SUPERSTORE Boss on the New Cloud 9 Manager: ‘We Don’t Have Any Plans to End the Arc’

[This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, April 4 episode of SUPERSTORE.]

When Glenn (Mark McKinney) abruptly decided to step down as manager of Cloud 9 at the end of “Lovebirds,” it left an opening for someone to move up in the ranks.

Amy (America Ferrera) was an obvious fit, but she found her hopes dashed when she realized she’d have to win over Laurie (Jennifer Irwin)—AKA the woman she accidentally ran over with a golf cart last season. And Laurie had someone else in mind for the job: her own son.

But when Amy caught Laurie doing coke, she—eventually, with the support of her colleagues—blackmailed her way into the new managerial position. (It helped that Laurie’s son had absolutely no clue how to manage a store.)

So what comes next? SUPERSTORE creator Justin Spitzer shares how this move shakes up the store and how long it may last.

At what point did you know that you’d be making Amy a manager?
I’m trying to remember off-hand if we knew when we decided to start giving her more ambition [to be promoted] if she would become the manager; I think we did.

It’s a vastly different dynamic. The person who is in charge ends up driving a lot of story. It wasn’t like we felt we were anywhere close to the limit of stories we had to tell, but this felt like opening up a door to a whole new kind of story. What is it like when you’re suddenly in charge? When you’ve just been a coworker and now you have power over people, how does it impact people? How does it impact her relationship with Jonah? Her relationship with everyone.

And the same for Glenn. He’s able to now devote time to his family, he’s now just another worker. He’s always been separate. How does he navigate that?

Dina (Lauren Ash) and Amy have really established a genuine friendship, but they haven’t always come down on the same side of work issues. Now that they will have to work closer together, how does it impact that relationship?
They continue to have their friendship. I think Dina thinks it’s going to be all smooth sailing from here on out. Pretty soon she’ll discover there are frustrations. In Dina’s mind, she’s the puppet-master and Amy can be the puppet and she can finally do whatever she wants. But that’s not the case.

That’s just a bump in the road. Generally speaking, they still have a good friendship.

The show has set up from season 1 that relationships between supervisors and underlings is a pretty strict no-go. Now that Amy is Jonah’s (Ben Feldman) boss—and they had a recent suspension due to their accidental sex tape—how will corporate handle their romance?
We decided to not go too hard on what corporate would say about them dating…it felt like we explored that area [in the past]. But I think the fact Amy has power over Jonah and her allegiances are a little more grey has ramifications as we enter the back half of the season. Jonah is very pro-labor and anti-corporate. And now she has some allegiance and might identify with the corporate side of things.

Is there any lingering resentment from any of the employees that Amy did get the job in an unethical way? Will that be used against her at all?
We debated early on if we wanted to create some competitiveness with Dina, but it’s not her personality. I think people were relieved she blackmailed Laurie because it benefits all of them.

That was a fun area for a story, because it was all about doing the wrong thing for the right reason. I think the general feeling in the store—that we wanted to convey to the audience—was she did deserve the job. She deserved the job more than anyone else that applied and certainly more than Laurie’s son.

Generally speaking, moves this big aren’t done for the duration of the series. Without revealing any major spoilers, how long do you anticipate Amy being in charge?
We don’t have any plans to end the arc. We’re not looking at this as a few episodes and putting things back the way they were. What I’ve always loved about the show where change happens very, very, very gradually, and then like life, when there is a change, you go from there. We’ll live with this. We’ll see how it goes for our characters for a while. Not to say things won’t ever change down the line, but this isn’t like a four-[episode arc].

It was a little scary to think about changing the series that much. But it felt like season 4, we were due for a change.

SUPERSTORE, Thursdays, 8/7c, NBC

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