For two seasons the worst part of the show is the cliche "will they-won't they" relationship between floor manager Amy and liberal elite employee Jonah. In the pilot episode Jonah was a new hire and befriended Amy. He was hoping for something more, but then he finds out she's married and has a teenage daughter. But that doesn't stop her from engaging in a middle school romance with Jonah that culminated in a passionate kiss at the end of season 2 when they thought they were going to die in a tornado.
This season Amy divorces her husband, which leaves her free to pursue Jonah, right? No, of course not, because he gets involved with a new employee, the bubbly bimbo Kelly. Except of course he can't just let Amy go. So he winds up cheating on Kelly with Amy, who by this time is pregnant with her ex-husband's baby. Holy soap opera, Batman! The end of the season has Amy and Jonah fucking on a hidden webcam that broadcasts the act to stores all over the world.
By that point Amy and Jonah have pretty much entirely ceded the moral high ground. I mean, she cheated on her husband and he cheated on his girlfriend. She then goes back to her ex-hubby for a one-night stand that produces a baby. Meanwhile, Jonah just casts Kelly aside even though she wasn't unfaithful to him. Yet strangely the writers seem to want us to think these are the "good guys."
The final episode revolves around a town hall company meeting in the superstore that's being broadcast all over the world. When Amy and Jonah find out that the company has been canning its elderly employees by writing up false performance reports, they decide to set up a sting to expose the crime during the meeting. The hidden webcam is part of this so the company can't just turn off the cameras.
Which is all well and good...except you have the two worst people on the show launching this moral crusade. You have essentially an adulterer and a guy who crushed his girlfriend's feelings like an empty beer can sitting in judgment of Corporate America? Who the fuck are these assholes to judge anyone?
This was the overriding problem with this third season. You're asking me to care and root for these shitheads, who are also unfortunately the stars of your show. The only thing I'm rooting for is for them to get fired and disappear at the start of next season. That is extremely unlikely as America Ferrera is a producer and sometimes director of the show, so unless it gets canceled (unfortunately NBC is not listening...) these assholes are likely to continue sucking up air time that could be better spent on characters who aren't the worst.
The thing is, I don't mind if characters are amoral assholes. A good example of this is the show that for the second half of the year followed Superstore: AP Bio. It stars Glenn Howerton (Dennis of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) as a complete asshole who gets thrown out of Harvard and is reduced to teaching high school biology. Except he has no interest in actually teaching biology. Instead, he enlists his nerdy students in destroying his British rival, who got a prestigious job chairing the philosophy department at Stanford.
This guy is as I say a complete asshole and yet it's fine with me. Why? Because the show doesn't ask me to root for him or try to make him some moral authority. It's more about the shenanigans that result from his Bad Teacher antics. Then it's a nice bonus when he does something relatively nice like help one girl in his class impress a boy.
Ironically, though, this unrepentant asshole is actually less of an asshole than the assholes on the other show. I mean, he doesn't cheat on a girlfriend or knock up an ex. So he actually has more moral authority than those other two assholes.
As I say in the title of this entry, it's better to have a character who's purely bad than to be wishy-washy about it. Don't make characters do bad things and then expect me as the viewer (or reader) to root for them to have a Happily Ever After or succeed in some moral crusade. It was in an old Lawrence Block book I read a month or so ago where after a would-be Bonnie and Clyde ride off with a bunch of stolen money, he writes how terrible it would be for them to live Happily Ever After, because what would that say? So they had to meet justice in the form of a police blockade. By the same token, why should I want Amy and Jonah to live Happily Ever After? They've lied, they've cheated, and they've been insensitive pricks. If they get to live Happily Ever After, what does that say? No, dumbass writers and producers of the show, I want them to meet karmic justice! I demand karmic justice! No happy endings for wishy-washy assholes.
Basically, I'm saying if you're going to make characters act like assholes, then go all in.
BTW, something else always bugged me about Superstore and I finally realized what was lacking. In one episode our moral authority (lol) finds out that the corporation wants to make their store a "4A store" which means it would be open 24 hours and employees would be worked like dogs. To avoid this fate, the employees work to drive sales down so they won't meet a sales quota.
This kind of slacker humor is what was missing from the show right from the start. I mean if you watch Clerks, some of the funniest parts are where the slacker Randle dicks with customers or tells them off. Some of the best parts of Office Space were when Peter was slacking off and when they steal an annoying printer to smash it. Some of the funniest parts of the indie novel Sale Day at C-Mart (about a KMart type store) were how employees would scheme to slack off. That's what this show should have been! Employees trying to avoid doing more than the bare minimum vs. a clueless manager and draconian district manager. Because as Homer Simpson said, "If you don't like your job, you don't quit. You just go in every day and do it completely half-assed. That's the American way!"
The problem with Superstore is they didn't want anyone to be "the bad guy" so they populate the show with wishy-washy characters. I guess you can say that's more "real" but it's a sitcom so no one is expecting morally complex characters.
Maybe they can do that in a reboot 20 years from now.
1 comment:
been watching "Superstore" lately, too, and just got into the third season. Never a fan of "will they or won't they" and I don't like either Amy or Jonah. Given that one of the creators came over from "The Office", there are a LOT of things cribbed from that show, from Dina being female Dwight to the little five second snippets of background characters doing ridiculous things and even many of the plots. I always liked Garrett as that slacker type guy and even though Dina is just Dwight, she's usually pretty funny (and who can be upset about her Halloween costume?) and, like "The Office", the secondary characters are probably better overall than the mains. Neither Amy nor Jonah are especially good characters, and like you said, they are hard to root for because they aren't good characters and their motivations are stupid.
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