Requested By
.· Ben ⬩ Salvidrim! ·. on our Discord server. Thank you for supporting the Substack!
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’ve seen the little rectangle a few times. I’m going out on a limb here, but from the image and title I think it might take place in a superstore.
Recap
It’s one month since the previous episode. Inside the store everyone is wearing masks, so this takes place during the pandemic. “Amy” comes in: she’s a former employee, here to surprise everyone on the store’s last day. The store greeter has no idea who she is and is not impressed that the surprise is Amy’s mere presence.
Everyone else is thrilled to see her, though one former coworker is hesitant until she assures him that she’s only here to visit and that “you and Eric can still live in my house”. Glenn, the store manager, is equally enthused: “we’re short-handed and it’s great that you came to help fill in,” he says without even hearing her objections.
Amy goes into the back room and puts on an employee vest. (The name tag says “Vangeline,” but I assume that’s because she’s wearing somebody else’s uniform. Still, I won’t assume the other characters’ nametags are accurate, just in case this is part of a running gag where the employees never have the right name tags.) Dina enters, and Amy congratulates her on her promotion to “Fulfillment Center manager”. Dina tells her to keep quiet about it for now.
Glenn discusses his impending retirement with “Jonah”: he’s looking forward to watching The Queen’s Gambit1. But Jonah points out that’s only seven episodes. What will you do after that?
VangelineEr, Amy2 approaches Jonah. He ribs her a bit for being in corporate, and she asks about his girlfriend Hannah. He reveals they had broken up. Amy already knew this, Dina having told her in the previous scene, but she just wanted an excuse to bring it up, since she’s clearly crushing on Jonah like mad.
Glenn’s wife, Jerusha3, arrives in the store, and they begin wandering the aisles trying to find something for him to do with the rest of his life.
VangeDammit, what was her name again, Amy consults with Dina and girl-whose-hair-is-covering-her-nametag: how upset was Jonah when I left? Clearly lying to make her as happy as possible, they both say 9.5 out of 10. She laments that she should have married him when she had the chance4. Another employee, who I think might be named Sandra, barges in, shouts “YA THINK?!” at the top of her lungs, and storms off.
Elsewhere in the store, some employees confront “Garrett”. He had left obviously-fake information on the contact form, and they think he thinks he’s too good to stay in touch. But he’s harshly realistic: we’ll email each other for a week at most.
Amy tells Jonah that she finally watched The Americans5, which he had been pestering her to watch for years. She apologizes for not texting him during the time she’s been in California - but he recognizes she’s actually apologizing for deciding not to marry him. The conversation goes swiftly downhill from there.
Meanwhile, Dina has to choose five employees to hire at the fulfillment center and can’t make a decision. Sandra comes in and just chooses for her, tagging herself as Dina’s new assistant manager - which Dina gratefully accepts.
Mateo, for whom the store’s closing is particularly stressful because he is an illegal immigrant, finally gets fed up with Glenn whining about his retirement: If you don’t want to retire, don’t retire! This never occurred to Glenn, who decides to reopen his late father’s hardware store.
Later, Glenn collects all the employees together: I’ve found the old video recordings of your job interviews! Against all reason, they decide to sit down and watch them.
In the interviews, Amy had expected to only be at the store for a couple of months; Garrett is as arrogant then as he is now; Glenn brought Sandra to interview without realizing he had hired her two weeks prior. (I assume that these and the other interviews hold a lot of moments of irony that went right over my head.)
As they watch, Dina asks Garrett if he wants to be in a permanent relationship, and Glenn makes up for his whining earlier by hiring Mateo at the upcoming hardware store.
In Jonah’s interview, he reveals that he’s had dozens of jobs and is looking for a change - which leads Amy to grab Jonah and pull him aside. You never stuck with a job more than a couple of months, she says. Why have you stayed here, at this terrible retail job, for six years? “Why do you think?” he asks: it was clearly because of her6. She starts listing all of his flaws, all the reasons she hated him at first, and her appreciation that nevertheless he waited around for her to decide that she liked him - Jonah gets tired of waiting for her to reach a conclusion and just kisses her.
