I love sitcoms. I watched them throughout my adolescence and based most of my ideas of social norms around what I saw. I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone else, but being socially inept as a child I had few other options. I have watched the entire series of Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Scrubs and The Big Bang Theory a few times now, so I have a very good understanding of how these series, in their modern form at least, function. Which brings me after my usual preamble to Superstore, another offering from NBC into the enormous genre.

Describing sitcoms is incredibly easy for anyone who has seen Friends. Many consider it to be the archetypal version of the modern form that the genre has taken, since most sitcoms that came after tend to share the same characteristics that made it so popular.

These include: a cast of characters with well-defined personalities and quirks; one ‘main’ couple that have a will they won’t they back and forth before eventually getting together (Ross and Rachel); a long-term couple that we get to examine as they go through conventional stages in life (Monica and Chandler); running gags (ugly naked guy, “We were on a break”, “How you doin’?” etc.).

Other shows tend to have all of these with a few changes in story-telling mode, setting or characters. For example:

How I Met Your Mother = Friends + Overarching mystery

The Big Bang Theory = Friends + Nerds

Scrubs = Friends + Doctors + Narration + Surreal Fantasies.

By the way, that is hopefully all the maths I will put into one of these.

To apply this to Superstore, it would be Friends + Retail Store, obviously. The show explores the daily trials and tribulations of the workers in a Missouri megastore, as they try to keep themselves sane working in one of the most hostile and depressing environments of the modern age. Speaking of Missouri, it was very refreshing to have an American sitcom not based in New York or California. A nice reminder that there are in fact more than two places in that country.

Anyway, Superstore does do wonders for showing how life in retail can be absolutely soul-crushing, but can be made bearable by the people who work there. There is a real sense of comradery that develops throughout the show, with friendships forming very naturally. Our main two, Amy Sosa and Jonah Simms (the Ross and Rachel), begin at odds with each other mainly due to Jonah’s irritating optimism and naivety clashing with Amy’s cynicism and general ball-busting nature. They eventually meet each other halfway (sort of) and form a pretty compelling relationship out of their antics with each other.

Other characters pair off as the series goes and none of it seems forced and the actors all have great chemistry with each other. I may be entirely speculating here (in fact I am almost certain that I am), but I believe that the writers were winging these relationships. In this case I mean that as a complement. Sometimes in serialised storytelling winging it is the best thing you can do, as it allows you to see which of your ideas work and which ones deserve to be thrown out of a high storey building. Too often characters get forced together because of a history in the show or because it’s what fans want, see Ross and Rachel in later seasons. None of that happens in Superstore. To give an example, the Assistant Manager to the store, Dina, initially has a crush on Jonah. This eventually crashes and burns in the season finale when Jonah finally gets the guts to admit that he doesn’t feel the same way about her and the relationship does not pick up again.

No viewer would mourn the loss of this potential pairing, as the two simply do not go well together. Jonah is a business school dropout with a saviour complex and the upper body strength of an anaemic kitten, while Dina has fully committed to everything she has ever done, often with frightening consequences, and looks like she moonlights as a professional wrestler. They are no Ross and Rachel, or perhaps they are?

In any case, its a good enough show with a dynamic cast that breaks stereotypes in both people and occasionally storytelling. It’s anti-capitalist message along with shots of customers being representative of the worst specimens of humanity are enough to keep you entertained, yet its jokes and setups are rather predictable. It does the usual trick of having each episode centred around a character learning a moral lesson and about 5 minutes into every instalment most people would be able to guess who was going to learn what by the end. So yeah, it can fill the time well enough, but probably will not stick with you for too long.