funny and emotionally resonant comedies of its era. NSFW has the bones, the format, the creator, and the cultural moment. What it is still building is the thing that cannot be written into a script: the feeling that these people actually belong together.

Regardless of where NSFW lands critically by the end of its first season, the fact that it exists is itself significant. Mindy Kaling looked at a generation of young people who have been told that their era of television is the peak TV era, the prestige era, the era of slow-burn psychological dramas and limited series about trauma, and decided to make them something that lets them breathe for forty-five minutes.

That is not a small thing. The easy show, done well, is one of the hardest things in television to make. It requires the discipline to resist the pull toward darkness and complexity, and the confidence to believe that warmth and humor and a good group of people in a good apartment is enough.