YMMV / Superstore

• Accidental Innuendo: In "Dog Adoption Day," Garrett tells Dina, "Stop talking and start swallowing." He's referring to her eating her lunch quickly.
• Anvilicious: In the last few seasons, the show's social commentary goes from a nuanced and somewhat realistic portrayal of how middle Americans would actually discuss topics to 20-minute Author Tracts with a clear "right" and "wrong" side.
• Arc Fatigue: Mateo and Jeff's on-again, off-again relationship. Their complete lack of chemistry and shallow attraction, based mostly on the fact that they both just happen to be gay and otherwise have nothing in common, is quite funny when it's a one-off joke. But when it lasts for multiple seasons, informs plot developments and comes to define their dynamic for pretty much the entire time Jeff's on the show, it can get very tiring. The fact that they ultimately don't get together can make all the focus the relationship got feel rather pointless.
• Awesome Ego: Dina. For all her bluster and intimidating presence, she's incredibly good at her job. When she's working on an event to celebrate the Olympics Closing Ceremony, she even manages to get a helicopter to take part.
• Base-Breaking Character: A fairly large contingent of fans thinks that Mateo is a self-centered, catty jerk who frequently mistreats those who genuinely want to help him. Some also think that he is a bad influence on Cheyenne, noting that she becomes more selfish when she hangs around with him and that his romantic arc with Jeff is unberable. However, his fandom thinks his antics cross the line into being funny, and his character arc tugs at the heartstrings. Many viewers who do find his character funny admit that he would be terrible to work with in real life.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Basically every transition (which focuses on various customers in the store) is one of these.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • In "Dog Adoption Day," Lydia informs Mateo and Jonah that her shelter euthanizes dogs that don't get adopted. Super sad, but then she adds that she's hoping the dogs don't get adopted because she has a crush on the guy who does the lethal injections, and it's horribly funny.
  • "New Initiative" has a subplot where Dina and Garrett make a bet to see who can smile the longest. This results in the two of them telling each other horribly tragic things and digging up each other's deep insecurities and traumas... all while both maintain a ridiculous smile on their face.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Dina is commonly interpreted as being autistic because she has many well-known traits of it. She is extremely blunt, a stickler for rules and routines, lacks social skills, is more attached to animals than people, has strong convictions and becomes very upset when they are breached, and displays difficulty understanding other people's intentions (e.g., it is obvious that Jonah does not return her feelings, but she is oblivious to this until it is spelled out for her).
• Funny Moments:
  • Amy's facial expressions at any given moment.
  • Glenn calling out his employees and swearing at them all the while keeping a smile on his face.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • At the end of "Black Friday," Glenn notices Myrtle passed out in a chair and asks if someone can poke her to "see if she's still alive." Of course, Myrtle's actress, Linda Porter, passed away during production of season 5, and was thusly killed off in the show as well, so that line is kind of depressing now.
  • In "New Initiative," Garrett tries to upset Dina (as they're in a bet over who can keep smiling the longest) by telling her, "Someday, all the birds you have are gonna die." Several episodes later, in "Lovebirds," Garrett accidentally frees all of Dina's birds, who are presumed dead for several episodes, sending Dina into depression.
• Ho Yay: Marcus tends to throw comments full of Homoerotic Subtext towards Jonah, but a less obvious instance of subtext is present in "The Trough," when it's revealed that he's been living with Jonah. Marcus acts like a Crazy Jealous Guy when Kelly reappears, insisting that he knows Jonah even better than she does, and at the end of the episode, the discussion he has with Jonah about why they can't be roommates anymore ("I just don't think you're ready to have a roommate right now, and I deserve one who will shout it from the rooftops") sounds more like a breakup speech. Then he asks Jonah to meet him by the quarry and discover a "new secret"... and the latter agrees. (The "secret" Marcus has in mind seems to be seeing something messed up, but the subtext remains.)
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • The more we get to know Dina as the series progresses, the more this side of her is revealed. She's generally a brash Rules Lawyer, but there's several episodes that suggest a Dark and Troubled Past and that she's more sensitive and hurt than she lets on. Especially when she reconnects with her Disappeared Dad in season 5's "Myrtle."
