On this week’s episode of Superstore, Amy, Dina, Jonah, Mateo, and Cheyenne all confront their uncertain futures.
This week’s episode of Superstore, “Shadowing Glenn,” capitalizes on one of the show’s biggest strengths.
After attending a manager’s conference last week and being lavished with expensive gifts and free cocktails, this week, Amy makes good on her decision to apply for a managerial position, but with power comes the need for training and Glenn decides to take it upon himself to usher Amy into the overseer ranks.
Any time the show gives McKinney room to stretch his comedic legs it shines, but that’s not what makes “Shadowing Glenn” a standout episode in season 4. Superstore is a show built on mishaps, funny moments that stretch over entire episodes and slowly push the plot along. Within those moments the writers are able to tackle big-theme issues but rarely is an entire episode itself afforded space to contemplate grand ideas.
In other words, an episode like the one centered on the birth of Amy’s child scratches at the surface of the pitfalls of the healthcare system and how it often fails women, but the driving action of the episode is the hilariousness of Amy’s unfortunate situation.
In “Shadowing Glenn” the show tackles big ideas by using its main characters to debate and confront them head-on. Amy wants more for her life so she goes after a manager’s position which forces Dina to consider her own future career prospects, which causes Jonah to realize he’s also sitting stagnant in his current job, which prompts Mateo and Cheyenne to dream of starting their own business. The entire episode is about big ideas — life purpose, unrealized dreams, etc.
It’s something Superstore rarely does, devote episodes to characters actually questioning what they want out of life and if a job at a big box department store is where they’ll find the answer, but when the show does decide to get serious, that’s when it gets good.
Amy’s training under Glenn starts out rough. He puts her through some pointless exercises and we’re soon left wondering why Amy isn’t the boss of Glenn instead. But halfway through we see that, for as competent and capable as she is, Amy still has a long way to go and Glenn has plenty to teach her. It’s a great way of bonding these two characters, of showing a different side to the bumbling, affable manager, and charting Amy’s growth over the course of four seasons.
Similarly, Dina and Jonah’s journey this episode, while mined for laughs, felt uncomfortably real at times. Dina’s a character who seems so perfectly suited for her role as assistant manager, it comes as a shock when she realizes that’s not what she wants for her life. Even worse, she’s not sure what she is actually looking for in a career. Jonah and Garrett try to help her figure it out, sifting through career books and quizzing her on her life goals, but in the end, Dina is no closer to finding her dream job. Which, as Jonah points out, is totally fine. You don’t decide what you want to be in a day, but the dilemma does set up some interesting questions that could alter Dina’s arc on the show if the writers stick with it.
What would Superstore look like if Dina wasn’t an assistant manager? What would the show look like if Amy was given a position of power? These would be big changes for the characters, sure, but they’d also mean a shift in the dynamics of the store, opening up new storylines and avenues for our favorite Cloud 9 employees.
Dina and Amy aren’t the only ones mulling life decisions this week. Jonah, a guy who believes he’s got most things figured out, is forced to reckon with his own depressing reality: he’s a college dropout with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans and a job as a floor worker won’t be helping him to crawl out of debt anytime soon. For Jonah, a character who’s always felt a bit out of place with the rest of the store employees, this might be the wakeup call he needs to start making moves. After all, most of these characters aren’t going to be stacking shelves until they’re retired.
It’s interesting that the show is choosing now to start asking these big questions. Whether they answer them or not, we’ll have to wait and see.