Summary
Not Suitable for Work can sometimes be a little too broad in its comedy, but its writing is starting to come together nicely as the relationships develop.
It’s amazing how much a show can benefit from being well written, which sounds like a very obvious point to make until you realise that most shows aren’t very well written at all. It’s starkly obvious in Not Suitable for Work, because it’s a sitcom about which the comedy is the least impressive thing. Sure, it’s funny. Episode 6, like most of Season 1, has some laugh-out-loud gags. But even when “Handsome Mug Guy” is floundering in the waters of the broadest possible gender-based humour (guys are messy and immature; girls have too many serums and are — this in a bit of a whisper — “bitchy”), it’s satisfying to see how all of the character-driven subplots are intermingling.
For instance, the hook of this half-hour is a classic trope: Kel, frustrated with Josh and Davis for acting like blithering man-children on a Friday night, staying up late playing video games with kids and eating his meal prep, decides to move out. But since his parents still aren’t talking to him and he’s a struggling actor working as a substitute teacher, his only real option is to move in with AJ and Abby. But instead of being the basis for the entire episode, it’s instead just a way to jostle various ongoing storylines and character dynamics around.
Truthfully, I don’t think “Handsome Mug Guy” does a great deal for Davis and Josh, who’re snooty about Kel’s career to justify treating him like a maid, and then immediately fall to pieces in his absence. There are some funny visual gags, like Davis trying to balance a cereal bowl on a mountain of dirty dishes, or tossing a full trash bag out of the window into the dumpster on the street below, but both of them end up looking like selfish idiots to too severe a degree. Josh’s relationship with Elena, which only just coalesced into something, ends out of nowhere, and Josh is too preoccupied to notice. Davis is still naively in love with AJ, but his general dopiness doesn’t suggest there’d ever be any legs in that dynamic anyway, so it feels like he’s biding his time in the absence of anything better to do.
But Kel fares well here. Immediately, both AJ and Abby begin seeing him as a confidante to air their frustrations about each other, namely that Abby is being judgmental about AJ’s relationship with Bill, and AJ is being naive about the same. Technically, AJ and Bill are dating, but they’re keeping everything completely secret, which makes sense at work but less so out of hours. Abby is worried that AJ letting Bill hide her away rather than taking her on real dates means they’re not really dating; AJ secretly agrees but doesn’t want to admit it, since she’s so high on the relationship. Kel is just stuck in the middle.
A lot of the texture of Not Suitable for Work Episode 5 comes from Kel being stuck in the middle, though. He’s still nursing a serious crush on Abby, is trying to enjoy his time surrounded by actual adults, and has to keep turning to the 14-year-old girls he teaches to understand text shorthand and catty group chat dynamics. Obviously, AJ and Abby both fall out with him when they realise he has been — reluctantly — playing both sides, which is timed perfectly with Josh and Davis arriving at the door with a pre-written apology, so Kel ends up back in the apartment, but the whole thing progresses Kel’s relationship with the boys, weaves in his career, solidifies in his mind that Abby isn’t into him and leads to him texting Kate, his colleague, finally making good on her looming presence at work. It’s a lot of character mileage for a one-episode mishap.
Things turn out pretty well for AJ and Bill, too. She finally sucks it up and demands that he start taking her on dates, and he, to his credit, does. He’s uncharacteristically open about his humble beginnings while AJ is wildly overdressed for a PB&J sandwich date on the Staten Island ferry, and it seems like they’re majorly into each other. The only potential obstacle, aside from the whole work thing, is that Josh saw Bill leaving AJ’s apartment and, when he finally learns how to do the dishes, recognises him from Davis’s Fisher-Stassen mug. But will he say anything?
Things are going much worse for Abby, who is trying to set up on her own as a celebrity stylist. The problem is that Vanessa is having her blacklisted for disloyalty — excusing a cameo from real viral fashion commentator Nicky Campbell — and Austin is her only client. But continuing a trend established in the previous episode, Austin is starting to take on a legitimately sinister contour. He invites Abby to meet with him and times it deliberately so that she sees him with another woman, and is clearly trying to manipulate her into bed by giving her opportunities, like styling him for an upcoming anti-ketamine PSA. This guy’s a real problem, and it’s highly likely that his pettiness is going to blow up in Abby’s face sooner rather than later.