  • Marcus is an obnoxious, alpha-male idiot, but it's hard not to feel terrible for the guy in mid-season 4 when it's revealed that he's homeless and living in the Cloud 9 back passageway.
  • Mateo. Yes, he's catty, condescending, and throws tons of shade, but when he discovers he's undocumented and has been lied to his whole life about being a legal citizen, it makes him a more tragic character. And then add the season 4 finale when ICE captures him and puts him in a detention center. It doesn't last, and he's able to work with Cloud 9 again under the table, but the threat lingers over his head through the rest of the series. No wonder he's so shady and gossipy; it beats being scared all the time.
  • The Yelp reviewer in "Mateo's Last Day." While he spends a lot of the episode posting rude reviews on Cloud 9's Yelp page, Amy visits his place and learns that he does this to cope with his difficult home life, as he's been unfairly unemployed and is stuck caring for his senile mother and a bunch of rabbits. He seems happy to actually sit down and talk to Amy, suggesting he's very lonely. But then he writes up a mean review about her behavior too.
• Moral Event Horizon: If the entire Cloud 9 corporation didn't cross it with the revelation in season 3 that they faked write ups so that they could fire their elderly employees, they definitely crossed it in the season 4 finale, where they send ICE to make an inspection on the store to terrorize the employees trying to unionize, culminating on Mateo being arrested for being undocumented.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • There's a running plot of Marcus selling cheese made of breast milk. Even worse, he apparently uses milk he finds from random bottles that nursing mothers leave around the store.
  • In "Blizzard," Marcus reveals that he craps in the shower every morning and stomps it down the drain, disgusting both the other employees and likely the viewer as well.
  • In "Quinceañera," somebody's old bandage ends up in the chocolate fountain.
  • The concoction created by Marcus and Dina in "Cloud 9.0" to simulate a sewage-based escape route — made of recalled dog food and old clam chowder — is truly disgusting.
• Nightmare Fuel: The climax of the episode "Tornado," when the tornado begins to ravage the store. It knocks back Brett, who is presumed dead (but found alive during Season 3) and then crashes through the glass doors, leaving the entire store staff and the audience in a panic. Luckily it only lasts a few minutes before subsiding, but it's a very intense scene for a show that was quite low-key up to this point.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Some fans feel that the show has suffered after the departure of showrunner Justin Spitzer.
• Squick: Cheyenne is played by a tall, pretty actress well into her late 20s who was most well known for a role in Shameless that involved nudity and sex scenes, so it's sometimes easy to forget that the character is a teenager in high school and only 17 years old in Season 1. The highly sexual jokes are uncomfortable to watch. More specifically, footage of her vagina as she enters (false) labor is accidentally aired on the display TVs, and a bunch of old men view it enthusiastically, with at least one sitting down to eat as he watches. In another episode she notes that she has to move away from a seasonal employee who has a boner.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The spoken-word verses of "Halloween Surfboard" are clearly a riff on Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash."
• Unpopular Popular Character:
  • Marcus is almost universally disliked in-universe for his obnoxiousness, his idiocy and his comically bad personal hygiene, but is beloved by the fandom for those same reasons.
  • Justine, who regularly disgusts the Cloud 9 staff with her constant (and completely untrue) claims of being an alcoholic sex addict, is liked by the show's fanbase.
  • Dina is most of the time a tactless, authoritarian bully who would be a dreadful figure to work with in real life in her role as Security chief doubling as corporate's Internal Affairs representative in the store, but Lauren Ash manages to make her absolutely hilarious.
• The Woobie: Poor Sandra. Her life is just a constant vortex of awful. She's terribly meek and her coworkers tend to ignore her. Dina treats Sandra like sand in her underwear. Carol, already a sociopath, is beyond cruel to Sandra and spitefully steals a man she has her eye on. Even by season 5, she can't even attempt to have a wedding without Carol attempting to kill her cat. Things keep going comically, catastrophically bad for Sandra, and yet she's probably one of the most relatable people on the show.

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