Superstore has closed its doors for good after six seasons on NBC, but its showrunners have revealed what might’ve been if the show had another season in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly. Jonathan Green and Gabe Miller were about halfway through Season 6 when they found it would be the last for the ensemble comedy set in a big-box retail store in St. Louis, Missouri. Green and Miller had to drop some storylines and adapt others to fit the limited time they had to wrap up the lives and loves of the employees at the Cloud 9 store.
One thing we had talked about doing in season 7 was we were setting up for Dina (Lauren Ash) and Garrett (Colton Dunn) to be together as a couple,” Miller told Entertainment Weekly, “really embracing the fact that they were an actual romantic couple and just seeing what that looks like for the two of them. That seemed like a fun setup for some romantic and comedic stories.”
Green added that the show also had plans in Season 7 to reveal where Garrett, the sardonic store announcer, ends up.
“[T]his season we had him mention that he had applied to GameStop four times and never got the job and that was sort of his dream job. ... We had a whole story line of Glenn helping him get the job at GameStop. This was before GameStop was so in the news for stock reasons, but we talked about seeing him in a flash-forward where he had finally gotten his dream job at GameStop and we reveal that he's already on his phone just totally checked out, back to old Garrett even at the job he's always dreamed of doing.”
Although Green and Miller said they stuck with their planned ending of Cloud 9 turning into a hybrid fulfillment center and in-person store, they changed what happened to Glenn (Mark McKinney), the hapless and earnest manager. “The final shot of the season would've been a wall going up and dividing the store,” Miller said, “and we were leading toward taking our co-managers and having Dina in charge of the fulfillment center part of the store and Glenn in charge of the in-person part of the store and dividing some of our employees and seeing what that's like in season 7. That was already part of our plan, but we just adapted that for the series finale.”
In the actual finale, Glenn reopens his father’s hardware store and hires Mateo (Nico Santos) and Cheyenne (Nichole Sakura). With Dina managing the fulfillment center, she kept Justine (Kelly Schumann), Marcus (Jon Barinholtz) and Sandra (Kaliko Kauahi) on as employees. Sandra was another character that would have seen more screen time had there been a Season 7 of Superstore. “We still thought there was a lot more to mine from Sandra being a mother,” Green noted, “just seeing what she's like as a mom.”
Regardless of what might have been, the showrunners said they’re satisfied with the world they built mining the retail grind for laughs, even if it ended earlier than expected. “With every character I think we could name stuff [to explore],” Green continued. “We had sort of barely started to see their potential. It was a dream experience in so many ways. We feel very lucky to have had six seasons with these characters and this amazing cast.”
Superstore is currently available to stream on Hulu.