Ashley Spurgeon is a lifelong TV fan — nay, expert — and with her recurring television and pop-culture column "And Another Thing," she'll tell you what to watch, what to skip, and what's worth thinking more about.
There are only a handful of sitcoms about the American working class, and most of them are about families and family life. The Belchers of Bob’s Burgers are always behind on rent, the kids on Everybody Hates Chris see dad Julius as “cheap” (on his delivery-man/security-guard salary), and The Middle quietly choogled along for nine seasons of wacky family fun in blue-collar Indiana. But NBC’s Superstore is one of the few sitcoms — really since Taxi — to actually show working class people at work. What a concept!
I was late to Superstore because I worried a network sitcom set in a Walmart-like big-box retailer would mostly be about product placement, complemented by shoddy writing and lazy acting. Is this a program that just so happens to feature, in every single episode, tastefully displayed consumer goods popping bright against the background? And the main characters frequently spend their time stocking name-brand snacks on the shelves? Hm.
But the store they work in — Cloud 9 — is, of course, an ironic hell, where the corporate machinery grinds everyone’s lives down to finer and finer dust. America Ferrera plays Amy, a 15-year Cloud 9 employee who wishes she had gone to college instead of marrying her high school sweetheart. New employee Jonah (Ben Feldman) is a business school dropout whose (presumed) middle-class future gets further away every day he clocks in.
Superstore barely has to stretch the horror of IRL corporate malfeasance to make a joke. Y’all remember that time, in reality, when that fast-food sandwich shop hired a pedophile to be the face of its brand? For like a decade? Then you might just recognize “Kyle the Cloud 9 Cloud,” a friendly spokes-character portrayed by a man who murdered and cannibalized 14 people. Cloud 9 controls their employees’ lives remotely (they can’t adjust the temperature or unlock the doors) and subjects them to corporate sloganeering like “Minimum wage is maximum fun!” and “‘Walk It Off,’ a Guide to Injuries on the Job.”
Amy and Jonah are the Will They/Won’t They couple of Superstore — they both perceive themselves as “smarter” than most of their coworkers, are of equal attractiveness, and most excitingly, they occasionally engage in a little light labor organizing. Store manager Glenn (Mark McKinney) is usually on their side, but his good heart and moral compass mean union busters are sometimes deployed to the store. Plus, at the end of the day, management is management. When the boss is informed he has to lay people off, he will lay people off.
The “work family” of Superstore tries to help each other whenever they can. Amy sees a lot of herself in Cheyenne (Nichole Bloom), a pregnant teenage co-worker. In sitcoms about working-class families, the idea is at the end of the day, it’s all worth it. Work is shitty, but home and family are where you can find your dignity again. Superstore shows how little respect is given to families in corporate culture — especially to mothers. There’s no paid maternity leave, and no maternity leave at all for new employees — someone is back on the floor two days after giving birth. Amy can’t source childcare in one episode, and has to bring her kid to work.
What if there was a way to support your family without having to sacrifice your dignity in the first place? Mid-20th-century ideas of the (white) working class promised that: Dads on the factory line, or men doing dirty jobs like trash collector that keep civilization running. Union jobs conferred dignity. But waitresses never counted as the working class, nor “burger flippers,” and certainly not the people scanning your groceries and deodorant, who are not allowed to sit down, not allowed to use the bathroom more than once per shift, not allowed to spend more than 15 minutes eating lunch.
The show takes place in Missouri, so the indginites of living in the Midwest are heaped upon our Superstore friends as well. Everyone has to drive everywhere — expensive. Sometimes tornadoes make your house disappear, and your only support system is your fellow co-workers, who are just as broke as you. Opportunities for a hundred-dollar bonus are huge deal, because everyone — not just the parents, not just the elderly — needs that money for food, clothing, shelter. Minimum wage is maximum fun!
Small bumper scenes of shoppers acting weird (They’re Just Like Us), seeing corporate Kool-Aid drinkers slowly realize they’ve been scammed, the building of support systems and nascent labor organizing — there are so many small moments of joy this show provides. “Kafkaesque” is not sufficient enough a word to describe the horrors of late capitalism. It is grotesque, absurd, immoral, and just so fucking ridiculous. This is where the humor lives, in the absolute utter ridiculousness of it all — and the flashes of beauty in between.
All episodes available on Hulu; Season 4 resumes March 7 on NBC.
