SUPERSTORE: Ben Feldman on Finding the Right Tension for Jonah and Amy’s Post-Split Face-to-Face

After a pretty brutal split, SUPERSTORE’s Jonah (Ben Feldman) is about to come face-to-face with his ex, Amy (America Ferrera), in the show’s two-episode series finale.

Unfortunately for the duo, the circumstances aren’t exactly ideal. Amy, who now has a California-based corporate job with Cloud 9 owners Zephra, has come to help try to save store #1217 after the employees discovered the retail shops might be on the verge of shutting down.

Though Jonah has taken steps to move past Amy in recent episodes—including his new relationship with Hannah (Maria Thayer)—he did spiral in “Lowell Anderson” when he thought she was on a vacation with another man. So how might he react when they see each other for the first time since she moved to California?

“We played around a whole lot with levels [of tension] when we were shooting it, when it was being written, and even through the editing process,” Feldman says. “Because you never know when a show gets cut together how everything is going to end up looking, what the timeline is going to be, which scenes will be removed or what order will they come in. It was a just a constant discussion with us: ‘Do they come in hot?’ At one point, we were like, ‘Is there not enough tension?'”

“There was a version where there was a little less; there was another version where there was way more,” he continues. “So you’re just constantly trying to get [it right]; it’s like running a bath. You’re just constantly holding your hand under the water and trying to figure out what’s not too cold and what’s not too hot. We were doing that months ago, from just when the writers sent us the sort of general brushstrokes of what was going to happen, all the way up until the day that we were shooting. And I’m sure, James [Renfroe], our editor, could cut together an entirely different dynamic if he wanted to, just based on the footage that we have.”

As the show wrapped up, Ferrera wasn’t the only familiar face to return: Justin Spitzer, who created the show—but stepped back at the end of season 4—returned to help write the final arc.

“It was great—Justin is sort of this evil genius, [who is] super neurotic and super thoughtful,” Feldman says with a laugh. “And it was an energy that we hadn’t had for a really long time. The whole thing was surreal for us, because it’s not just Justin—Ruben [Fleischer], who EPed the show, and directed the pilot and a few in between, was also back directing the finale. And so to look and see [showrunners] Gabe [Miller] and Jonathan [Green], and Justin, all of them sitting over at video village with Ruben, was just this kind of crazy time warp.”

“My mom used to do tarot cards, and it felt very much whenever my mom would draw the death card, people would get worried, but she would always remind them death doesn’t mean the end of something, it means the beginning of something, too—it’s both at the exact same time,” he continues. “And that’s what shooting that finale felt like for us. It was kind of like, ‘This is your life on SUPERSTORE’ [flashback], so having Justin there was not only great and helpful and cool, but it was also extremely important for us to have everybody. To have to have mom and dad there at our high school graduation was really nice.”

SUPERSTORE, Series Finale, Thursday, March 25, 8/7c, NBC

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