When COVID Becomes the Story

How Superstore leaned into a pandemic it couldn’t ignore.

- By Kathryn VanArendonk

Nico Santos, Ben Feldman, Kaliko Kauahi, and panicked shoppers in an early scene from this season.

THIS PAST MARCH, the people who make Superstore were staring down a series of problems. Some were similar to those facing many American TV shows last spring. “By the time this airs, are we ready to laugh?” Superstore star Ben Feldman recalled wondering. “Or is covid something we expect to see?” But the show had a unique set of challenges, too. While hangout sitcoms and comedies about precocious children do not demand the intrusion of a global health crisis, it’s much harder to ignore covid on a series about frontline workers. “Going escapist just didn’t make sense,” Superstore writer Owen Ellickson told me. “Our characters would be people in a very interesting, tough spot.”

The past few months have given network-TV viewers the chance to witness a huge, inescapable narrative experiment. Every series set in contemporary life had to make a choice about how to deal with the pandemic. Grey’s Anatomy, a medical show, went all in, building the whole season around the crisis. Some justice procedurals, such as Bull and Law & Order: SVU, included indifferent masking and covid protocols but otherwise clung to familiar narrative structures. Several sitcoms, including CBS’s The Unicorn and Bob Hearts Abishola, chose to ignore covid entirely.