Adults VS Not Suitable for Work: Why We Can't Have a Friends of the 2020s
It was late afternoon, and I was in bed listening to Audrey Hobert sing about Sex and the City and Phoebe Buffay of Friends, when I was reminded of the debate I've frequently hashed with my friends about what the “quintessential” Gen Z show is. I couldn’t help but wonder…why hasn't any show pulled off what the sitcoms of the 90s/2000s did for their generations, and what would that even take?
I found myself fixating on how Friends and Sex and the City seem to exist in alternate universes with fantastical rules about money. Work is given only fleeting plot importance: nobody can quite explain Chandler’s occupation, just as they can’t explain how Carrie affords rent by writing a single weekly relationship column. Audiences suspend their disbelief just enough to indulge unquestioningly in a fantasy of fashionable New York high-rises and brownstones. Can today's shows still get away with that?
As the teen genre has increasingly encroached into the mature themes of adult media (think HBO’s Euphoria), it seems the only thing you can’t have a high schooler do is work a 9-5. Work has become the last line of defense for the Adult genre. This and a brutal entry-level economy have perhaps revitalized “the workplace” in Adult dramedy.
Two recent shows have taken the chance to capitalize on this: FX’s Adults and Hulu’s Not Suitable for Work. Both shows are concerned with their characters navigating life not just as adults, but working adults. However, the two shows make almost opposite choices with this premise. Recently, they’ve met quite different fates, with Adults releasing a second season just as Not Suitable for Work was canceled after its first. This begs the question: does the way a show depicts work affect its network vitality?
In Not Suitable for Work, work is a character in its own right; the show returns to the office space more often than it returns to its leads' Murray Hill apartments, with its characters living through the workday instead of around it. Not Suitable for Work leans into a specificity incongruous with Sex and the City’s New York, yet feels immediately resonant in 2026, featuring a distinctly contemporary range of vocations: investment bankers, a med student turned substitute teacher, a celebrity fashion stylist, and a media production nepo-hire. Creator Mindy Kaling explained that the show was inspired by her experience of "utter desperation, significant highs and lows, and a strong sense of ambition coupled with a lack of access" moving to Manhattan after college. Her twenty-somethings, by design, are hungry and work-obsessed.
The execution of this compelling premise is the show's Achilles’ heel. Kel auditions for what turns out to be an AI motion-capture gig, a plotline that should be the show's best shot at saying something meaningful about building a career at this moment. Instead, the AI premise is quietly dropped, and the narrative is pulled in a more derivative direction: his parents discovering he left medical school. Josh’s plotline follows the same pattern: he is tasked with debunking Reddit conspiracy theories that his media-mogul boss is secretly dead, a storyline that brushes up against misinformation and media labor before resolving as a punchline. Refusing to interrogate its own premise and take a bold stance on the modern adult workforce, the show comes off as topical yet ultimately shallow.
While work is central to Not Suitable for Work, it remains at the periphery of Adults, treated as a backdrop or setup for situational irony. The pilot is set in motion when a distant friend of the group goes public about being sexually harassed at his job, but the focus remains on how the friend group responds: Issa angles to speak at his rally to revel in her proximity to such a just cause, Billie tries to leverage his story into her own promotion, and Samir spirals into auditing his own past relationships. The workplace incident serves only to reveal how self-involved everyone around it is.
By Season 2, this same instinct has calcified into background noise: the group's chronic underemployment no longer registers as a crisis and becomes more of a baseline condition than a plot point. The joke is no longer that these characters lack stable jobs; it's that nobody, themselves included, seems to notice anymore. It's a funnier, lighter choice than Not Suitable for Work's, and by many measures, a successful one. Adults gets to be observational rather than diagnostic, mining precarity for punchlines.
Why are shows afraid to get specific and ugly about work? Here's my hypothesis: studios have little incentive to let a show about young people in the workforce dwell on the unflattering parts of that experience. Harping on job scarcity, gigification (the shift from traditional and stable jobs to freelance ones), and precarious contract-based entry points into full-time work, to name a few, would implicate their own labor practices. The Bureau of Labor Statistics set the unemployment rate for 16-to 24-year-olds at 9.1% in mid-2026, more than double the rate of 4.3% for all adults. Hollywood especially has suffered: U.S. motion picture and sound recording jobs fell from roughly 455,700 in 2022 to about 337,400 by 2026, and Los Angeles County alone shed an estimated 42,000. The fact that a Hulu show won’t make meaningful commentary about issues like AI displacing entry-level creative labor isn’t entirely a smoking gun for censorship, but it is a blind spot–one of the immovable obstacles standing between audiences, big streamers, and a Friends of the 2020s.
"This isn't Sex and the City, nobody sees me and knows of my column." Perhaps Audrey Hobert gets it. Until a show learns to depict the unglamorous work of this decade without sidelining or over-resolving it, we won't get our Friends of the 2020s. We'll just keep getting close.
Sabina Brunn is a freshman in the College studying (probably) Government. She would desperately love to show you a picture of her 14-year-old kitten.
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