Superstore; A Love/Hate Affair

Be warned. I’m about to do something a little stupid. I’m going to take a network sitcom very seriously. A few hundred words from now when you go ‘Wow. This dude needs to get outside once in a while.’ just know that I did try to tell you.

Superstore started on NBC in November of 2015. While it has never exactly been a ratings smash, it’s always been successful enough to get renewed each season and is currently wrapping up its–very funny–fifth season and has already been scheduled for a sixth. I came into this show fairly late, catching up via Hulu just before the premiere of the fifth season in September of 2019.

(SIDE NOTE: you ever notice how few people are willing to try a show from the start anymore? It’s like unless TV shows are attached to an already existing brand, they have to prove themselves for multiple seasons until most people deem them worth a shot. I wonder how many great, unknown shows we’ve lost due to this change in viewer behavior, or how many could have lived if they’d tied themselves up with a video game or an old movie.)

While the start of the show is a little rough, by the time I was midway through binge watching the first season I was hooked. The main character of Amy Sosa (America Ferrera) is funny and cute and capable and is allowed some rare depth of character for a network sitcom. She is presented to you as someone with a real history, with an already existing family and routines and expectations for how her life will play out. She is not the blank slate entry point so many shows use for a protagonist. We will discuss that character here in a minute.

The rest of the cast is filled out wonderfully for the most part. Both Dina (Lauren Ash) and Glenn (Mark McKinney) are hilarious in their positions as the ultra-competent assistant manager and utterly incompetent but well-meaning general manager respectively. They both do a great job representing two different faces of low-level corporate representation in big box store jobs. There are other hilarious characters as well, Mateo (Nico Santos) has some of the best snarky one-liners you will see on TV right now and his storyline involving accidental illegal immigration is handled with intelligence and sensitivity. And we haven’t even mentioned Cheyenne (Nichole Bloom) or Sandra (Kaliko Kauahi) or Marcus (Jon Barinholtz), all of whom have almost made me cry from laughing and all of whom have been forced to deal with issues real-life workers at a big box store might face. That’s one of Superstore’s biggest strengths actually, the ability to incorporate real world issues (such as unionization, the struggles of being part of the working poor, labor rights, corporate overreach) into the plot of a genuinely pleasant sitcom.

But all of that is where we run into Jonah (Ben Feldman). Despite the fact that Amy Sosa (America Ferrera) is the show lead, Jonah is used as the audience POV character for both the beginning of the series and occasionally throughout. Unlike the rest of the workers at the store, Jonah grew up either upper-middle class or just upper class (it’s hard to tell) and is both educated and political. While increasing corporate control in the lives of the average worker is a frequently used plot point for all the characters on the show, it is often only Jonah who shows an awareness for what is happening. He is the one who has led multiple efforts to unionize, the one who is cognizant of how corporate and government policy generally seem to make the lives of Cloud 9 employees (the Target-esque store where the show takes place) that much harder. He is frequently the only person at the store who shows any actual intellectual curiosity, including even Amy.

Despite that the show has received a lot of praise for the way it handles real issues, Jonah, and by extension his ideas that are usually what pushes those real issues into the show, are not taken seriously by anyone working in the store or by the show itself. When the union the Cloud 9 workers have tried to start sporadically throughout the series falls just short of being actualized during this ongoing fifth season, leaving Jonah understandably despondent, more than one character tells him he was just looking for a cause to fight and he needs to get over it or find something else to fight for. This despite the fact that a union would have been something that benefits almost every character in the show. Or when Cloud 9 tries to tell its employees who to vote for on an election day episode, he is the only one who finds that troubling and is consistently made fun of for that. Jonah is presented as a bundle of all the most annoying stereotypes of the ‘bleeding heart liberal’. He only listens to NPR and seems to worship Rachel Maddow. He doesn’t seem capable of having fun or making male friends. He takes things too seriously and his Halloween costumes are confusing. He is shown to be weak, preening, effeminate, and utterly out of touch with reality over and over and over again.

And now we’re getting to that part where you’re going to go: ‘calm down, dude,’ because part of me thinks that is purposeful on the show’s end. By minimizing Jonah, NBC (a massive broadcasting company owned by an even more massive media conglomerate: Comcast; all of which are pretty invested in the current economic status quo) is also minimizing the ideas they have him espouse. Who wants to join or start a union when the guy on TV always talking about them is such a pansy? Who cares about massive corporate infiltration into the lives of their employees when the guy who worries about that is wrong about everything else? Why would you invest yourself into the politics that could affect your life if that just means you’ll turn into Jonah? It paints the portrait that only weak, loser white guys care about that sort of thing. When in reality, everyone needs to be involved in politics, in fighting for labor rights, in working to make your own life better. Superstore is hilarious and real and I honestly don’t think the creators think of this as the goal of what they’re writing. But when being politically aware is consistently shown as a character flaw at best and pathetic at worst, when the correct response to attempts at activism is shown to be laughter or a resigned shrug, when the main character over and over again chooses to go along with the massive corporation that dominates her life to get along, against the advice of one of the few people in the store she is shown to at least kind of respect; then it is not a show about the real struggles of the working poor. Instead it is a show about encouraging apathy.

And apathy does nothing for those who need change. Apathy only protects those already in charge.

If you enjoyed this article at all, please check out my New Adult Contemporary Fantasy Novel: Magic, Television, & Marijuana. Out now on Amazon.