Garrett gives his last announcement over the store’s PA system. Initially he’s flippant and sarcastic, but then he suddenly becomes sentimental about his time there. Under the announcement we see brief clips from earlier episodes in the series, followed by glimpses into the future: Glenn at the hardware store with his new employees Mateo and Hair-Over-Nametag; Jonah and Amy’s engagement; a reunion barbeque at which even Garrett deigns to attend; Jonah and Amy married with (at least) two kids.
Lingering questions
What is Hair-Over-Nametag’s name? This isn’t the first time I failed to learn a character’s name thanks to her hair. It occurs to me that this would be a great running gag: the employee whose hair covers her nametag and therefore nobody, including the viewers, ever learns her name across the entire series.
Ratings
I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; high ratings are not necessarily better and low rating are not necessarily worse. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.
Story: 6/10. There was a glaring plot hole:
I’m kidding. I wouldn’t actually reduce the rating of a comedy show for something like that.
The short runtime limited the writers’ options, but the episode did a good job of covering every character and giving each one their own trajectory after the closing of the store. Importantly, most of these subplots were strung across multiple scenes throughout the episode, rather than being brought up and resolved instantly. Good, non-checklisty work7. I can’t score this too highly, though, because none of the stories interacted with each other in any way.
Writing: 4/10. The jokes were weak; I only laughed out loud once. I would score it even lower, but I’m a sucker for sentimentality and Garrett’s speech at the end was actually pretty moving.
Production: 5/10. Standard for a sitcom. Nothing really stood out; standard acting, standard camerawork, standard editing, standard everything. The music was pretty good.
Characterization: 3/10. I saw very little character work beyond broad-strokes caricatures. The most work was put into Jonah and Amy’s relationship, of course, but even that was surface-level.
Accessibility: 9/10. I was left with a few relatively unimportant questions at the end, but it wasn’t difficult to jump straight into the episode. Really the only confusing part was the Vangeline nametag - and that’s a function of my brain’s idiosyncrasies.
Closure: 7/10. The episode provides a natural end to a story about a superstore: the store is closing and everybody is moving on with their lives. But that in and of itself doesn’t provide closure. To quote John Finnemore, discussing the end of his sitcom Cabin Pressure:
as well as the straight-forward happy endings […] there needed to be another, intangible level of happy ending, in which all five of the crew graduated, in one way or another, from being sitcom characters […] while they’ll still be having fun and playing games, they won't be doing the sorts of things that kept them getting into sitcom-episode-sized scrapes, and that ultimately stemmed from something out-of-joint in their lives. They’ve grown up.8
Superstore’s writers made sure to tell us where each character will go after the store closes, which is enough to make a perfectly serviceable finale. And they did so more comprehensively than most - hence the above-average rating. But other than Amy and Jonah cementing their relationship, it doesn’t look like most characters will act any differently in the next stage of their lives. The series could easily continue under the name Sturgis & Sons or Fulfillment Center.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s a perfectly acceptable, average sitcom, but it lacks oomph. I need a bit more than that.
Is there a series finale you’d like me to review? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.
I have not watched this, so if anyone wants to request it…
Text enters my brain far more directly than speech. That wrong nametag is going to be a problem.
A really weird name, but apparently a real one, given to at least five Americans - and sometimes as many as 43 - every year since 1967.
This flips my understanding of Amy on its head. Up until this moment (including when she asked if he was upset) I thought she had been pining for Jonah and never did anything about it. But apparently they had a robust, serious relationship.
I have not watched this either, so if anyone wants to request it…
Which raises the question why he didn’t quit after she left. Unless he figured the store was closing anyway, might as well stick around for the last few weeks.
A “checklist” finale is one in which the writers make a list of every ongoing subplot and then methodically and mechanically resolve them one at a time. I’ve seen a few of these, and it makes for a choppy episode.
Source: https://johnfinnemore.blogspot.com/2014/12/farewell-bear-facts-zurich.html
Don’t read it if you haven’t listened to the series. (And if you haven’t listened to the series, don’t eat or drink or sleep until you have.)
"Perfectly serviceable sitcom" is quite apt. I enjoyed it like I enjoy fast food, it was easy low-stakes entertainment, with none of the cringiness sitcoms sometimes have (I break out in hives at Big Bang Theory). Plus I'm a sucker for workplace comedy, a retail store was the perfect setup. For the bit about nametags: it's one of Amy's quirks, established in the first episode, that she prefers not using her real name on her nametag: "I just don't like random strangers using my name like we're buddies."