Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Superstore
(NBC, 2015-present) I do not particularly like this show, but started streaming it during the lockdown, and slowly worked my way through the whole thing. While I do not find it particularly funny, and do not care about most of the characters (with the exception of the sad Hawaiian woman who is a super good liar with some kind of tragic total recall superpower, so every terrible day of her life is always vividly in mind), I still am kind of impressed. Though they were clearly trying to replicate The Office, with a smattering of regular looking cast members, the drawn out romance, the clueless leader, and a blatant ripoff Dwight figure, the other things that do are impressive in the low-threshold-for-impressiveness world of mediocre sitcoms. Instead of a couple of tokens, most of the characters represent races, sexual identities, immigration statuses, disabilities, and religious beliefs that are not usually seen on Network TV, and those characteristics are rarely the themes of episodes or topics of jokes. More importantly, the show is about hourly labor in general, and corporate big box stores in particular, being oppressive, soul crushing deathtraps. The company is continuously squashing any attempts at labor organizing, and considering the strengths of Hollywood guilds it's surprising how rarely this is depicted on TV. There are a couple (out of thousands) of jokes I chuckled at, and the running interstitial pantomimes of customers being awful are low level Sergio Aragones-funny (or high end Dave Berg at the least), but if you skip this you are not really missing anything. But if your life condition allows you, and your inclination compels you, to watch The Office, or Friends all the way through again, you could do worse than switching over to this.
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