Superstore makes serious issues funny
The show: Superstore, Season 1, Episode 3 The moment: The racism seminar Several employees of the superstore Cloud 9 (think Walmart) have crossed a racist line: Mateo (Nico Santos), who is Asian, was pretending to be Mexican. Chastising him, Amy (America Ferrera, whose parents are Honduran) did a racist Asian accent. Jonah (Ben Feldman) helped an elderly lady who turned out to be a white supremacist. Their boss Glenn (Mark McKinney) lectures them on sensitivity.
“Anyone can be a racist,” Glenn says.
“I was not being racist,” Amy insists. “I was making a comment about racism.”
“Helping people because they’re white is almost as bad as discriminating against them if they’re not white,” Glenn tells Jonah.
“It’s exactly as bad,” says Garrett (Colton Dunn), who is black.
“I helped that lady because she was old, not because she was white,” Jonah says.
“Ageism is just as racist as racism,” says Mateo, who dislikes Jonah.
“Are racist jokes OK again?” asks Dina (Lauren Ash). “Did you hear the one about the Jewish bird?”
Showrunner Justin Spitzer previously wrote for The Office, so workplace-comedy comparisons are inevitable. The overlapping quips and Amy and Jonah’s will-they-won’tthey attraction feel familiar.
But while the earlier series explored the minutia of behaviour among people trapped in dull jobs — small things writ large — this new one cracks the world open.
The discount chain Cloud 9 bridges all racial and economic gaps. Its customers and employees are about what the U.S. looks like now and how it’s coping with that. It’s big stuff — immigration, ethnic tension, corporate greed — writ funny. Superstore airs on Global TV. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.