With ‘American Auto,’ Spitzer Explores Corporate Humor This Time

The more episodes that appear, the more American Auto is hitting its stride after a pilot and six installments on NBC. The Justin Spitzer-created, half-hour comedy is showing why it’s got promise as a worthy successor in the workplace-sitcom firmament.

American Auto is beginning to succeed in exactly the way Spitzer told me he wants it to: as a comedic platform for looking at what happens among proximate co-workers in the workplace — the key to sitcom hits with which he was previously involved, The Office and Superstore — and specifically how that unfolds in a big company.

So while American Auto relies on the fact that its cast works for a major corporation that builds cars, the show is profitably exploring opportunities for humor as well as social observation in how any big company in a traditional industry might operate internally and externally.

Thus, episode five dealt with both the pathos and comedic possibilities of where Payne Automotive was going to put a new assembly plant to build its planned $10,000 car, while episode six was a telling take on the complexities, sensitivities — and absurdities — that come with how modern marketers approach the diversity of their customer bases and advertising audiences.

“I wanted to do a show about a big American, multinational corporation, not a show about a cool tech startup,” Spitzer said. “That’s been done, and done really well. I wanted a baseline industry that would give us specificity but still feel that it was relatable to people who could see their own industry in it. We considered autos, and we considered Big Pharma a little bit. But it would be too hard to get into jokes about cancer clusters.”

Spitzer also wanted to create a show that would allow his characters and plots to get out into the world more, to encounter and leverage the vastly more creative opportunities this would provide.

“The Office lived in Dunder Mifflin, and Superstore really lived in Cloud 9,” Spitzer said, referencing the small paper-supply company headquarters that served as the backdrop for the first show and the Walmart-type big-box store that pretty much contained the second hit.

(A post-pandemic office environment with a sort of 2019 feel is assumed in American Auto, though there are a lot of Zoom calls. “I hope by the time season two airs, it’ll be over,” Spitzer said.)

“I wanted [American Auto] to be able to get out more, and three of the first 10 episodes are all or significantly out of the office,” he said. “I may even want to be able to take a jet to Davos — that’s part of the fun of the show, that it can be international. The only restrictions are production expenses. I’d love to be able to go to an assembly line, but realistically those things are so mammoth you could fit ten Cloud 9’s in one factory.”

Thus in episode 5, American Auto gets a lot of mileage out of the CEO and her team trying to figure out how they’re possibly going to deliver on the promise of a $10,000 new Payne model that she made to Wall Street. The choices for manufacturing the new model are a small town in Iowa, of all places, and an Eastern Europe dictatorship. Payne’s C-suite decides that they can’t resist the siren call of incredibly cheap wages in “Bolvaria,” where also the government presumably would look the other way about a lot of things.

So the Payne crew flies on their private jet to the middle of the corn fields in Iowa in an effort to gently let down the fictitious town of Millbank after the company already had promised to build its new factory there, providing 8,000 jobs. The problem is that the townspeople are so grateful at the prospect of so many good-paying jobs, they seem not to care how bad the company might be that is providing them.

Irony and sardonic humor ensue. “This factory will bring jobs, but something else too,” CEO Kathryn Hastings, played by Ana Gasteyer, tells the crowd. “Change. We all love change. [But this change will bring] cannabis dispensaries and ethnic small-plate restaurants.” The crowd cheers.

Frustrated, the chief adds more ominously, “There will be new types of people of all sorts of faith, with a mosque on every corner right here in Millbank.” More cheers — are the people oblivious, Hastings’ team wonders, or just really want the jobs? “And yes, of course, there will be homeless people and methadone clinics and needle exchanges and popup abortion sites. But if you don’t want that in your back yard, then you don’t want Payne in your front yard … And also Antifa.”

Hastings’ team muses about why this small town in flyover country isn’t bothered by the human diversity the new plant will bring. “What is this, Berkley? Where is their xenophobia?” asks Wesley Payne, a doofus played by Jon Barinholtz who’s in management only because he’s a scion. Jack, a former line worker who’s been brought into the executive suite because of his Everyman sensibilities, played by Tye White, says, “Maybe they’re just desperate. When you’ve been out of work for a year, a hole in the ozone isn’t that important.”

Concludes Hastings: “We might as well be threatening to take away their New Yorker subscriptions. We need to focus on what these people care about.”

In the end, however, Payne Motors relents and decides to build the plant in Iowa after the news reports that Bolvaria has exploded in civil war.

Spitzer brings similar relevance and comedic exploration to episode 6, only this time it’s around how Payne needs to sell vehicles to diverse audiences — gender-wise, ethnically, in sexual preference and so on — that aren’t reflected in its new advertising campaign. Hastings and her team quickly schedule filming of a replacement commercial that will show proper respect to diverse demographics and various pairings within families.

In the process, Spitzer’s characters — a diverse group themselves, especially with the recent addition of a chief marketing officer who fits the white-supemacist mode — step on every possible land mine that this subject can bring, potentially offending everybody within the fiction of the commercial shoot as well as in American Auto’s TV audience. Yet by spreading buckshot across the entire great and increasingly diverse melting pot of American consumers, Spitzer manages not really to offend anyone at all.

But for the most part, and likely over the long haul that Spitzer hopes for the show, the humor in American Auto is generated in the office and among constant workmates.

And there seems to be plenty of material available there. “Workplace shows are great when you really drill into conflict between people,” Spitzer said. “The fun of a workplace show is people from diverse backgrounds who wouldn’t choose to spend time together, but do. They are different people with different values. I try to keep an edge to it and have people be a little biting with each other. Nice moments shine through, though.”