TV Talk: O’Hara native plots NBC’s new season of ‘Superstore’ as star America Ferrera exits

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

For the 2019-20 season of NBC’s “Superstore,” showrunners Gabe Miller and O’Hara Township native Jonathan Green expected their biggest challenge to be satisfactorily writing star America Ferrera out of the comedy series. And they almost made it that far.

Production on “Superstore” shut down due to the covid-19 pandemic after production of the season’s penultimate episode, which wound up becoming the season finale but failed to exit Ferrera’s Amy, who’s leaving her manager position at a Cloud 9 big box store for a new role at the chain’s corporate headquarters.

Much of what was planned for that never-filmed season finale got moved into the new season’s second episode. The first episode of the season airs at 8 p.m. Thursday on WPXI-TV.

“Once the pandemic hit, we realized there was a lot to cover as far as how the pandemic would affect the store,” said Green, whose parents, Richard and Dana Green, still live in the house he grew up in.

Green said producers never really considered ignoring the pandemic because “Superstore” often has dealt with real-world issues.

“It felt like it would be strange if our show shied away from addressing it, especially when the pandemic had such a big effect on retail stores and retail workers who are now called ‘essential workers,’ ” Green said. “We thought it was much more interesting to show how our characters’ world has completely changed during this time.”

Miller and Green, a 1991 Shadyside Academy grad who grew up a fan of “Saturday Night Live,” have been a writing team for years, including stints on “The Office” and “The Cleveland Show.” They’ve written for “Superstore” since season one and became showrunners/head writers beginning with the 2019-20 TV season.

Production on the sixth season of “Superstore” began Sept. 8 with Ferrera in the first two episodes of the new season before departing.

“She was in many ways the center not just of the show but of the store, especially when she was manager,” Green said. “There is a little bit of rebalancing with Jonah definitely taking center stage more as the point of view character, more of the grounded character, with other characters spinning out around him.”

In past seasons, a “Superstore” episode was filmed over five days. This season, due to covid-19 safety protocols, it takes six days to film an episode. Parts of the production process that previously would have been done at the same time — like rehearsal and lighting — now must be done separately as different departments on the show work separately in pods to avoid sharing the same space.

“Because things take so much longer, we’re not always sure we’ll get to shoot as many pages,” Green said. “In previous seasons, we would shoot longer and then trim it down in editing. Now we’re having to make decisions earlier in the process to cut things along the way. But overall I’ve been pleasantly surprised how smoothly things have gone, knock wood. Turns out it is possible to shoot a TV show this way.”