America Ferrera confirms she'll return to bid farewell to Superstore in the Season 6 premiere

Deadline

Ferrera, whose final season was cut one episode short due to the coronavirus shutdown, confirmed she'll be back next season while discussing last night's abrupt Season 5 finale. "I was gearing up for a big goodbye to my cast and crew that I’ve worked with for five years who I love so much," she tells Deadline. "I had so much emotion building up and I thought, 'Okay, I’m not going to cry for a month. I’m going to wait for the last week and say my goodbyes in the last week.' When people wanted to talk about it, I was like, 'Nope, nope, nope, nope. Not doing this right now. We’ll do it in the last week.” I was holding it all in and then we got shut down. The Friday that we got shut down, we came into work and they were like, 'This is your last day.' That was jarring and not completely unexpected because we were obviously paying attention to world events and realizing this could have an impact on what happens. The silver lining is that I get to come back at the beginning of the season and see my Superstore family and be a part of the first episode back. I assume that that’s how it’s going to go and wrap up the storyline." Showrunner Jonathan Green adds: "There was no time in between the decision to shut down and the decision from America that she would have to come back for a premiere of next season. That was not even a discussion. It was just sort of a given from both sides. She really wanted to do it and we wanted to give her the farewell she deserves."

ALSO:

• Superstore originally planned to have 250 extras for America Ferrera's final episode, but not anymore in the era of social distancing: Showrunners Jonathan Green and Gabe Miller say  they were on the verge of shooting the Season 5 finale when the coronavirus shutdown happened. Preproduction on the 22nd episode "was well underway," says Green. "The director was prepping it, location scouting, everything… It was that Thursday, before we were about to shoot it the following Monday, that we finally realized that, “OK, we’re going to have to shut things down. There is no way we can produce this.” One of the storylines in the planned finale involved some big crowd scenes. We were supposed to have about 250 extras, and it became clear pretty early that we were not going to be able to bring together that large a group of people, in addition to our crew." Now Green says "it’ll probably be impossible" to have 250 extras in the era of social distancing.