Inside the challenges Superstore faced in returning to work amid the pandemic

Vulture

Ben Feldman said the NBC comedy faced a number of questions before resuming filming, including: “Are we sick of it? Do we hate them for shoving COVID in our face when we just came to TV to escape? Is it comfortable to see on TV? Is it something we expect because we need to see something we recognize?” As Kathryn VanArendonk puts it, "Those were the big universal questions, but Superstore had its own particular set of challenges. It’s one thing for sitcoms with relatively closed worlds to ignore COVID; hangout sitcoms and comedies about a precocious kid do not demand the intrusion of a global health crisis. But Superstore is about a group of big-box-store workers, and it’s much harder to ignore COVID when the central premise of the show is about frontline workers." Or as Superstore writer Owen Ellickson explains: "This was a show where going escapist just didn’t make sense. Our characters would be people in a very interesting, tough spot.”