SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the three episode-premiere of “Not Suitable For Work,” now streaming on Hulu.
Let the record show that Mindy Kaling is well aware of the possibility of people looking up “Mindy Kaling NSFW” and finding “inappropriate photos” of the actor/writer/producer, rather than information about her newest TV show, “Not Suitable For Work,” now streaming on Hulu.
Originally titled “Murray Hill” after the Manhattan neighborhood the show is set in, Kaling agreed to switch the name to “Not Suitable For Work” after Hulu exec Craig Erwich (and B.J. Novak) told her the title was “boring and needs to change.”
“As a show creator, when you have to thank the literal head of your network, the person who made you make a change, and everyone likes it better, it’s not good for the ego,” Kaling tells Variety with a laugh. “But thank you, Craig.”
Joined by Kaling’s long-time collaborator Charlie Grandy as showrunner, Kaling views “NSFW” — which focuses on ambitious 20somethings in New York City — as the third installment in a series loosely based on her life, following the high school drama of “Never Have I Ever” and collegiate chaos of “The Sex Lives of College Girls.”
The show kicks off when AJ (Ella Hunt), an investment banker from Boston, moves to New York for a new job and begins living with her best friend, aspiring celebrity stylist Abby (Avantika). Across the hall in a “Friends”-esque set-up, live a trio of male best friends; Davis (Will Angus), AJ’s hopeless romantic co-worker who develops a crush on her pretty much at first sight; Josh (Jack Martin), a slightly pretentious nepo baby and aspiring journalist; and Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), an aspiring actor who drops out of med-school and begins teaching to cover the bills.
Much happens within the three-episode premiere, starting with Josh and AJ immediately getting off on the wrong foot, especially since AJ remembers their one-night stand from their college Model UN days and Josh doesn’t. On a practice run to her new office, she gets into a verbal fight with a stranger, who turns out to be her new boss, Bill (Jay Ellis), and later develops a burgeoning crush on him. Performing workplace shenanigans together, Davis falls hard and fast for AJ but remains in the dark about her hookup with Josh, who is eventually reminded of the fact by AJ. Josh, for his part, has his own issues to deal with; his girlfriend Vivian (Stella Everett) dumps him for a Property Brother, and his dad’s position as CEO helps him land an assistant gig at his role model and investigative journalist Wes Dryden’s show, but his new colleagues take a minute to warm up to him. Kel picks up a job as private school English teacher where he is mocked by teenage girls for not knowing who Elizabeth Bennet is, while having a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer crush on Abby, who, after managing to prevent her landlord from evicting her, finds herself being pursued by a client (and Cate Blanchett’s fictional nephew) Austin Blanchett (Harry Richardson) and struggles with her over-bearing boss, Vanessa (Constance Wu).
After an important save at work, AJ invites Davis over for a home-cooked meal, and he mistakenly believes it to be a date. AJ, on the other hand, panic-invites Bill and admits her attraction to him to Abby, who also attends the dinner and invites Kel to join. Josh is blamed for AJ’s wine shipment being nabbed from the lobby after he signs for the delivery and is tasked with picking up a new crate for her dinner party where Davis, despite having a shellfish allergy, keeps eating AJ’s seafood-heavy dishes and eventually finds out that AJ and Josh slept together after telling the group a story about a previous hookup of Josh’s he dubbed the “Philadelphia Sex Monster.” AJ, said Philadelphia sex monster, is less than happy with Josh when he arrives and the two begin trading facts about the night with their friends overlooking the exchange as a convicting jury. The guilty party? Josh, who left without a text after AJ asked “Is that it?” once they were done. In AJ’s defense, she reveals it was her first time, and in a later scene with just Josh and AJ, he reveals it was his too. In the midst of the fight, however, an increasingly red and swollen Davis passes out and is rushed to the ER, while the episode’s closing scene pans to Bill arriving to the party but deciding against going in.
Below, Kaling and Grandy spoke to Variety in separate conversations about the messy web of love interests, finding the right careers and character traits — and depicting the Gen Z workforce onscreen.
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I loved that Ella Hunt’s character AJ never stopped wearing her Boston sports merch despite moving to New York. How did you decide that AJ’s move was where you wanted to kick the show off?
