Entertainment

Hulu’s Newest Show Is the Unofficial Sequel to This 4-Part Beloved 94% Netflix Hit

Published

on

In just one day since its premiere, Hulu’s new show Not Suitable for Work has already surged through the streaming charts. According to FlixPatrol, the series is now at #4 worldwide, and it’ll likely only continue to rise through the ranks as the week goes on. The series, which has only released three episodes so far, follows “five work-obsessed 20-somethings” in a Friends-style living situation as they fight to maintain a perfect work-life balance in “Manhattan’s most glamorous neighborhood, Murray Hill.”

Behind the series is Mindy Kaling, a TV powerhouse both on and off camera, who just recently released the long-awaited second season of Running Point on Netflix in April. Therefore, Kaling’s new show not only maintains her reign on streaming in 2026, but officially continues the TV trilogy she started back in 2020.

Advertisement

‘Not Suitable for Work’ Is Part of Mindy Kaling’s TV Trilogy

In a recent interview with Good Morning America, Kaling opened up about how Not Suitable for Work is connected to two of her previous projects, Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls. “In my mind, this is the third show in a trilogy of shows that are about my life,” she stated. “Never Have I Ever is about me being in high school, Sex Lives of College Girls was about my time at Dartmouth, and this is this last pivotal time in my youth, which was moving to New York City, being super ambitious and being in your 20s.” As a reminder, Never Have I Ever was first released in 2020 and went on for four seasons until their characters graduated from high school, while The Sex Lives of College Girls premiered over a year later in 2021 and ran for three seasons until its cancellation in May 2025.

In each of the shows, while there isn’t any character named after Kaling specifically, there’s always at least one central Indian-American character who’s ambitious and quirky in their own way, and seen as Kaling’s most faithful portrayal of her experience. In Never Have I Ever, that’s Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), while in The Sex Lives of College Girls, the South Asian main character is Bela Malhotra (Amrit Kaur). In Not Suitable for Work, Avantika Vandanapu plays Abhinaya “Abby” Chilukuri, an assistant to a celebrity stylist who’s always terrified of losing her job.



















































Advertisement

Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz
Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In?
The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

Advertisement

🏥ER

💉Grey’s

🔬House

🩺Scrubs

Advertisement

01

Advertisement

A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct?
Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.





02

Advertisement

Why did you go into medicine in the first place?
The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.





03

Advertisement

What do you actually want from the people you work with?
Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.





04

Advertisement

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it?
Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.





05

Advertisement

How would your colleagues describe the way you work?
Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.





06

Advertisement

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure?
Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.





07

Advertisement

What does this job cost you personally?
Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?





08

Advertisement

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back?
The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.





Your Assignment Has Been Made
You Belong In…
Advertisement

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.


Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center

Advertisement
The Pitt

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.

  • You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
  • You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
  • You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
  • Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.


County General Hospital, Chicago

Advertisement
ER

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

  • You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
  • You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
  • You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
  • ER is television about endurance. You have it.


Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle

Advertisement
Grey’s Anatomy

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

  • You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
  • Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
  • You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
  • It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.


Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ

Advertisement
House

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

  • You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
  • You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
  • Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
  • The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.


Sacred Heart Hospital, California

Advertisement
Scrubs

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

  • You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
  • You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
  • You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
  • Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

Advertisement

‘Never Have I Ever’ Is Mindy Kaling’s Most Beloved Show

While Not Suitable for Work has just come out, Never Have I Ever set a high bar when it comes to Kaling’s productions. After all, the four-season series was not only a major streaming hit for Netflix, but it also received major critical acclaim at an average 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. From the critics, it’s clear the series nailed key elements of the show, not only showing a hilarious yet honest portrayal of teen years, but shining a light on a flawed yet charismatic lead with Ramakrishnan’s Devi. “It asserts itself with sassy confidence right away, not just in Devi’s voice but in the narrative’s framing,” one review wrote.

Unlike both The Sex Lives of College Girls and Not Suitable for Work, Never Have I Ever thrived because of its larger focus on the lead rather than being a full ensemble show. By doing so, the series honed in on Devi’s life, shining a light on Indian expectations and traditions, second-generation experiences, and the emotional journey with grief she went on after the loss of her father. With that, the series balanced comedy with heart in a way that made it TV gold.

Advertisement



Mindy Kaling’s Best Movies and Series, Ranked From Hilarious to Heartwarming

Mindy Kaling has proven she is one funny writer!

Advertisement

In Collider’s very own review of the show following the Season 2 release, Carly Lane highlighted that Ramakrishnan was indeed the show’s not-so-secret weapon. “Ultimately, a show is only as strong as its lead, and once again, Ramakrishnan proves why she’s the one to build an entire series around, not only in Devi’s most ridiculous and chaotic moments (the show literally describes some of her wildest antics as “pulling a Devi”) but in the scenes that call on her to be quiet, vulnerable, and having to come to grips with the real emotions that drive her to make some confusing and (in true teen fashion) dramatic decisions,” Lane wrote.

With that said, while Kaling’s new show Not Suitable for Work is currently climbing the charts on Hulu and Disney+, perhaps the first series in her TV trilogy, Never Have I Ever, will always be her best. With a quirky yet complicated lead, the series did more than just talk about boy crushes and love triangles, and depicted a heartfelt quintessentially human story instead.


Advertisement

Advertisement


Release Date

2020 – 2023-00-00

Advertisement

Showrunner

Lang Fisher

Directors
Advertisement

Lang Fisher


Advertisement

Advertisement


Advertisement

Source link

Advertisement

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Trending

Exit mobile version