More than three decades after Friends launched, it is still a brave writer who puts out a show about a gaggle of twentysomethings learning to navigate life and love in a brace of unfeasibly palatial apartments in Manhattan. Brave or, perhaps, foolish.The new sitcom from Mindy Kaling (who began her writing and acting career on the US version of The Office and most recently created high school comedy Never Have I Ever and university sitcom The Sex Lives of College Girls) gives us five rather than six friends split between two apartments across a hallway. Two of them are people of colour rather than maintaining the Kauffman-Cranes’ now infamously melanin-free approach to city life, but the keen eye can still trace the ancestry. The ear may have more trouble. Kaling’s scripts try hard but rarely shine, let alone dazzle as the Friends’ dialogue almost unfailingly did.Our quintet comprises: AJ (Ella Hunt), an ambitious first year analyst at a merchant bank who comes to live with her college pal Abby (Avantika) after her boyfriend moves out; she is the unrequited love interest of Kel (Nicholas Duvernay), a medical student who longs to be an actor but has immigrant parents who have set their hearts on him becoming a doctor. They’re joined by people-pleaser and undying romantic Davis (Will Angus), who soon falls for the new girl across the hall, who also turns out to be his new junior colleague at work; and Josh (Jack Martin), a super woke child of privilege who doesn’t let his social warrior credentials get in the way of securing himself his dream job – investigative TV journalist – at his father’s firm. The post should have gone to dues-paying intern Elena (Emilia Suarez). Josh finds her very attractive, but how can he make her see what a good guy he really is? Will it be before or after he realises that the reason AJ looks so familiar is that they slept together at a drunken party and he ghosted her before dawn?All of this is laboriously set up over the course of a 46-minute pilot, which is twice as long as this kind of thing, even at its best, can bear. The next episode comes in at 35, and thereafter at a few minutes less, but none of them flies by. Kel quits med school after fainting in dissection class. We have the traditional scenes of him embarrassing himself at auditions, and scenes of him telling his family that their ambitions for him will not be realised. These are interleaved with scenes of him embarrassing himself in front of Abby, but their friendship proceeds by increments – maybe to something more?! – nevertheless.Roomies Abby (Avantika) and AJ (Ella Hunt). Photograph: DisneySimilarly uninventive obstacles and entanglements abound. You’ll never guess who the arrogant but attractive older man AJ gets into an argument with at the coffee cart outside her new office turns out to be. Or what ends up happening between them. Or whether she and her team succeed in meeting the wild deadline he demands on her first day. And will Abby be able to deny the attraction between herself and her client Austin Blanchett (“Cate’s nephew”) or will she be led into contract-breaching waters? And so on and very much so forth.None of which would matter if the dialogue snapped and/or zinged. But when people talk of AJ’s boss firing someone for being called “Erika”, AJ is given the response, “But that’s not even the weirdest way to spell ‘Erica’”. A running joke about Josh’s cardigan – his friends hate it! He thinks it gives him “a quiet sophistication”! – makes you realise that every one of the actors is working 10 times harder than any of their characters and, surely, Kaling herself.There are bright spots, often offered by the more peripheral players. Michael Benjamin Washington (best known for his small but unforgettable roles in 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) brings his unassailably eccentric energy to the part of the group’s landlord, Antoine, and adds a much-needed flavour of weirdness to every scene he’s in. Greg Germann’s comic chops – here deployed as Josh’s father, David – are always welcome, and he also functions as an oasis of peace as the rest of the cast are required to rush ever more frantically from plot point to plot point. Jay Ellis as AJ’s boss, Bill Gibson, is also a welcome counterpoint to the flightiness and chaos elsewhere, and brings astringency to what sometimes threatens to become half an hour of growing and learning – a slice of schmaltzy pudding flopping on the plate.On the other hand, pudding may be all most of us can cope with right now. NSFW is, if nothing else, an easy watch and one whose charms may grow on an audience. The joke hit rate picks up as the episodes go on and if you’re a good person, you will want to see if these kids make it in Manhattan. If not, there are a lot of reruns I can recommend.