Once upon a time, before the days when the Blake Shelton-Adam Levine bromance and Milo Ventimiglia's sculpted butt helped resurrect the network's failing ratings, NBC faced a very serious problem. One of their most watched show, The Office, was losing steam quickly after lead Steve Carell's departure and the only other comedies left on the network were critically heralded, but little watched series like Community and 30 Rock. The network's mission then became clear, find a successor that could anchor the network's comedy lineup the way the Dunder Mifflin crew had done for years. Like any sensible network, NBC figured the best course of action was to stick with what worked, bringing back familiar faces like Sean Hayes, Matthew Perry, and Michael J. Fox to front their own TV shows and return the network to it's glory days. Unfortunately despite their impressive casts and pedigrees, all these shows were dead on arrival. Coupled with more adventurous shows like the Ryan Murphy sitcom The New Normal and the White House comedy 1600 Penn proving similarly unable to find audiences, the network was soon left totally bereft of compelling original comedy.

When Superstore arrived in late 2015, it seemed destined to become yet another failed attempt by the network to recapture its former glory. The show had all the trappings of a blatant Office clone. Set in a fictional Target/Costco-like store in St. Louis, it focuses on the oddball characters who work there. From the store's eccentric, over-bearing boss (Mark McKinney) to it's overly aggressive assistant manager (Lauren Ash) to the would be young lovers kept apart by the woman's dying relationship (series leads Ben Feldman and America Ferrera), the show knew from the get go what it was aspiring to be. Between these familiarities and the admittedly mixed critical response to the pilot, things looked bleak. But thanks in part to the ratings success of its lead-in The Voice; the show's viewership was strong enough to buy the show the time necessary to find its legs. Thankfully Superstore seized this opportunity, slowly evolving into something far more endearing.

So what changed, you're probably asking? Well, nothing really. The show never engaged in any major creative overhaul, which in turn allowed it's large ensemble to get in synch and become the comedic force it aspired to be. Just as Feldman's new employee Jonah became more familiar with his new coworkers, the show began to find the heart beneath its character's eccentricities. While Ferrera's Amy initially appeared to be yet another tough professional woman, whose fun-side needed to be unlocked by a man, the show was able to find nuances in her character as it explored the emotional aftermath of her teenage pregnancy and troubled marriage. Despite her Schrute-like tendencies, Ash's Donna is more complicated than she initially appears as we come to see her yearning for connection with her female with her coworkers despite her rigid outlook on the world.

More importantly the show takes much of what worked in The Office and utilizes it to tell stories that continue to feel relevant to contemporary working class experiences. The show has spoken on multiple occasions about worker's rights and the nature of corporate America without ever coming across as a lecture. The cast similarly reflects the diverse nature of the workplace, showcasing characters that are White, Black, Latino, Asian, straight, gay, and disabled, while largely subverting outdated stereotype humor. Whereas The Office was built around cringe-humor, Superstore instead leads more with its heart, seeing its characters as a bizarre family that are there for each other, at the end of the day. Similarly, more so than The Office, the show seems to treat its female characters as true equals, with Ferrera or Ash driving many of the plots instead of being treated as trophies for the male characters, perhaps due in part to Ferrera's role as one of the show's producers.

Though only in it's second season, the show appears to have helped turn the tide for the network's comedy woes. The series has performed solidly away from its Voice lead in and was paired first with the recently renewed Kristen Bell sitcom The Good Place and currently the promising superhero-adjacent comedy Powerless. While it may not reach the Emmy Award winning heights of its predecessor, the show has slowly but surely managed to carry the torch of The Office, while also creating path all it's own.