The Z-Suite “Pilot”/”In With the New”
Created by Katie O’Brien
Written by Katie O’Brien (“Pilot”) and Kate Lambert (“In With the New”)
Directed by Tristram Shapeero
Airs Thursdays on Tubi
Though Tubi’s history with airing scripted series is incredibly brief – remember Joss Whedon’s The Nevers? – the ad-supported network’s had an incredibly prolific output of low budget films, reality shows and documentaries since its purchase by Fox in 2020 (including January’s New York Post Presents: Luigi Mangione Monster or Martyr? … I’m not saying its an incredibly impressive collection), so it’s not a huge surprise to see them dipping their toes a bit further into scripted series in 2025. Those efforts are being led by The Z-Suite, Tubi’s first foray into the comedy genre, ostensibly the network’s attempt to appeal to numerous generations under the familiar guise of the workplace comedy – and even though its first two episodes feel more like a rough draft for a series pitch, there are a few intriguing elements for what could grow into a really effective corporate satire.
Created by former Teachers and The Santa Clause writer Katie O’Brien (who also featured prominently as Mary Bennigan on Teachers), The Z-Suite is best described as an uncanny mix of Selfie, any number of NBC workplace comedies from the past decade, with a few shades of Netflix’s short-lived Glamorous in for good effort (and like, a tiny dash of the original Doogie Howser, I guess?). After a disastrously “progressive” ad campaign by advertising legend Monica Marks (Lauren Graham, shifting into a more comedic role) and her assistant Doug Garcia (Superstore‘s Nico Santos), the ad company they built fires them and installs three inexperienced Gen Z stereotypes in their place, to which chaos predictably ensues.
Pretty simple premise, right? Don’t tell The Z-Suite, which takes two entire episodes to set up this the basics of its story – which it oddly does on two entirely separate narrative tracks, the construction of which seems at odd with the assumed central intergenerational conflicts of the series. One half of “Pilot” is spent painstakingly establishing Monica and Doug’s characters and presence within their industry, while the other half introduces us to Kriska (Madison Shamoun), Elliot (Spencer Stevenson), and Clem (Anna Bezahler), the remote-working Gen Z stereotypes who end up being named the company’s new C-suite after Monica and Doug’s sudden firing, right as the company starts a critical Super Bowl ad campaign for a big client.
After their individual introductions (Monica and Doug are introduced together at an awards ceremony, in the pilot’s cold open), “Pilot” and “In With the New” both take a lot of pointless diversions in executing two stories that feel like two halves of a premise – it’s not until the final minute of “In With the New”, when Atelier’s CEO learns of Gen Z’s reckless corporate credit card usage as they try to create a ‘new, better’ office culture, that it feels like the series is getting started.
So what does it fill those first 40 minutes with? A real mixed bag of simplistic workplace comedy, a handful of tired, cliche jokes that feature phrases like “it’s giving morgue” and the first (and hopefully last) use of “cheugy” I’ve seen in a comedy. In these moments, The Z-Suite is exactly the kind of cloying, mindless network reject one would expect a Tubi Original Series to be (kind of like how most of those Spectrum Originals were thoroughly useless reboots or spinoffs) – it is not sharply written, its decision to isolate the stories of Monica and Kriska from each other makes it feel like a show with two B stories and no A story, and its depiction of workplace culture in 2025 would’ve felt cliche in ABC’s comedy lineup circa 2015.
And yet… there are a few brief moments where The Z-Suite sheds its own mediocrity, and offers a glimpse into a series that hews much closer to something like Great News or the later seasons of Brockmire, in its quiet flirtations with being a much sharper, engaged satire of corporate life and intergenerational conflict. The anti-capitalists fighting over the company credit card, the montage of Kriska’s constant vlogging, the odd function of an HR rep in 2025 (HR Natasha is probably my favorite character in these first two episodes); there are occasional moments of brevity in The Z-Suite‘s first two episodes that had my sitting up in my chair a little bit – the result, of course, of sitting through 40 minutes of jokes about gay guys who are “soly poly”, All Lives Matter, and Hamilton. But those moments of potential are there – however, until the show figures out what it wants its personality to be, those moments are going to exist like tiny, isolated pockets of flavor in an otherwise bland stew of creative elements.
What does The Z-Suite want to be? A rousing, mindless ensemble comedy, a sardonic black satire, or something somewhere in the middle (again, I think Selfie is a great template here, though that would require the series recentering itself on Kriska, which seems unlikely given the amount of gravity given to Graham’s character). That is what’s unclear in these first two episodes – and with only six more in its unfortunately brief first season, I’m afraid it is a question this series isn’t going to have time to adequately work out on its own. Right now, it’s not interesting, funny (outside of a few amusing punchlines, most of which are found in “In With the New”), or snappy enough to find a dependable audience – if it can figure out that identity crisis, though, there’s a glimpse of hope for The Z-Suite to be one of the more unexpected, unassuming niche hits of 2025. I’m not confident at all it can get there, but you know I’ll be tuning in to find out.