Mindy Kaling: A sort of delusional Boston person in other regions is something that I find very funny. Boston people, we grew up thinking that growing up in Boston is the same as New York. And then they leave Boston, they realize that no one else in the world thinks that. As someone who grew up in Boston and moved to New York, and felt I was a kind of sheltered kid and felt wildly out of place and overwhelmed, I related to that. I wanted to give it to that character, and just have her on her heels from the instant she first appears on the show.
Charlie Grandy, the showrunner for “Not Suitable For Work,” is also someone you’ve worked with throughout these other projects you mentioned.
Kaling: I was looking at him yesterday at a panel, and thinking: “I have known Charlie since I was 25 so I’ve known him for 21 years.” We started at “The Office” together, and he had come from “Saturday Night Live,” and was one of those guys that started at “SNL” when he was 21, had four Emmys already, and went to Harvard too. He’s this intimidating guy that I thought was going to be really snobby, and he wasn’t, and I loved him. He’s so funny. We worked together on “The Mindy Project” and “College Girls,” so we have such a great shorthand with each other. He thinks that we could not be more different as people, but he knows how to write for women so well, and he’s just an excellent writer who loves young people. He has three teenagers – no, one of them is in their 20s — and so he really understands that generation too.
Charlie, how do you remember onboarding the project?
Charlie Grandy: This all sprung from the head of Mindy Kaling. She wrote the pilot, sold it and then brought me in. We’ve worked together a lot on numerous projects, going back to “The Office,” and I was lucky enough for her to just call me and say, “Hey, would you want to come work on this show? Would you want to run it for me?” And I said yes, and then she said, “Hold on, you’ll need to move to New York for four months,” and I pretended to be upset about that, but I was actually very excited. It was just an incredible experience to be able to shoot in the city.
The characters felt very real to me, especially the boys who are such specific archetypes of men that you find in New York. Were there people or incidents in your life that you drew inspiration from to create these characters or some of their dialogue?
Kaling: Thank you for saying that. I really take that as a huge compliment. I feel in TV we see this characterization of a finance frat guy, and when I went to Dartmouth, there could not have been more guys who were Econ majors who wanted to go off and work in an investment bank, but the kind of guys that I knew and was friends with had these very complex, deep wells of emotion, vulnerability, and just wanting to be like loved and accepted. That’s why so many men join fraternities. It’s kind of mandated friendship, and I just think that’s a really interesting, unexplored area.
The truth is, I don’t write for male characters that often. It’s not something that has typically interested me, but that kind of guy, when I was doing the show about the 20s, I was like, “Oh, I want to showcase this kind of guy that I went to school with, that I have so much affection for.” That really was Davis, and Will Angus is so funny in the role. He has such a vulnerability, he’s been working in sketch comedy for such a long time, and he’s a writer as well, so I think he really approaches that character in a really original, funny way. Nicholas Duvernay is playing a character that I also relate to, because he’s the child of immigrants who don’t necessarily understand or support their son switching careers midway to go into the arts. I love those male characters. Their dynamic with each other is really funny and they have a really good chemistry, and that was not the writing — that’s just those guys.
Grandy: Yeah, absolutely. I feel that, especially with Josh, that was just a lot of guys that we’d gone to college with — hyper-literate, very intellectual, snobby, but maybe didn’t realize it — and we’ve worked with the writerly type of persona as well, so we’d certainly come across many of those types of guys, whose hearts are in the right place, but it doesn’t always come out the right way. Davis was just writing to parts of who we want to be, in some ways, just so emotionally vulnerable, constantly stating what his deal is, and being so open especially for a man, who just says, “I just want to fall in love, that’s it.” Kel was a hard kind of character because we cast Nicholas, and then changed the character a lot, and we found it with him. He’s so lovely and winning and funny, that it was just like, “Oh, this is a guy who can also be vulnerable and charming.”
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I’m curious to know how you changed Kel’s character after Nicholas came aboard.
Grandy: Originally, it was this character who was supposed to be a personal trainer, and he was South Asian. The character’s name was Ram. We’d seen a bunch of actors, and no one was quite getting it. I can’t remember what the chain of events was, but we met with Nicholas. He was like, “Am I going in for this South Asian personal trainer? I don’t think I can play that.” We just met, and that was sort of how we got Avantika as well. Mindy had worked with her, and she was so wonderful. We’re like, “Let’s just think about the character and see if we can make this work,” and it would, and so once we cast Nicholas, we just rethought the entire character, and everything snapped into place after that.
