Superstore’s “Essential Workers” Premiere Is the Only Good TV Episode About the Pandemic

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that Superstore, one of TV’s smartest and most plugged-in, though underappreciated, series produced the best episode of television that has grappled with the pandemic thus far.

To be fair, it’s not a tall order, with the efforts from new shows like Social Distance and Love in the Time of Corona to the recent premiere of This Is Us ranging from instantly dated and twee to emotionally manipulative and overwrought. But a caveat like that doesn’t properly celebrate how the NBC sitcom managed not only to capture the uncertainty and unprecedented nature of that moment, but actually add perspective and something new to take away from it.

In other words, where these other shows stopped at merely recounting what it was like in the early months of the pandemic, hoping that was enough to stir some sort of emotion, Superstore made sure there was a point in revisiting it all. It also proved in ways that none of these other shows have that we are actually ready to laugh about things, provided the jokes are smart enough and coming from the right place. “Essential Workers,” the title of Thursday’s Superstore season premiere, was very funny.

Read more at The Daily Beast.