Superstore was the rare show that I completely dropped. I never really loved the series, but I enjoyed it well enough for its fourth season. But when the fifth season came around, I just completely lost interest, and never felt the need to come back and finish it off. But why? I've pushed through way worse seasons than Season 5 of Superstore, so why was this show too much for me?
Superstore is a show about a group of employees working at a fictional store called Cloud 9. It's a huge chain supermarket, think something like Target or Walmart (the latter of which Cloud 9 most resembles). The series is essentially your usual workplace comedy, but in a store, with a wide variety of colorful employees, a quirky but ultimately well-meaning boss, and as standard of a romantic subplot as you could get between its two main leads. However, what I think differentiates Superstore from a lot of sitcoms is its politics and slightly darker tone. Plenty of sitcoms have their "very special episodes" that deal with serious topics, and plenty of sitcoms have tense and angsty character drama within them, but Superstore spends a lot of its time dealing with how poorly retail companies like Cloud 9 treat their employees. An especially common theme is how Cloud 9's higher-ups are oh so eager to stop unions before they even begin. At first, I thought this was really cool, but in later seasons these darker themes become so prevalent that they turn what should be a light-hearted comedy into one of the most soul-crushing and existentially depressing shows I've ever seen in my life. Once again, I'm fine with sitcoms taking a darker turn (I've literally just been praising Scrubs for that), but I didn't want to further lose my faith in humanity every time I turned on an episode of Superstore.
Ultimately, I think what kept me watching through Superstore's first four seasons are the characters. Superstore has a really diverse and likable cast, and it's a joy to watch them all interact. Garrett is probably the highlight due to his snark, but I also really liked the aforementioned boss Glenn and the Dwight Schrute equivalent of the group in Dina (who also happens to be played by Scorpia's voice actress). But what's probably the best character of the show is the store itself. As you'd expect from a workplace comedy, much of Superstore takes place in Cloud 9, and some of the best episodes play around with this contained location. Characters get locked in or out of the store, the store is wracked by natural disasters, and the self-contained nature of the building means that characters run into each other and interact pretty much constantly. Superstore also has plenty of fantastic storylines that could only really be done with this setting, with the most obvious standout being the Black Friday episode.
Now let's go over the seasons of Superstore, at least until when I quit:
Season 1: This was a fine first season, though it suffered from being really short, only 11 episodes long. Sitcoms usually take some time to really get into the swing of things, so just when the season starts to get really fun with episodes like Color Wars and All-Nighter, it ends. The characters are established but haven't been fully developed yet, and the store setting hasn't been used to its fullest potential. I really need to assert just how much All-Nighter feels like the show growing into its own, a fantastic episode that develops the characters, utilizes the setting in a cool way, and manages to be a great episode in its own right. The season ends with Cheyenne giving birth (after a standard pregnancy plotline) and Glenn getting fired for advocating for her to get maturnity leave, so everyone but Gina starts a union. It's a decent but slightly clumsy cliffhanger that also sets the seeds for that crushing sense of hopelessness I already mentioned since the union gets immediately squashed in Season 2's premiere.
Highlight Episode: All-Nighter
2/5 Stars
Season 2: This season was generally a pretty sizable improvement in a lot of ways. The characters were more fleshed-out, the episodes were more consistently funny and creative, and we got introduced to a few of Superstore's big reoccurring trends, most notably its fun Halloween episodes. But what really made Season 2 stick out to me was that phenomenal final episode, Tornado. The season's main storyline revolved around Cheyenne's wedding, that ended up occurring in the admittedly great penultimate episode. However, the point where the season ended off on addressed a different storyline, the subtle but constant nods at a potential looming tornado that finally hits Cloud 9 in the finale. Tornado is such a masterful ending, an absolute drama bomb of an episode that brings all of the show's conflicts to a head and gives every character something to do as the store is being torn apart around them. It's still one of my favorite finales to date and makes an already solid season even better.
Highlight Episode: Tornado
3/5 Stars
Season 3: Season 3 doesn't have anything as literally ground-breaking as Tornado, but it is overall the best and most consistently solid season of the show. There aren't really any weak episodes here like Shoplifter in Season 1 or Rebranding in Season 2, it's still not amazing but it's at the very least reliably entertaining. The will-they-won't-they relationship of Amy and Jonah (the main couple of the series) really starts to come to a head after their kiss in Tornado, and it leads to a ton of fantastic and fun episodes, especially when new employee Kelly comes into the picture and turns the whole situation into a crazy love triangle. I also think, aside from the finale Town Hall, Season 3 is probably the least focused on Cloud 9's corporate troubles, and is thus the least depressing season of the bunch.
Highlight Episodes: Amnesty
4/5 Stars
Season 4: Season 4 of Superstore is both really good and kind of the beginning of the end. On one hand, this season had some of my favorite episodes of the series. Blizzard felt like an even better followup to All-Nighter, Costume Competition was the most fun Halloween episode yet, and Employee Appreciation Day is a devastating and stunning finale that really made waves when it had first aired. However, this season is also a lot more inconsistent than the previous one, with plenty of weak episodes and a generally average first half. And while Mateo being taken in by ICE was a shocking twist at the time, it pretty much permanently shifts the show's tone to dark and cynical, and puts a far greater focus on unions than ever better. I wouldn't say this makes the show bad, and I think these discussions do need to be had, but it did make the show a bit less enjoyable to watch.
Highlight Episode: Blizzard
3/5 Stars
Season 5: But even with how dark earlier seasons of Superstore would get, at the very least it was still pretty funny. In Season 5, on the other hand, Superstore just... stopped being funny. From what I heard, the showrunner Justin Spitzer stepped down, and while I'm not sure how much that influenced things, I couldn't help but find that the show's humor just felt off. But on the other hand, Season 5 also became incredibly dramatic, with Mateo dealing with ICE and the workers failing at starting a union every chance they get. And speaking of Mateo, from what I can remember ICE kind of just gave up and left him at Cloud 9 early in the season, resolving the show's darkest cliffhanger in the most anticlimactic way possible. I watched up to the midseason finale but when Superstore returned for its second half, I just didn't really care anymore. It kept hitting the same beats and the comedy wasn't as good, it wasn't even that bad of a season, it was just so agressively average and boring that I felt there was no more reason for me to watch it.
1/5 Star
So yeah, that's Superstore. A fine sitcom that never really got better than pretty good, and ultimately became so dull that I just gave up on it. The setting and characters were cool, Tornado will always be a fantastic episode, and I admire the show's attempt at tackling dark themes, but Superstore never did the best job of balancing out its tone and as the writing and comedy got weaker, those depressing commentaries on the workforce were really all the show had left. It's definitely possible to juggle being a light-hearted sitcom and dealing with serious topics, but Superstore just couldn't nail it for me.
Favorite Episode: Tornado
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