On 'Superstore' And The Ties That Bind

Work will never love you back, but your coworkers might.

On March 26, the NBC comedy “Superstore” ended after six seasons.

In America, our jobs have so many ways to hook into us and keep us in place. We need the health insurance. We need the paycheck. We need the stability, some fragile peace of mind in a stressful, precarious world. I started at my last employer in 2011, on the day that AOL’s acquisition of HuffPost was announced; a decade later, I had been on staff there through three corporate overlords, several top editors, and innumerable pivots to and from video when I met the BuzzFeed axe. 

All of those things kept me there, but there are other ties too: The knowledge that I had a dream job, the kind where in theory you don’t work a day in your life because you’re so excited to get up and do it every morning. The paucity of open positions in the field to apply to, of course. And, maybe most important of all, the friendships. It’s incredibly trite, I’m sorry, but it’s true! Every single friend I’ve made in the decade since college has been at or because of my old job. I even met my husband at a coworker’s party. When my old editor left for another offer, I cried into a bottle of red wine for hours. I hadn’t wanted to leave HuffPost in large part because of her -- her incisive edits, her galvanizing pep talks, her friendship -- but one of us was always going to leave eventually. In the end, it’s just a job.

Until its finale last month, “Superstore” was, to me, the reigning workplace comedy on TV. (Spoiler alert: the rest of this newsletter will contain spoilers from the series finale.) One of its great joys was that it understood all of this so deeply. The crew at the St. Louis big box store Cloud 9 all had their reasons to keep working there, despite the occasional appearance of severed human feet around the store -- income to support their young kids, a lack of other options, a sense of joy and purpose in customer service, having somewhere to be every day, and, often reluctantly, a sense of commitment to the others in the store. Telling employees that they’re like family is an easy way to exploit them because of the truth that it contains: working together creates a real bond. 

Not everyone accedes to that as easily as others. Glenn (Mark McKinney), the store manager, is passionately attached to the idea that Cloud 9 is a family affair; Garrett (Colton Dunn), who makes the in-store announcements, prefers to keep a cool distance between his personal life and his work life. The show finale drops the curtain on the store as well as the show, after Zephra, the new parent company, decides to turn it into a fulfillment center for online orders thanks to the shift in shopping habits during the pandemic. As the soon-to-be-former coworkers eagerly make an email list and plan a future trip to “Kansas City or Tokyo,” Garrett demurs: “Look, we work together, and now we’re gonna go work with other people. I’d rather skip the part where we email for a week trying to plan some fictional group trip.” 

Garrett (Colton Dunn), center, never forgets that a job is just a job.

The workplace sitcom is a natural fit for an era in which our lives center on work. The nature of a sitcom is that almost all of it takes place in just one or two settings -- a family’s home, a coffee shop, an apartment, a bar, an office. Wherever the show is primarily set, that’s where the characters need to be. On “Friends,” it seemed that none of the characters ever actually went to their jobs. On “The Office,” they never seemed to go home. Their lives are lived in one dimension. So was my life: It took place at the newsroom, and with people I met at the newsroom. The friendship and solidarity we build with our colleagues can be a source of comfort amid the grind and exploitation of the workplace, but that comfort that can attach us, by proxy, to employers who will drop us without a second thought.

In the final episode, we revisit the job interviews of the central characters on the show, including Amy (America Ferrera) and Jonah (Ben Feldman), the will-they-won’t-they couple who each believed that Cloud 9 was a pitstop in their career but ended up lingering there for years. Amy stayed because of an unexpected pregnancy that scuttled her college plans, but for Jonah, it’s always been hard to sell his continued presence in the store: He’s a self-consciously cerebral business-school dropout from an affluent background, a political idealist who has never quite gotten past the belief that he’s above his job. In his interview, he told Glenn that, after a slew of short-lived professional and educational endeavors, he just wanted to spend a few months not using his brain. Instead, he stayed for years, through a relationship and a painful breakup with Amy. 

As the last day draws to a close, Amy confronts him. “You’ve been here six years. Why?” she asks. Jonah responds that it’s a good job, which she dismisses; it’s a terrible job. (“Superstore” has never shied away from depicting how much retail work can involve cleaning up customers’ bodily fluids and dropped Slushies.) She asks again. “Why do you think, Amy?” he responds, wearily. 

It’s a deeply satisfying scene of romantic reunion -- yes, I cried, this is my shit -- but it’s also a sentimentalized depiction of something real: the affection we feel for our coworkers (even if it’s merely platonic) anchors us at work for longer hours and longer tenures. Silicon Valley startups have long understood this -- thus all the foosball tables and fro-yo machines, and the rise of Slack, a workplace messaging platform that easily serves as a forum for more pleasurable communication, like gossip and affinity group building.

The sword, for bosses, is double-edged. Connecting your employees deeply to each other can trick them into thinking they’re a family, with the company as their benevolent parent. And yes, this is a trap. Work can’t love you back. But other people can. They can love each other enough to fight harder for each other. They can love each other, and themselves, enough to unionize. Through the years, the “Superstore” crew fought a doomed battle to organize a union, and they pushed back on intrusive and threatening corporate initiatives. Their care for each other was not the same as care for the job; they were people bonded through work, not to work. 

In the end, their final battle to save the store, and their jobs, also fails. As “Superstore” draws to a close, the predominant emotion conveyed is bittersweet release. They’re all free to go on to something new, their relationships and their inertia no longer chaining them to a bad job because the job doesn’t exist anymore. Glenn can restart his family hardware store; Jonah can find a calling that suits his passion for changing the world; Dina can shoulder the new challenge of running a fulfillment center. When we see them together in a post-Cloud 9 world, they aren’t working -- they’re taking a break from living their best lives to hang out and actually relax.

This is where the expectations of the genre brush up against reality. A store shutting down and dozens of jobs being lost isn’t exactly a wonderful opportunity for all the workers to level up in their careers. It’s a privilege to face a job loss as a sort of graduation, an unwelcome but ultimately healthy kick in the pants, urging you on to something better. Amy even makes a wry comment on this, noting that though she quit her executive role at Zephra, she has lots of interviews lined up: “Turns out once you’ve been an executive, it’s kind of easy to stay an executive.” For others, their job prospects look more murky, or, if clearly sketched out, poignantly utopian. (Is this a prime time to reopen a family hardware store? I doubt it!) “Superstore” is a network sitcom, after all, and it’s not in the business of tragedy. It’s the kind of show we watch when we want to indulge in the hope that even after painful setbacks, a brighter future lies ahead. 

This hopefulness, married with an honest depiction of the indignities of employment, was what made it such a lovable gem. Without daring to suggest that a company is a family, it saw the necessity and beauty of workers loving each other anyway, and loving each other all the more because the company never would. That’s what I’ll miss most about “Superstore” — and about my old newsroom, and the union we built together. The company isn’t my family, but the people I met there always will be.