NBC’s ‘Superstore’ Walks the Line Between Real and Funny in Today’s Paycheck-to-Paycheck Economy

Half-hour comedies went through a period in the 1980s and ’90s with shows like Family Ties, Seinfeld, and Friends where people lived in relative comfort and had a lot of free time on their hands. There was plenty of conflict, but it didn’t come from figuring out how to pay the bills when your minimum-wage job didn’t provide maternity leave.

That followed a period in the 1970s when shows like One Day at a Time, All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley were more midwestern, more working-class, and more prone to find conflict in economic and social situations. We’re seeing a return to that now with comedies like The Carmichael Show, Mom and the One Day at a Time reboot addressing economic insecurity as a real-world reality without slipping into Very Special Episode mode or being more dramedy than comedy.

NBC’s Superstore, which returns tonight for its midseason premiere, is a workplace comedy set in a Walmart-like retail store. The characters are hourly employees who live paycheck to paycheck. Their jobs tend to tedium and repetition. Some of them want to go to college and can’t. It’s funny without pandering, stereotyping or glossing over difficulty. It’s a show with a social consciousness without being a show about social consciousness.

Showrunner Justin Spitzer covered some of that territory as a writer on The Office and you’ll recognize some workplace-comedy tropes on Superstore — like bureaucracy, employer-employee disputes and office romances — but Superstore post the 2016 election is sitting in the perfect setup to speak from Flyover Country about things like the minimum wage at a time when nobody really knows what’s going to happen.

So what’s going to happen on Superstore?

“If things become more difficult for people on the working-class side of the spectrum, if there’s more of an anti-union tilt, if there are issues with the minimum wage, I think our characters will tackle those things,” Spitzer said in a long sit-down with Decider. “We’re trying to be socially relevant without being political.”

Spitzer also talks about how his early years as a writer, how Dina [Lauren Ash] both is and isn’t Dwight Schrute from The Office, and the special episode that gave Superstore such a boost during the Summer Olympics.

DECIDER: You were only 13 years old when you started out on The Office, right?

JUSTIN SPITZER: [Laughs.] I think I was 26 or 28. I’m 39 now.

That was a young writers’ room. You, B.J. Novak, Mindy Kaling were all in your twenties at the time.

Yeah, most of us were, and Mike Schur is only a year or two older than me. It’s a funny thing that I started on The Office fairly early in my career, and there were some people on that show younger than me. I stayed on that show for seven years, and I was one of the older guys in the room by the time I left.

What was your background before The Office?

I had written a few things but not much. I wrote an episode of Scrubs on spec, they bought it and I rewrote it with them. I wrote on NBC’s Committed for 13 episodes and CBS’s Courting Alex, which didn’t last very long either. The Office was definitely my break and definitely where I learned how to write.

Does your writers’ room for Superstore function similarly to how The Office did, or did you move in another direction?

In some ways. I hadn’t worked on that many shows, so I don’t even know how most shows work. Writers’ rooms are always kind of a mess. We’re always trying new exercises to come up with stories or trying new ways of organizing and structuring things. Writing is such an un-normal thing to do, so we’re always trying to figure out the best way to do it.

Did have an idea what you wanted to do coming into Season 2?

We ended last season with everyone walking out of the store. We finished shooting and editing Season 1 before any of it had aired, so we didn’t know if the show would even come back for a second season. That walkout was something I wanted to do, so we made sure we did it while we had the chance. With the second season, we had to figure out how to get them back in the store. We didn’t want them to be out of the store for long because it’s not a show about people walking around the parking lot and we knew we’d have some new viewers, and we also didn’t want to sell out the premise of why they walked out. [The walkout was in protest of not giving one character paid maternity leave.] And then we found out we were doing the Olympics episode.

The timing for that was odd. You basically handled it like a lost episode, right?

[Laughs.] Exactly. We had written it so that everybody had walked out of the store, but we didn’t want to have this episode that was gonna get more viewers than we had ever had to be about people in the parking lot, so we decided this would be an episode that took place at some other point. We figured that showing Cheyenne [Nichole Bloom] would tell people that this was an episode that took place last year, so we treated it as a fun, independent episode that says what the show is about and celebrates the Olympics.

There are some analogues on the show to The Office. You have a Dwight-type character in Dina [Lauren Ash] and a Jim-and-Pam set-up with Ben Feldman and America Ferrera. Do you think much about either leaning into or leaning away from what worked on The Office?

