Payne in the gas
‘American Auto’ is a comedy driven by one family’s drama
On the NBC sitcom “Superstore,” showrunner Justin Spitzer told a workplace comedy from the perspective of the workers: the cashiers, bag boys and stock clerks at a megastore.
He’s starting from the top in “American Auto.”
“If ‘Superstore’ is the boots-onthe ground workers whose lives are affected, usually negatively, by corporate policy, these are the people making the corporate policy that usually negatively affects those workers,” Jon Barinholtz, who starred as Marcus White on “Superstore” and has reunited with Spitzer to play Wesley Payne on “American Auto,” told the Daily News.
“It’s not as meticulous as you think it is. Decisions are usually made with a little bit more planning than a coin toss.”
The new NBC sitcom, premiering Monday at 10 p.m. then moving to its regular 8 p.m. Tuesdays time slot Jan. 4, is set at Payne Motors, a family-run car manufacturer in Detroit that’s brought in an outside CEO (Ana Gasteyer) to get the company back on track and help keep the engine running.
“She’s from a world of female CEOs that are really held up and
seen as cultural leaders, even above their abilities to do that. Probably has political ambitions, probably wants to write the best seller about being a woman in a man’s world,” Gasteyer said of her character, Katherine.
“She really cares about public image in a way that I find funny because people trying to save face is funny to me.”
Gasteyer, 54, said that she hearkened back to “the ‘80s and ‘90s model for executives, more born of a ‘Lean In’ generation of female executives.”
Like the best workplace comedies, “American Auto” is about mostly well-intentioned people failing at their jobs. The geniuses
at Payne Motors invent a self-driving car that doesn’t recognize nonwhite people and create a media storm around a serial killer using one of their models to transport his victims.
“This is network ‘Succession,’” Barinholtz, 41, told The News, comparing his show to HBO’s brutal hit drama about the Roy children fighting for control of the family business. “On ‘Succession,’ they really are pitiful, bad people, but there’s a likability in our characters.”
For Barinholtz’s Wesley, specifically, the “Succession” comparison is simple — the most disappointing son of the family business struggling to keep up with the changing ecosystem around them.
“Wesley is kind of like the three [Roy] sons combined; he has the worst qualities of each one,” he joked.
Katherine, coming from Big Pharma to run Payne Motors, is thrown into a sea of mediocrity. Not just Wesley, who wants to be loved without doing any work, but the entire C-suite of misfits. She may know nothing about cars, but she knows how to run a business, which is more than can be said for the rest of the company.
Gasteyer also knows nothing about cars; she knows her family owns a Kia and it’s parked somewhere in New York, but that’s about it.
Somewhere in Barinholtz’s family tree is a Studebaker, founders of an automotive company in the early 1850s, but his relative is the brother “who decided cars aren’t going to be a thing,” he joked.
But “American Auto” isn’t really about cars. It’s about the rich people who run the world.
“They’re looking at their bottom line. Everything else is almost irrelevant,” Barinholtz told The News.
“It’s disheartening from the reality of it but it’s very fun to play and make fun of.”