The Z-Suite Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Monica accepts a huge (literally) award, with her right-hand man, Doug Garcia (Nico Santos) at her side. Of course, she take all the kudos, and she isn’t exactly modest in her speech.
Watching the speech from her Brooklyn efficiency is Kriska Thompson (Madison Shamoun), the 24-year-old head of Atielier’s social media team. She’s been working there for about four months but is already annoyed that Monica won’t hear her pitches for campaigns. After TikToking her morning routine, she comes back to her apartment to start working. Her she and her team — Clem (Anna Bezahler) and Elliot (Spencer Stevenson) — have chosen to work from home, seemingly on whatever schedule they choose. On their Zoom/Teams call, they’re joined by an annoying non-creative millennial they call Minnesota Matt (Evan Marsh) to his face.
As usual, Monica and Doug are juggling multiple major campaigns, with one for a headphone brand called Vibezz about to launch. But the first thing they have to field is a call from George (Mark McKinney), the CEO of a burger chain. He wants his new campaign to really target Gen Zers, and while Monica thinks she can create a campaign for Zoomers, any ideas she and Doug bat around are woefully outdated. “Send in the clowns” she says to Doug as she resigns herself to getting input from the social media team. Kriska comes up with an idea involving Olivia Rodrigo, but wants to pitch it to George herself. Monica tells her that they can be at the meeting but not talk.
Of course, Kriska speaks up with a social media component to the campaign when she sees things going poorly — George brings his teenage daughter to the meeting. Of course, this sets Monica off, railing against the entitlement Zoomers like Kriska seem to have.
Then the campaign for Vibezz comes out, with an unfortunate slogan that gets Atelier killed on social media. It goes so bad that Oliver, the owner of the firm, actually comes into the office. He fires Monica and Doug and installs Kriska as the CEO, with Clem and Elliott as part of the new C-suite.
Let’s get this out of the way: It pains us to no end to see Lauren Graham playing an out-of-touch dinosaur, and not just because we’ve been following her career since the ’90s, before she starred in Gilmore Girls. Until recently, most of Graham’s characters have been in touch with the world and pop culture, not in a generational bubble where every reference she makes seems desperate and moldy.
That being said, Graham does a lot with what is a cartoonishly confident character in Monica. While “cartoonishly confident” wouldn’t seem to be in Graham’s wheelhouse, she plays self-absorbed well, mainly because Monica is self-absorbed with lots of quirks. One of those quirks is that she has an exact replica of her office in her apartment. Nico Santos is also funny as Doug, who is utterly devoted to Monica and blew all of his money collecting Christmas train village figurines.
On the other side of the ledger, while we’ve been fans of Shamoun’s previous work (go watch The Lake on Prime Video and you’ll agree with me), Kriska is a little too Gen Z for our tastes. In fact, all three of the “Z-Suite” characters seem to be walking, talking bundles of sensitivities, entitlement and self-centeredness.
We get what the arc of this first season is going to be: The zoomers think they know how to run the agency better than the veterans that they replaced, and they get in way over their heads. In the meantime, Monica and Doug are going to try to get their jobs back, and perhaps Monica might learn a little humility in the process.
The show had enough funny moments that we think that, once each set of characters move away from the cliches around their respective generations, there could be a good workplace comedy here. But the whole “Gen X is out of touch, Gen Z thinks they should have everything right away” shtick grows old quickly.
