Also central to the series are Jonah (Feldman) — a newer addition to the store and an idealist who’s constantly worried those around him will think he’s elitist — and Glenn (McKinney), the longtime store manager, whose optimism and hope for the store and its employees are seemingly never-ending. They’re also both intensely earnest in their beliefs — but the former a satire of white liberalism and the latter of white Christian conservatism.

In a Season 2 episode called “Guns, Pills, and Birds,” Jonah tries to opt out of a shift selling guns at the Cloud 9 gun counter. According to Spitzer, the writers room wanted to do an episode about “what happens when your job requires you to do something that you have moral problems with.” Jonah, with what Spitzer refers to as his “East Coast liberal fear of guns,” fit the storyline perfectly — and helped inspire another important part of the episode. “From [Jonah], we started talking about what other employees might have moral problems with something in the store,” Spitzer said. Soon Glenn took up the episode’s B story, buying up the store’s entire stock of the morning-after pill to keep it off the shelves — and then immediately trying to sell it back to customers when he realizes how expensive his moral quest is.

“We never want to feel like we’re proselytizing,” Spitzer said. “We’re not trying to teach anyone a lesson.” It’s a sentiment his coworkers echo. “We want to avoid being either preachy or it feeling academic,” Miller said. And as fellow executive producer Jonathan Green put it, “Our way in is always through these characters. We’re not ever looking for, like, ‘the show needs to make a statement about this.’”

That careful line they walk may at times hold them back from fully fleshing out the topics they choose to take on. The format itself plays into this, too: You can only dive so far into gun control or the morning-after pill debate in a time span of 22 minutes of light comedy — especially when you’re trying not to alienate any big political demographics. With this in mind, time and again Superstore integrates relevant slices of American political life into the fabric of the show. In the “Election Day” episode, which aired five days before the 2016 presidential election, the characters dealt with a polling place being set up in the store.

“We had a lot of conversations about how specific we could be,” Spitzer said of how the writers grappled with what was, from all sides, a contentious time to say the least. “That was definitely an area where we didn’t want to get too literally political; we would [out] of necessity be alienating 40% of our audience, whether we took one point of view or another.”