15 shows about working-class families that aren’t Roseanne
By Sundi Rose
Superstore
You can’t not love America Ferrera. Considering her past as Ugly Betty and a Traveling Pants sister, she’s everybody’s sweetheart, and for very good reason.
The premise: Ferrara plays Amy, the de facto leader of a clique of employees working at a giant box store in the American Midwest. The store very closely resembles Walmart, and often features stories about their mistreatment, low salaries, and absent health benefits.
The show features these working-class issues as a function of their characters’ lives, instead of making the show a soapbox on which its writers and creators can shout from their very lofty positions. In its very essence,Superstore is about a group of individuals forced to share a space for a good bit of their lives, and the relationships that grow from that situation.
It’s relatable in a real way, especially to anyone who has ever worked with people with which you didn’t care for or that were just generally weird. Ferrara’s Amy is whip smart and world savvy, and our natural question is “why is she working at this place?” But most of us can answer our own questions, as Amy reveals she is the breadwinner for her family and must support her young daughter.
Why you’ll like it: It feels like a funnier, updated The Office, if it had a much more diverse cast and its writers had a better sense of the world to which it’s being offered. As an audience, we are deeply invested in the characters’ lives, and it is downright funny. Like, make you laugh out loud funny.
Where to find it: You can watch all three seasons on NBC.com or Hulu. It’s so easy to watch and completely digestible. You won’t even realize you’ve devoted an entire weekend to it.