Superstore – drama series

This series is a light hearted take on a theme popularized by “Angadi theru” movie. As the name says, its about events happening on a supermarket on the lines of Walmart, the day to day activities of the staff and their personal life. Its heavy duty communist/socialist message, surviving for six seasons, makes one wonder about the present leaning of the American public. The USP of the show is, it never takes itself seriously enough. The topics of minimum wage, racism, corporate exploitation, over worked staff, stereotyping, every single one of them have been spoken about in a light hearted way and never preached as a solution. It is just dealt with it as how it is being dealt with in daily life. The minimum wage call which leads to unionism and how it is underplayed to the point of being forgotten actually shows at its heart America will always be the capitalist dream land and in a way it works for the show as well, for the lead character herself, who is also the producer, turns a selfish heart and decides to join the corporate bandwagon. The supposedly hero, who is the male half of the lead pair, is a bumbling conformist, who tries to say the perfect words and be an idealist in every situation, despite messing up to the extreme opposite of what he wants to convey. There is a wheel chair bound realist, who plays the announcer of daily specials on the store, possibly the most rational character amongst all. There are a bunch of weird characters starting with the Bible bound store manager who demotes himself to floor assistant and eventually starts his own company, the control freak guy who is openly gay, a psychotic woman hell bent with jealousy over a dumb-yet-funny lady colleague. Overall the cacophonic bunch majorly work. It brings out the essence of being in a work place, where how much ever the job may suck, the camaraderie amongst coworkers carries the day. The show spans across six seasons, culminating in shutting down of the shop. The last episode where the announcer summarizes his experience with the store, it was quite endearing and realistic in a non-sentimental way. May be that is how a long termer in a company feels when he has to leave his batchmates who also happened to be his long time colleagues. Personally I’ve never got to experience such a scenario in my career, for I will always be the last one to move out or the quickest. This series, really caught my attention for the fact that, while rest of all the ones I had review posted here, happens to be interpersonal relationships of room-mates, this happens to be probably one of those rare series that deals with work place relationships. Also, it was quite an eye opener to see the after sales hour work which the floor assistants have to do and it was quite shocking as a realization. May be next time when I visit a mall, will be more careful about how I shop and be a bit more respectful to those fellows on the floor.