LOS ANGELES — And just like that, here comes another coterie of young people to make some of us feel old and some of us feel seen.

Following not exactly in the recent footsteps of “Adults” and “I Love L.A.,” “Not Suitable for Work,” premiering Tuesday on Hulu, is an amiable, sweet-tempered romantic ensemble comedy with a heftier than usual emphasis on professional ambition. (See title, above.) Created by Mindy Kaling, it’s set in New York, the city that never sleeps, not in order to party, but to get something on somebody’s desk first thing in the morning.

As on “Friends,” the main characters occupy two New York apartments separated by a hallway. In one live Josh (Jack Martin), Davis (Will Angus), and Kel (Nicholas Duvernay); Kel has known Josh since they were 12; Davis and Josh were in college together. In the other, we find Abby (Avantika), who as the curtain rises is being joined by AJ (Ella Hunt), her college friend, replacing Abby’s boyfriend, who moved to Nashville to be a country singer. If the layout is familiar, the less than trendy neighborhood in which it’s set — Murray Hill, east of Midtown, over by the United Nations — is novel. Various sources describe it as popular with “recent college graduates” and “young professionals,” which tracks. (The show does go downtown to Katz’s Delicatessen, twice, though perhaps that’s just because it’s a rom-com landmark, where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally…” )

Coincidentally — though is there really any coincidence where an all-powerful authorial hand is involved — most are beginning new jobs. Each, in their way, is ambitious — no room for slackers here! This isn’t Brooklyn! Abby is the new assistant to celebrity stylist Vanessa (Constance Wu). Kel, who wants to be an actor, finds a job as a substitute teacher in a posh private girls’ school, through the offices of Kate (Ego Nwodim), with whom he once shared an “undefined hookup situation.” (His evolving relationship with his students is my favorite part of the series.)

Davis works in finance at some banking behemoth, where AJ has just been hired, and Bill, called “the Butcher” (Jay Ellis), cracks the whip. Josh, who wants to be an investigative journalist, is an idealist in a PBS T-shirt (and with a PBS tote bag) who gets by on family money and is incapable of taking care of himself in any practical way. (He’s also “pretty well known in the youth squash world.”) Dropping his father’s name to score a job with his hero, TV anchor Wes Dryden (Victor Garber), he alienates his new colleagues, who call him Joffrey (“evil nepo, son of a king”) and leave him off the work chat.

Significantly, Davis has just been left by a girlfriend, because he’s too much — she’s training as a barista in order to spell her name in foam — and Josh is about to be left by one, because he’s not enough. Professional arcs not entirely aside, this is a romantic comedy, full of meet cutes and related tropes, where love rules; no one’s got it, everyone’s looking for it. (“I am the complete package,” says Davis, despairing of a connection. “I am a straight man in New York City with a high-paying job and a great body — calves could use some work — who wants to wife up a woman and have four beautiful kids who go to private school.” This might have something to do with his scaring women off.)

AJ stands out almost as a central character by virtue of her being new in town because a lot of romantic energy is directed her way; because she is marginally less quirky than the other characters — Abby does call her “anxious, angry and obsessed with justice”— and because all but one of the official spoilers involves her. But it’s very much an ensemble sort of rom-com, like “Love Actually,” and indeed, there are Christmas and New Year’s Eve episodes to cap the season — though, unlike a movie, it ends on a note of suspension. A false, artificial note, it seemed to me, though, to be sure, this sort of narrative troublemaking is endemic to television romance; we will see how that cadence resolves in the surely coming second season.

A superb supporting cast also notably includes Michael Benjamin Washington, very funny as Antoine the landlord; Greg Germann as Josh’s father; Laura Bell Bundy as AJ’s beautician mother, visiting from Dorchester; and Judy Gold as Paula, the power behind Wes Dryden. Harry Richardson plays charming actor Austin Blanchett, Cate’s fictional nephew, who is starring as George Washington in a Sofia Coppola film somehow being made in the middle of Manhattan. (“Nobody’s ever done a film about the Revolutionary War where everyone is hot,” says Austin, impressed), who’ll be well tangled in Abby’s plot line. There are cameo appearances by Questlove; podcasters and reality TV stars Paige DeSorbo and Hannah Berner; Spanx founder Sara Blakely and a joke about B.J. Novak, Kaling’s sometime collaborator, though he remains offstage.

“Not Suitable” isn’t exactly chaste — there is some smooching, and a very little bit of sex — but there is an old-fashioned modesty to it that seems more lifelike than shows in which characters are getting busy all the time and sex is the constantly discussed be all and end all. (“They’re hot, they’re famous and they will literally jump on anything,” Vanessa warns Abby regarding their celebrity clients.) No one gets naked. Instead, we learn who likes whom, in a high school sort of way, usually unknown to the object, and even to the liker; things will happen or never happen, work out or won’t over the course of nine episodes. Egos will be deflated where necessary, lessons learned. (The men, especially, can be dopes.) In the series’ hierarchy of importance, love comes before work, but friendship, as the Spice Girls sang, is the real prize.

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