The first season of “Superstore” ended
with a tried-and-true comic premise: An employee is going into labor! And she
can’t make it to the hospital in time! We’re going to have to deliver the baby
right here!
اضافة اعلان
A call goes up over the loudspeaker at Cloud 9, the big-box
store where the savings are “heavenly” and the customers look as if they’ve
wandered off a George Romero set. Garrett (Colton Dunn), the customer service
guy, starts to ask for a doctor but catches himself after a quick scan around
the store: “Anybody here watch a lot of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’? Maybe ‘Nurse Jackie’?
Not ‘The Knick.’ “
As all the other employees huddle around Cheyenne (Nichole
Sakura), the teen mom now huffing-and-puffing on an AstroTurf lawn display,
each of them stay true to comic form, confidently harmonizing their quirks.
Jonah (Ben Feldman), the store’s super-woke business-school dropout, speculates
that she might be having “Braxton Hicks contractions,” a kind of false alarm,
which prompts Amy (America Ferrera), the floor supervisor, to call him out for
being a pretentious know-it-all. (They have a thing.)
Dina (Lauren Ash), a take-charge company woman in the Dwight
Schrute mold, rolls up her sleeves. “I took part in a cow birth once,” she
says. “The calf died. But I learned what not to do.” Glenn (Mark McKinney), the store’s
anti-abortion Christian manager, offers that he “played the abortion doctor in
a Hell House once.”
It’s a wonderfully manic half-hour of television, with laughs
spread across the ensemble. But the name of the episode, “Labor,” suggests a
double meaning. When the panic subsides — Jonah was right about the Braxton
Hicks contractions, much to Amy’s annoyance — certain practical questions
settle in: Why is Cheyenne working this late into her pregnancy? Why doesn’t
the company offer maternity leave? Can she afford to take any days off?
“Superstore” ends its six-season run Thursday as the
punch-clock analog to another great NBC workplace comedy, “The Office,” of
which the “Superstore” creator, Justin Spitzer, wrote many episodes. There are
unmistakable echoes between the two, from the Jim and Pam-style
will-they-or-won’t-they chemistry between Amy and Jonah to staff meetings that
regularly descend into chaotic forums for dumb ideas or embarrassing personal
squabbles.
And yet “Superstore,” with its more diverse and underpaid
staff, kept bumping into issues more common to the American workforce,
specifically the vested legions of stockers and checkout clerks lining the
aisles of Target, Walmart and other department-store beachheads. Unionization,
immigration, racism, gun control, reproductive rights: The show wasn’t
necessarily inclined to pick fights, but characters with low wages and few
benefits are bound to have practical problems, and a store like Cloud 9 never
insulated them from the outside world. It was an ecosystem, but not a bubble.
So what was the America of “Superstore”? It’s a place where
blue-collar workers cannot make a living wage and have to rely on ad-hoc
solutions to problems that corporate can’t solve. When Cheyenne can’t get
maternity leave, Glenn gives her a six-week paid suspension. (He is fired for
that.) When deductibles become too high, Jonah tries to start a health care
fund to pay for them but inadvertently creates a pyramid scheme.
When Garrett and other employees of color complain about the
microaggressions they face every day, Glenn attempts to solve systemic racism
by throwing them a pizza party as reparations. (“The break room is kind of a
safe space for the historically marginalized,” Jonah says.)
Although “Superstore” was not long on Very Special Episodes,
it did have the audacity to end its fourth season with an undocumented Filipino
associate, Mateo (Nico Santos), getting carted away by immigration police. And
this was no random dragnet: Corporate authorized a workplace enforcement as
part of its strategy to crush a unionization effort. There is a melting-pot
optimism to the Cloud 9 setting, where employees of varying ethnicities and
personalities can resolve problems and find common cause. But this is America,
too, the show implied, where corporate greed hammers its employees and
hard-line immigration policies wind up infiltrating the local department store.
And yet Spitzer, who wrote Mateo’s detention as his final episode
as showrunner — the hottest of potatoes to hand off to his successors, Gabe
Miller and Jonathan Green — said that he never intended “Superstore” to be
issue oriented.
No comedy was better suited to live up to our pandemic
moment, as “Superstore” did in its final season. From the early days of
COVID-19, employees at stores like Cloud 9 have been hailed as essential front
line workers, quietly absorbing the invective (and spittle) of the unmasked
while serving those with the luxury to shelter in place. Their bosses call them
“the true heroes during this chaotic time,” but give them little guidance or
personal protective equipment, which reduces one associate to fashioning a mask
out of a coffee filter and the others to decapitate teddy bears and steal their
neckerchiefs.
In a video call, Green said that it had helped that the show
was established before the pandemic season. “If we had been starting the show
right now during the pandemic, and trying to show what retail workers are going
through at this time, I think it might have felt more heavy-handed or
lecture-y,” he said.
And so “Superstore” ends with our friends in the trenches. It’s
Garrett who’s behind a thin veil of Plexiglas, taking returns from “the
wet-lipped community.” It’s Dina who gives chase from a 6-foot distance when a
maskless customer runs after the last jar of pasta sauce. It’s Glenn who doesn’t
want to be called a hero for pointing out where someone can find the bottled
water.
There’s an esprit de corps to these characters that speaks to
more than six seasons of consistently strong writing or the chemistry of its
cast or even their fitful bids for collective bargaining. “Superstore” is a
workplace sitcom that feels like society in miniature, a fractious pocket of
humanity that comes together out of necessity and improvisation. Few of them
would be friends outside work, but if they pull down the same shift long
enough, they start to become family.
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