The Office was plenty popular when it first aired throughout its initial run on NBC. Once it hit streaming, however, it managed to take on an even bigger following, at least a decade after its initial appearance. If you were to ask a dozen people to list what they thought the most popular sitcom of all time was, more often than not, The Office is all but guaranteed to rank toward the top; for good reason too, its everyday-man type of comedy is relatable to most of the people tuning in to watch.
While The Office has most certainly already secured its place in the sitcom hall of fame, there’s another workplace comedy deserving of a spot right alongside it. And it was also written by an alumnus of The Office, mind you.
Superstore is television’s most underappreciated comedy
Created by Justin Spitzer, credited as a writer and producer on over 130 episodes of The Office, Superstore takes a familiar workplace comedy formula and drops it inside Cloud 9, a fictional big-box chain where employees grapple with corporate nonsense, strange customers, and even stranger coworkers.
At the root of Superstore is the retail version of Jim and Pam, Amy Sosa (America Ferrera) and Jonah Simms (Ben Feldman). Even then, the show eventually becomes an ensemble in much the same way of its spiritual predecessor. Dina, Glenn, Garrett, Cheyenne, and Mateo all develop into characters capable of carrying entire episodes (and story arcs) themselves.
Beyond that, some of the show’s funniest jokes come from quick cutaways showing customers doing completely inexplicable things in the store, whether they’re ruining displays, testing products in bizarre ways, ruining product-filled displays, or simply wandering through Cloud 9 like they’ve never encountered human life before.
Like with any excellent sitcom, though, Superstore carries much more on its mind other than gut-busting jokes. Throughout its six-season run, Superstore tackled healthcare, maternity leave, immigration, unionization, wages, and the general instability that comes with hourly retail work. The show rarely stops to deliver a speech about any of it — save for any number of Jonah’s soapbox moments — but instead, those issues are baked directly into the lives of the its characters.
And that’s what makes Superstore great. It’s incredibly funny, but it also understands why a job that looks meaningless from the outside can become enormously important to the people working it. Like Dunder Mifflin, Cloud 9 eventually becomes less about the workplace and more about the people stuck there together.
If The Office could become even bigger after leaving the air in the age of streaming, there’s no reason Superstore shouldn’t get the same chance.