SUPERSTORE Creator Explains the Show’s Unconventional Original Title

Naming anything is difficult, but when it comes to a show, the pressure is immense: you have to appropriately capture what the show is, and, if possible, do it in the exact correct amount of words so it can be easily referenced, but not be forgettable.

For NBC’s SUPERSTORE, the title fits. It’s clear it’s about a big-box store and about the ensemble versus singling out a character or characters. But when Justin Spitzer was creating the comedy, he originally had a very different name in mind.

“The original title was THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD,” he told reporters in the video below. “I wanted to do a show about people who worked in a store. That’s not a very sellable concept on its own; it’s…all in the execution. I like those shows the best, but they’re a little harder to sell.”

Spitzer knew Jonah (Ben Feldman) and Amy’s (America Ferrera) will they/won’t they relationship would play into the series, so he figured “that could be the selling point, a little like HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER. It had this big conceit, but it was just about this group of friends. So we sold it like that.”

As viewers know, though there was a connection between the duo from the start, the end of the pilot revealed that Amy was actually married. (Something Jonah wouldn’t discover until later in the first season.) “I always knew Jonah and Amy were not going to be the greatest love story ever told; it was going to be a mislead,” he acknowledged. “You weren’t going to know what the story was at the end of the pilot.”

But that development year was right after a number of broadcast networks took big swings on rom-coms—including Feldman’s A TO Z—that didn’t work out.

So then NBC called him…

SUPERSTORE, Season Premiere, Thursday, September 26, 8/7c, NBC

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• SUPERSTORE: Kaliko Kauahi on Sandra’s Surprise Engagement
• SUPERSTORE’s Nico Santos Reflects on the ‘Difficult,’ ‘Triggering’ Season 4 Finale
• Inside SUPERSTORE’s Cloud 9 Pop-Up at Comic-Con
• SUPERSTORE: Colton Dunn to Pen a Season 5 Episode
• SUPERSTORE’s Lauren Ash Shares What You Didn’t See in the Emotional Season Finale
• SUPERSTORE Finale Post-Mortem: Justin Spitzer on That Heartbreaking Twist
• SUPERSTORE Boss on the New Cloud 9 Manager: ‘We Don’t Have Any Plans to End the Arc’
• On the Set of SUPERSTORE: Check Out Props and Costumes from the Comedy’s History
• SUPERSTORE: Colton Dunn Crashes Ben Feldman’s Interview

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