By Jenna Remley
Writing a good ending to a seasons-long TV show is always a tricky thing to manage. Some good shows can feel retroactively ruined by a bad finale, or have odd last seasons that drag on while trying to wrap up storylines. Sometimes series cancellations are announced suddenly, leaving the story unfinished or rushed to a shoddy conclusion.
Superstore, which aired its final episode on March 25, was uniquely challenged when it came to putting together its sixth and final season. In February of 2020, lead actress and producer America Ferrera announced that she was leaving Superstore to focus on other projects. Then season five was cut short when filming was shut down due to the pandemic. Production for the sixth season started in the fall, with a shorter-than-average 15-episode season. Then in December, when episodes were already airing, NBC announced that the sixth season would be the last.
All of these factors meant that the odds were stacked against Superstore’s sixth season. Any of these obstacles would have had the potential to negatively impact the show’s quality, let alone all of them combined.
And yet, the bastards pulled it off.
Something I have always loved and admired about Superstore is its willingness to tackle difficult topics. It’s a show about average people who work for a corporation that will always value profit over employees, and it’s not afraid to take swings at the system and culture that can make these low-wage jobs so miserable. While other workplace sitcoms such as The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine have used satire to criticize their real-life counterparts, I’ve never seen a TV show go as hard as Superstore when it comes to criticism. We’ve seen union-busting, the deportation of undocumented immigrants, racial profiling, and discrimination against older workers. And while these topics are treated thoughtfully and given sufficient weight, it is also always a very funny show.
Before watching this season of Superstore, I had not watched any media that was set during the pandemic, and I really had no desire to. I worried that any on-screen portrayal of the strange and horrifying reality I was living through would be tacky, or overly sentimental, or too dismissive. But Superstore is a show about undervalued workers in a big box store - a show about the ‘essential workers’ that had been lauded as heroes and yet rarely given sufficient PPE or hazard pay. The show approached this pandemic with the same blend of satire and earnestness that they’ve always used to criticize the mistreatment of their characters.
They poked fun at the strangeness of our reality without trivializing the seriousness of the crisis. The story jumped through time - from supply hoarding at the uncertain beginnings of the pandemic, to a summer of widespread protest against police abuse, to the way everyone adapted as the pandemic stretched on, life continuing with the constant background noise of COVID. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to laugh at jokes about the pandemic, that even when portraying the overwhelming yet mundane horror of my daily life and the tremendous challenges faced by essential workers, this show could still be enjoyable and clever and compassionate.
Going into this season, I was also concerned by the departure of America Ferrera. Her character Amy had been the heart of the show for five seasons. Even the main plotlines for Jonah, the male lead character, revolve mostly around his romantic life - and therefore, his relationship with Amy. Meanwhile, we’ve seen Amy have storylines related to parenting her daughter and having a new child, going through a divorce, and making changes to her career. It’s hard to imagine Superstore without Amy, and I worried I wouldn’t be as invested in the show without her.
But I underestimated how well the writers have developed the ensemble cast of this show over the past several years. When I started watching season six, I realized that of course I cared about the lives of Garrett, Dina, Cheyanne, Mateo, Glenn, and Sandra. While they may all be secondary characters compared to Amy and Jonah, they have become perfectly capable of standing on their own throughout the past five seasons. Not only were the plotlines for this season still funny and entertaining, I genuinely cared about them because of the strength of these characters - they all had developed personalities, histories, and goals that made me invested in their stories. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Sandra be coerced into adopting a teenage boy, but come to genuinely love him (and his pet sharks), or watching Cheyanne become floor manager and step into a leadership role with strength and style.
The biggest problem regarding Amy wasn’t her absence, but the circumstances under which she left. Amy and Jonah had been in a steady, committed relationship for several seasons - they were living together and raising Amy’s son. But one of the actors was leaving, and the other was staying, putting the writers in a tough spot with no easy, logical solution. So Amy is rash, and she breaks up with Jonah before moving to California for a corporate job. It didn’t make a lot of sense in-universe, which sucks, but I understand the real-life reality that forced this move. And when it was announced that America Ferrera was returning for the finale, I hoped desperately that the dissatisfying situation could be remedied.
I normally watch Superstore on Hulu, but for the final, hour-long episode, I watched with my sister so we could use her YouTube TV account and see it live. It was only the second time I’d been back in my family’s house since I’d been vaccinated, and just being able to watch TV with my sister felt truly momentous.
The finale was, at times, a bit rushed. In a perfect world, plotlines could have been wrapped up more elegantly. But given the wild number of constraints that the show creators had, it was incredible. Everything that I hoped would happen did happen, but I was also joyfully surprised by other conclusions. It was a satisfying happy end without being entirely predictable. It also had some of that same sentimental philosophizing that I loved in the finale of The Office - the reminder that there is beauty in ordinary things, that these characters and their lives may have been mundane, but they still matter. That, in Jonah’s words, we don’t have to look that hard to find something special - even a seemingly boring or underappreciated job at a store can be special. Cheesy, yes, but I absolutely love that stuff.
In some ways, I’m glad this was the final season. Six seasons is a good amount of time to tell the stories this show was interested in, without stretching the constraints of the premise too far. Ending on the pandemic also feels right in a certain way - what more could the writers have to say about the conflicts of this particular workplace that weren’t brought sharply to light through the pandemic? And, by ending things here, we got the return of Amy and a sort of redemption, making her breakup with Jonah merely a temporary obstacle before their happily-ever-after.
Superstore was already one of my all-time favorite sitcoms, but it’s a huge relief that I now know it can be enjoyed right up to the very end. This show impressed and surprised me in so many ways, but none more than how they pulled off a strong final season, despite everything.
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