All five of the main characters have very Gen Z just-entering-the-workforce jobs. Were there other career paths that you considered and then decided against?
Kaling: It can be very tricky when you’re old, like me, trying to write for young people, and now this is the third show that I’ve done it. We had to pack our writers’ room with young people so that it could pass the test of naturalism and realism. I’ve seen a lot of shows about Gen Z kids who are screenagers, and we show a lot about influencer culture — by the way I love those shows — but in this one, we wanted to do something that was a little different. Of course, the characters have to send texts and are on their phones, but we wanted to divorce them from jobs that were very much tied up in the online world.
Grandy: I think Mindy really liked the idea of a stylist assistant, because fashion is such a big part of her life, and she has used stylists a lot and was fascinated by these people that are really doing it for the love of the job. Because it’s decidedly not glamorous, actually, the work of an assistant. A lot of it is just scrubbing deodorant stains out of blouses and returning clothes — the hours are long, and it’s grueling work, especially at that level. It was finding these very hard, often not well-paying jobs, with the exception of investment banking, that you’re doing it just because you genuinely love it. I mean, news producing is maybe the best example of that.
I’d have to agree with that. By the end of Episode 3, each character seems to be set up with a couple of possible love interests. Why was it so important to set up multiple possibilities from the jump? Are there any specific pairings that you think people are really going to root for?
Grandy: I hope! I think as a writer you want to give yourself as many outlets as possible, just to see where you’re going. We hadn’t even started the casting process by the time we’d gotten into Episode 3, so you want to give yourself the freedom to be like, “OK, what actors are going to have chemistry?” Sometimes you can be surprised and you don’t want to be too locked into anything, because if something really pops, once you start adding actual humans to the element, you can have the freedom to go in that direction. And for the streaming model, I think you want to keep people guessing, you want to have people invested. People that are Team Davis, Team Kel, Team Josh. You just want all of those options there for you.
Kaling: I love romance and triangles, wondering what’s going to happen, and hoping a character makes a certain decision romantically — sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they do. All my favorite shows growing up have those kinds of curveballs thrown in with romance, and I think that’s just — I don’t know, I’ve been ingrained in all the great romantic comedies I’ve seen.
Mindy, you’ve always made a point throughout your career to give South Asian people representation on screen and in the industry. Bela, Devi, Mindy Lahiri – they’re all beloved and charming characters, but Avantika’s Abby is charming in a different way and is very mainstream cool. Was that dynamic intentional, to represent an Indian character like that this time around?
Kaling: I think one of the great opportunities of making shows is being able to show young Desi characters in different lights. I got to play Mindy Lahiri, and she was a very certain way, very flawed in different ways, then I got to do Maitreyi [Ramakrishnan]’s character and Poorna [Jagannathan] and Richa [Moorjani, all actors on “Never Have I Ever”] and the three of them were so different. Now with Avantika, she was never a nerd, really. She is someone who has been self-possessed and knows what she wants. Abby still has a lot of flaws, she’s got a lot to learn. She’s very stubborn, a little snobby, but I think of her as very different than the other characters I’ve written, and that’s why it’s so fun to write for her. Avantika is also so funny. We first worked with her on “Sex Lives,” but only for an episode, and I was so happy that I can work with her in a bigger, more major way.
In the first episode, Abby tells AJ, “I can’t be your entire social ecosystem,” and asks her to commit to make making other friends. Abby presumably has other friends, but we never see hers or anyone else’s on screen. Was that set up on purpose?
Kaling: That’s ripped from the headlines of my life. I work with hundreds of people on many shows, and have had so many opportunities in my life to make long and deep-lasting friendships, and I have four friends. I have so many friendly acquaintances, but in terms of the person that I want to be really vulnerable with or just talk about the real stuff, I can count them on one hand. I don’t think I’ve ever told my friends, “Hey, I only have you guys, you need to be there for me,” and I really love that about AJ and Abby. AJ is like, “I only have one friend!” and Abby can say to her, “Go make another one.” This interview has become about my problems, but I really relate to having a very, very small circle, and for good and for bad, and so I really loved having the characters have the same issues.
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The scene at the end of Episode 3 when AJ and Josh are breaking down the details of their hookup is almost a debate, with new details being revealed each round. What was shooting that scene like? It’s also one of the few scenes that all five of them together on screen.
