MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

NBC’s Superstore offers a multicultural and diverse cast of characters, often staying true to the actors’ real-life ethnicity and cultural identity, such as America Ferrera’s Honduran heritage. The show’s unique sensibilities rely on its ability to directly portray and address common stereotypes, however absurd, while simultaneously breaking down these stereotypical portrayals as a way of positively transforming any ignorant and insensitive connotations attached to them.

Instead of offering the audience a contrived, episodic plotline strictly created to fit into the show’s 22 minutes of airtime, Superstore offers an ongoing, multifaceted character development, which allows the narrative to flow in a more natural and realistic pace. The liberal undertones apparent in many of NBC’s shows, be it dramas or sitcoms, are also a central tenet in Superstore. In addition to the show’s multicultural diversity and implicit liberal stance, resides a primary contextual base focused on portraying the realistic struggles faced by the working class.

Superstore manages to seamlessly weave heavy hitting topics into the fabric of the show (e.g. unionization of workers, undocumented immigrants, electoral fraud), while still maintaining hilarity from episode to episode. The show consistently works to reverse stereotypes as a matter of discourse (e.g. male-female power dynamics), not only through its main ensemble cast, but via its peripheral/guest characters as well. The ongoing and direct tackling of a wide range of problematic cultural, economic, and sociopolitical assumptions, makes Superstore a unique comedic show in today’s primetime television landscape.

Ultimately, this project seeks to address the power of discourse and identity in Superstore, by analyzing the show’s implicitly sociopolitical perspectives and the ways in which on/off screen talent make and break the ignorant and absurd stereotypes of a culturally diverse working class.