Is ‘American Auto’ As Funny As ‘Superstore’?

Although “Superstore” may be over, creator Justin Spitzer has a new show to take its place.

Spitzer, who previously wrote for “The Office,” has taken his comedic talents to the auto industry, in the new NBC workplace comedy series, “American Auto.”

The show, which debuted Monday night, features “Saturday Night Live” alum Ana Gasteyer as Katherine Hastings, a former pharmaceutical executive who was hired to run Payne Motors, a huge automobile company. Although she’s the first female CEO in the company’s 100-year history, she doesn’t like cars too much… and doesn’t know how to drive one, either.

This will be the third workplace comedy that Spitzer has worked on, so he has creating a cohesive ensemble cast down to a science.

“With an ensemble friends show, you have people who enjoy being with each other, and in a family show there’s generally a certain amount of love there, unless it’s incredibly cynical,” Spitzer told The New York Post.

He added, “This is a workplace, where a bunch of people with very different interests and backgrounds and goals and values are thrown together in a world where being competitive and outshining each other is very helpful — and there’s the stress of having to be together in a claustrophobic environment.”

With Elon Musk becoming TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year for his contributions from companies SpaceX and Tesla, Spitzer felt that it was a good time to bring “American Auto” to audiences.

“I originally pitched it and wrote the pilot in 2013; I had just come off ‘The Office’ and wanted to write a corporate comedy, and that’s where I started, with the auto industry,” he explained. “In terms of timing and the [visibility of] the auto industry I can’t claim credit for either one. That pilot didn’t go and then I did ‘Superstore’ the following year.”

“This just felt like a good time,” he continued. “The auto industry has changed a lot and I re-wrote the pilot, so here it is — there’s so much fodder for stories because there’s so much happening in that industry.”

He added, “It’s really nice to have a not-very-intelligent boss in the workplace — we had that on ‘The Office’ — but I wanted [Katherine] to be intelligent and competent, and one way to do that was to at least have her not being familiar with this particular industry so she could make mistakes that lead to funny situations.”

Critics at USA Today gave the fledgling show 2 and a half stars out of 4. They praised Gasteyer’s “deadpan monotone that delights.”

In the first episode, the company's new self-driving car hits a snag when they find out that camera sensors can only detect white people because they were never tested on people of color. The car is quickly scrapped and put together with a variety of parts that are stolen from employees' cars in the parking lot. When the clueless CEO asks the company’s main designer (Michael Benjamin Washington) what he thinks of their monstrous creation, he replies:

“It’s like something Bjork would drive to the Oscars. No, it’s what she would drive to the Oscars but if she got into a head-on collision with Blossom on her way to the prom and then the car was reassembled by a blind villager from a tribe that had never seen technology and a spider on LSD who had bad taste.”

“At least it’s not racist,” Gasteyer replies after a beat.

The review concluded, “All this to say, while ‘American Auto’ feels like it’s having some early engine trouble, it's worth taking this new ride into the shop for a tune-up.”

Although “American Auto” doesn’t have the same presence “Superstore” had right off the bat, there’s still time for “American Auto” to get the motor running with audiences when it returns next year.

Although the first two episodes of “American Auto” are available to stream, it will move to its regular time on Tuesday, January 4 at 8 PM EST on NBC.