The Essentials Dashboard Dashboard

The writers of NBC’s Superstore proved uniquely equipped to take on the stark realities of being a retail worker during COVID-19, while still managing to find some much-needed laughs.

(1/29/2021)

It’s famously said that comedy is tragedy plus time, but what do you do when there’s no time? Specifically, say there’s a global pandemic—the deadly scope of which is still very much mounting—and you’ve got a sitcom to write?

While it’s hardly the most daunting challenge of the last year, it was a very real quandary for television writers across the industry as so many Americans sheltered in place, using the small screen as their only portal to a world outside. During the chaotic onset of the pandemic, some shows elected to ignore the crisis, while others found a way to write it into their storylines. NBC’s sleeper hit Superstore—currently in the midst of its sixth and final season—chose to address COVID-19 early on and proved to be uniquely, and somewhat unexpectedly, suited for it. The sitcom, centered around an eclectic ensemble of employees working in a fictional Target-esque store called Cloud 9, has been widely lauded for how it tackled COVID-19, with many critics going so far as to say no television series did it better.

The show’s success at handling the crisis can be largely ascribed to two things. First, Superstore had already developed a knack for wrestling with serious national issues before the pandemic. The final episode of Season 4, for example, took on the tragic reality of ICE detentions under the Trump administration, when Mateo (Nico Santos) was arrested by the agency for falsifying his identity to land his job.

Secondly, as the whole world almost immediately figured out last spring, it turns out that when a pandemic hits, grocery stores and big-box stores—in all their necessary, everyday normalcy—become a crucial front line in the crisis, and a place where people’s best and worst is on daily parade.

“At the beginning, we all saw it when we ran to the grocery store and shelves were empty and people were starting to panic,” says Co-EP Bridget Kyle. She and Co-EP Vicky Luu wrote the debut episode of Season 6, Essential, which aired October 29, marking Superstore’s return after being shut down in March, and its first mention of the pandemic.

Gabe Miller, who is co-showrunner with Jonathan Green, says it was a clear choice to confront COVID-19 head-on. “It felt like it’d be crazy to ignore something this huge, especially something that has affected the lives of retail workers in such specific and dramatic ways.” The series was in a unique position to “show what the pandemic has been like for this group of front-line workers who are sometimes overlooked.”

While nurses, doctors and other first responders are rightly heralded during such emergencies, the idea of acknowledging the service of retail workers, who put themselves at significant personal risk each day to ensure people get food and necessary supplies, was almost as novel as the virus.

“Superstore has always tried to uplift these workers, and it felt wrong to do a show completely ignoring what they are going through,” says Luu. “We, like a lot of people, can work from home. But what about these people who don't have that option and have to come into the store to work? We just felt it would have been a huge disservice to not show that world. The title of that episode was ‘Essential’ because we were recognizing every essential worker, every person who did not have the luxury or the privilege to stay at home and be safe.”

The writers’ room found a certain hypocrisy in how retail workers were called heroes, but largely treated even worse than before, dealing with “panicked shoppers, the new protocols, the conflicting safety information, the PPE shortages and the frustration of suddenly being called ‘essential’ while still being treated as disposable,” says Miller. Larger pre-existing labor rights issues were worsened and laid bare by the virus, which “has only exacerbated the ways companies can take advantage of their workers, with things like wage theft, unsafe conditions, lack of protections and hazard pay.”

Many of these issues weren’t new to Superstore. “We're always talking about workers’ rights, just because you see what workers in the big-box stores are going through,” says Luu. “So, of course, we wanted to address this. It was like all of a sudden their job doubled and tripled beyond what they’re meant and trained to do. Now there are these new elements like having to clean the entire store before and after, and having to corral people. Are they getting paid extra for this because they are doing more work? They’re making a living and they're so often getting underpaid and undervalued. That applied to the pandemic even more so. You saw it happening daily.”

At the same time, Green says, the series was also still bound by its own essential job: “to make people laugh.” The big question remained; how do you make any of this funny? The answer, it turns out, is largely the same way they did before: by writing jokes that were true to the characters they’d created and how they would react to this new reality. “We try to have our stories come from character as much as possible. We never want to force an issue into the show or have it feel like we’re trying to teach a lesson or declare an easy fix,” Green explains. “The topics we’ve dealt with are ones that come up naturally for a diverse group of employees at a big-box store, and most importantly, ones we can find a funny angle on. It seems to work best when it doesn’t feel like we’re ‘tackling’ an issue; we’re just representing different perspectives on it.”

This philosophy is on full display in the joke Luu and Kyle came up with as a way into the show’s first acknowledgement of COVID-19, when the aggressively blunt character Dina (Lauren Ash) announces during a staff meeting that her boyfriend just cancelled their “sex weekend” at Aloha Thunder indoor water park due to news of the virus.

Comedic ice broken, the episode’s jokes flowed—from the perfunctory comedic depiction of toilet paper hoarding to cleverly micro-dated references to Tiger King. They even had fun with insane conspiracy theories, as when the hapless, religious store manager Glenn (Mark McKinney) is accosted by an irate anti-mask customer who accuses him of working for Satan and he replies, in high dudgeon, “He is the one person I would never work for!”

Chalk one up for the workers.

Finding humor amid all the fear and grief wasn’t simple, but then again, “it’s never easy,” says Kyle. “The pandemic isn't hilarious, I'll be the first one to say that, but that's our job.” In their quest for laughs, writers had to strike a tricky balance. “In trying to capture what’s absurd and weird and funny about working and living through a pandemic, we have tried to be careful not to make light of COVID-19 itself,” says Miller, acknowledging that their setting and genre has helped. “Our show’s not set in a hospital, it’s a store, so we don’t have to show the most dire aspects of the pandemic. We can focus on things like customers’ bad behavior, corporate’s confusing policies, and dealing with friends who have different levels of comfort with social distancing.”

And as central as COVID-19 has been to everyone’s life, it’s hardly been the only social issue the writers felt deserved attention. “We just aired our Black Lives Matter episode” on January 14, says Kyle. “That also seemed extremely important to tell this year.” In the episode, Cloud 9 corporate, in a change of policy, decided that hair care products for Black people would no longer be held under lock and key, pointing powerfully to the insidious ubiquity of systemic racism. Entitled “Hair Care Products,” the resulting episode, still backdropped by the pandemic, was again widely praised.

The writers also had to balance the advent of COVID-19 with all the existing storylines that define the show. “We realized we could tell endless stories about COVID-19, especially in this location,” says Kyle. “It feels like every month there’s something that’s radically unimaginable that has happened. It gave us so much material that it was insane.”

While COVID-19 remains a common theme throughout the entire sixth season, “we never wanted it to overtake every other storyline,” Kyle notes. “There were just so many things that we wanted to cover as well—personal storylines between these characters that we’ve cultivated over six years, and that we owed the audience, to show them the next steps in these people’s lives. So we started to tell more stories, and different stories, but COVID-19 never went away.”