A Hilarious Superstore Bit Was Inspired By A Real-Life Incident On Set

If you've never watched "Superstore," the NBC workplace sitcom created by Justin Spitzer that ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2021, you're really missing out. Not only is this show sweet, funny, and delightfully weird, but it also features some of the best and strangest running gags in recent TV memory. Apparently, one of those three bits wasn't even really a joke, though; the show's actual soundstage just inspired it.

During a virtual panel for San Diego Comic-Con in 2020, executive producers Gabe Miller and Jonathan Green sat down with a bunch of the show's central cast members. Flanked by Ben Feldman, Colton Dunn, Nichole Sakura, Kaliko Kauahi, Nico Santos, Lauren Ash, and Mark McKinney, Miller revealed the secret behind the whole raccoon thing. (Allow him to explain.)

"The running bit in the show that fans would know about — the raccoons infesting the store was partially inspired, as the cast would know, by the actual raccoons that we have on our soundstages," Miller said. "From time to time, you'll be shooting a scene and you'll see, up in the rafters, like, a mama raccoon like peeking over. It's cute, but you know, it's a little ... It's taken care of. Don't worry."

The cast members did have some understandable concerns, especially because they were on a COVID-mandated break from filming at the time. "Oh, really? They haven't [taken over] during this time we've been down?" Dunn mused, laughing. "Oh, it's an entire city of raccoons there," Feldman said, making everyone else laugh, too.

The brilliant thing about "Superstore" is that it isn't afraid to get weird, and another running gag that's not related to random wildlife certainly puts that on display. After a tornado rips apart the store in Season 2, one employee, the mysteriously silent Brett (played by Jon Miyahara, goes missing ... and when other employees find a severed foot in the store, they naturally assume that it belongs to Brett and is a casualty of the tornado. Brett ultimately resurfaces, and more and more severed feet keep showing up throughout the store. Unlike the raccoon infestation, this running gag gets neatly wrapped up in the "Superstore" series finale — and it turns out that the store has been employing a full-fledged serial killer this whole time.

Elias, a side character and Cloud 9 employee played by Danny Gura since the very first season of "Superstore," is revealed to be the killer behind all these severed feet. At the time of the series finale in 2021, Jonathan Green told TVLine why the show solved this mystery. "We had joked about revealing someone as the foot person for a long time," he said. "And there was a lot of discussion about whether we actually wanted to do it in the finale, and then who it should be."

So why Elias? Though Green said he felt conflicted because Elias is so lovable, it was perfect ... and Gura agreed. "But then we realized, 'No, it's kinda great. It's kinda funny. It's the last person you'd expect," Green concluded. "And Danny Gura was really honored to have that kind of big role in the series finale, and the lore of the show."

By the time "Superstore" came to an end in 2021 — with a surprisingly sweet conclusion that saw Jonah and Amy Sosa (America Ferrera, who briefly left the show after Season 5 before returning for the sixth and final season) end up together — it also became known for its absolutely incredible customer interstitials, a series-long feature.

Some of these interstitials are only mildly weird, like a receipt longer than anything you could possibly imagine coming from CVS, a woman casually browsing clothes with a rifle strapped to her back, or a guy fighting for his life to get one of those pesky produce bags open the right way. There are also some sort of unsettling-but-still-funny split-second gags, like two moms switching kids in an aisle by complete accident, a customer putting a container of bleach on a shelf in between containers of Parmesan cheese (with almost identical labels on both), or a store employee catching site of twin girls dressed exactly like the ones from "The Shining" while he's restocking shelves on Halloween. 

"Superstore" is streaming on Hulu now.