Certainly in terms of the way I right — what I think is good, what I think is important to the story — I learned from Greg Daniels on The Office. That will always stay with me. In terms of the specific analogues, I’m always trying to push things away from feeling too much like The Office. I want Superstore to not repeat those stories. I certainly see why people think Dina is a lot like Dwight. I see them as very different characters because I’ve been so involved in developing both of them. The same as the will-they-won’t-they story, I’m trying to do things that feel different but still make a virtue of what people like about our show, about The Office, about Cheers, about Friends — shows that have will-they-won’t-they stories — but figuring out how to do it our way.

Dina has been a confounding character to watch because she’s petty like Dwight but in much more of a position of authority. Has she been a divisive character in the writers’ room?

We change our minds a lot. Dina, as I originally envisioned the character, was closer to the character that Danny DeVito played on Taxi. I wanted her to be a hardass that you would find likable over a long period of time. Lauren Ash is an amazing actress and Dina became likable a lot faster, but sometimes I still want her to be able to be an antagonist and to be the authority that makes people follow the rules. Glenn [Mark McKinney] is a nice guy as a manager who doesn’t do that as much.

There’s a scene between Dina and Glenn in the midseason premiere where she does something unredeemingly mean, and that’s not something I’m used to seeing on a show like this.

Dina is always frustrated with Glenn. Everyone else sees someone sweet and caring, and she sees him hiding behind religion and morals. She has a moral code that she sticks to, and we’re trying to figure out in every situation what that code would make her do and have it make sense in her mind. During the walkout, it was intentional that she stayed on corporate’s side. It’s not because she doesn’t like the employees; it’s because she follows the rules and the rules say you stay. She wasn’t making the bad choice as much as the moral choice. I think Dwight on The Office had a moral code, but he was always trying to get ahead. Dina isn’t trying to take over the world. She wants to follow the rules, and that’s enough for her.

Do you and the other writers feel like you’re speaking for specific characters when you have those discussions. Are you the conscience of anyone in particular?

Everybody knows the characters and can write for any of them, but there are certain writers who have a character’s voice more than others. Jackie Clarke writes amazing things for Dina and can always push the envelope with edgy bits of dialogue. Eric Ledgin is often the voice of Jonah [Ben Feldman]. My point of view often starts from Amy [America Ferrera] — more cynical and trying to get through the day and not seeing the beautiful moments that Jonah talks about in the pilot.

With Amy and Jonah, you could let things ride for many seasons like Jim and Pam on The Office or Niles and Daphne on Frasier. The other idea is to never save any idea because you don’t know how long you’re going to have. How do you approach the idea of a long arc with those two ideas in mind?

It was easier when you were less likely to be cancelled and could plan things over time. I certainly understand the idea that you shouldn’t save great episodes. We thought about that a lot in Season 1. With a will-they-won’t-they, I don’t want to give that up all at once. I don’t think it’s worth rushing a romance. You have to plan things and let them grow.

You don’t necessarily continue every story in every episode, which has given Mateo [Nico Santos] in particular some time to develop that character.

One of the responsibilities of a showrunner, I think, is to have the discipline to slow down and take time with a story. It’s tempting to say let’s do another big move with Mateo, but that leaves you with less to do going forward. The payoff is often better if you wait.

There have been some specific references to social-justice issues like fair wages that you would expect to come up in the context of a big retail store. Have you approached that like an activist figuring out where to put those things or more like a journalist who’s having to figure things out?

We have never made it a mandate for every episode to deal with some political issue. Sometimes we use a social or political issue as a starting point, but it’s more about creating entertaining episodes. We don’t want to be didactic and persuade the audience to believe one side of an issue, and we’re not trying to hash out issues. It’s a show that takes place in the real world, and we shouldn’t be afraid to touch on those issues when they come up. We did an episode with a story about selling guns, and we knew that was a topical and controversial issues. Many stores like this sell guns, and it became about what to do when you’re asked to sell something you have a moral objection to.

Have you aired an episode yet that you wrote after the election?

Not yet.

Have you had discussions about whether Donald Trump will be the president on the show? Whether anyone will acknowledge that or what it means for those characters?

When we write and shoot an episode we’re a few months out from when it airs, so sometimes it’s difficult to do things that are too topical. We talked about that when we did an episode that was set on Election Day, but we wrote it months before when nobody knew what would happen. It hasn’t become part of our DNA yet, but it could. If things start changing socially in American in a way that would affect the day-to-day life of workers in a store, I think we would start putting it in the show.

It’s not a show that you would expect to make political, but things probably are going to change.

Maybe. If things become more difficult for people on the working-class side of the spectrum, if there’s more of an anti-union tilt, if there are issues with the minimum wage, I think our characters will tackle those things. We’re trying to be socially relevant without being political.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Stream 'Superstore' on Hulu