Kaling: Our executives at Hulu, who we love and they love the show, they really understand the show and the one note they have is: “Can we see all the characters together?” Which is obviously such a smart note, because those scenes are so fun, but with characters who are really trying to make it in the world, they have to go off on their individual adventures. I love that scene. That episode was written by Charlie, and it was one of those episodes that feels like a very fun, classic sitcom episode where all the truths are coming out with multiple storylines. It really helps that there’s a lot of physical comedy going on too — there’s an allergy, there’s a broken coffee table, there’s a mean nickname, old memories resurfacing, there’s a little bit of sex in it. And so that was such an enjoyable scene to both write and shoot.
Grandy: That was difficult. Logistically we were really under the wire in terms of time. It was getting very late at night. It was the last scene we shot of a very long day. It was the first time we’d had all five characters together. Our sets were built like an actual New York apartment, so they weren’t big, so it was just very hard, moving cameras around, and it felt like every take was so important. So, my memory of it was incredibly high-stress, but the cast were incredible, so professional. We run a lot of jokes, we change a lot of things on the fly, and the cast all just rolled with it, and they brought it every single take. There’s a ton of coverage in that, so there are a lot of times that you know Jack and Ella are doing these incredibly emotional things. They’re not even on camera, we’re just doing a reaction pass on Will and Nicholas and Avantika. At that moment that night, it was such a gauntlet for us to run. It was the first time we were doing all five, and it was like, “We may really have something here,” because it was so stressful, but them was, “Oh, this is working.”
In your opinion, who goes through the most growth by the end of the season?
Grandy: I would say Davis probably goes through the most. He probably has the biggest season-long arc, but they all learn a lot. That was what was really fun about this ensemble, and having such talented actors, is once we got them in there, we were able to adjust scripts because we knew that they could handle it. They could handle anything we threw at them, from a comedy perspective, from a drama perspective. It allowed us to really kind of dig in and give them all something really emotional and juicy and real growth over the course of the season.
We’ve also gotten some really great cameos in the first three episodes alone (with more to come!), including Gigi Hadid and Zarna Garg. How did you approach cultivating those appearances?
Grandy: It was incredible. That was really why we wanted to do the show in New York, because we knew we would just have so much more access to talent of people that it’s in their backyard. It’s easy for them. We can send a car, we can pick them up, we can drive them to set. It just made it really easy. Mindy had a previous relationship with Gigi from voiceover work on “Never Have I Ever.” You always feel so lucky anytime you make an offer to someone and they say yes, and she was incredible. It was everything we could have hoped for, and more. Mindy is at a point now where, I think, people know that they will have fun stuff to do when they come to set, so it’s a little bit easier for her to get people because they know they’ll come and have a good time.
The show had the working title of “Murray Hill,” after the New York neighborhood in which it’s set and was later retitled. Why did you decide to change the name to what it is now? Were you worried at all about people typing in “Mindy Kaling NSFW” on Google?
Kaling: And seeing a lot of inappropriate photos of me? Yes. I’ve never told this story before, actually. It was called “Murray Hill,” because I’m bad at naming things, and that felt straightforward. And Craig Erwich — who I’ve known very long time and was the one that put “The Mindy Project” on Hulu back in its earlier years — said, “I love the show. But the title is boring and it needs to change.” I remember arguing with him and being like, “No, Murray Hill is like a blank slate, it can be anything, this neighborhood blah blah blah,” and he’s like, “It’s not gripping enough, and I love the names of your other shows.” “Never Have I Ever,” “Sex Lives of College Girls” one could argue, have grabbier titles, and he changed it, and I was like, “I don’t know about this.” And my friend B.J. Novak was like, “Oh, I love that you changed the name, the new name is so much better.” As a show creator, when you have to thank the literal head of your network, the person who made you make a change, and everyone likes it better, it’s not good for the ego. But thank you, Craig.
Do you have any updates about there being a Season 2?
Kaling: I have only hopeful feelings. We love making the show. It seems like Hulu really likes what they’ve seen, but you never know. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed.
Grandy: Season 2, Season 3, we talked about it, we have everything pretty arced out. I think we know exactly what we would want to do for a Season 2, so hopefully people watch. Because we definitely know where we’re going, and it’s very good.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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