Season 1 of American Auto wasn’t a huge, Abbott Elementary-style hit for NBC, but its first season showed that it was a solid if unspectacular workplace comedy with a well-oiled cast. Usually shows like this improve in their second seasons, and the second season of American Auto shows the gang at Payne Motors smack in the middle of the crisis introduced at the end of Season 1.
Opening Shot: “Day 1.” Elliot (Humphrey Ker), the lead attorney at Payne Motors, tells the buzzing office that if they’re going to destroy evidence regarding the company’s coverup of their Hydra model rolling out of park, they should do it before they’re court-ordered not to. He doesn’t tell them directly, of course.
The Gist: Payne Motors CEO Katherine Hastings (Ana Gasteyer) is convinced that this Hydra issue will blow over, but she’s brought in Ian (Eric Stonestreet), a crisis coordinator she’s previously worked with, to manage their response. Sadie Ryan (Harriet Dyer), the company’s CCO, just thinks they should recall the Hydra and get in front of things that way, something Jack Fortin (Tye White), Katherine’s liaison to the factory workers, agrees with. Cyrus Knight (Michael B. Washington), the chief designer, is stress-eating. Dori (X Mayo), Katherine’s assistant, offers to print a war room sign that doesn’t look like “Warroom.” Wesley Payne (Jon Barinhotlz), the only Payne in the C-suite, keeps harping on the fact that Jack and Sadie slept together once.
Things seem to be pretty calm until a viral video comes out; it not only shows a Hyrdra rolling backwards while in park, but then the sparks it generates rubbing against a guard rail starts a brush fire. As the days and weeks go by, the “Payne Wildfire” blazes unchecked throughout the country. Everyone is spiraling, including Elliot, who is breaking out in hives, and Dori, who stopped pooping. And it seems that Ian the crisis manager is tossing Sadie out to get eaten alive by the press, and Sadie just wants to look impressive to Katherine. All the while, Katherine is as cool as a cucumber.
As the fire continues for a second month, even Ian is out of solutions. And, when everyone tells Katherine that they’re amazed at how she’s been handling the crisis, the inevitable tiny issue makes her melt down. The only thing left is for the board to fire Katherine, giving her a generous exit package.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? When we reviewed the first season of American Auto, we compared it to creator Justin Spitzer’s previous show, Superstore. That comparison holds, but you could really compare it to any workplace comedy from the last decade.
Our Take: We tentatively recommended American Auto in December 2021 because the Gasteyer-led ensemble that Spitzer put together had gelled pretty nicely, even if the characters themselves seemed like fairly generic workplace comedy tropes. We figured the show would need at least a season for the stories to shape and define the characters beyond the broad archetypes, and we were right. The show still had some issues by the end of the first season, but things were humming along a lot better by the time the last episode aired.
The first episode, where the group is in the middle of the Hydra rolling crisis, doesn’t exactly reestablish what each person’s role is in the company, but definitely goes a long way of reestablishing their characters, just by showing how they’re reacting to the ever-escalating crisis. Stonestreet is a good guest addition to the group, if only because he’s there to disrupt the status quo. He’s less integrated in the second episode, where he tells Sadie that’s he’s actively trying to take her job.
The second episode shows that the storytelling is still a little inconsistent. After the fire is out, and (not a spoiler if you know how TV works) Katherine has vowed to turn the company around in six months, Ian and Sadie have Katherine do damage control. One attempt, where she tries to do an apology video with her family, opens up a well of character exploration that isn’t taken advantage of, in favor of Katherine getting lectured by Seth Meyers when Sadie suggests she goes on his show. A B-plot, where Cyrus and Dori create an entire universe of fake Twitter users in order to make Katherine look popular on social media, works well because how each of them let things get out of control is completely consistent with their characters.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Katherine tells the gang that she saved everyone from being fired, and revels in how “heroic” she was.
Sleeper Star: X Mayo really came into her own as Dori in Season 1, and she continues to be one of the funniest people on the show in Season 2.
Most Pilot-y Line: Jack gets freaked out when Cyrus eats a KitKat without breaking off a piece. It feels we’ve seen a variation of that KitKat gag a few times. But we agree: It’s freaky to see someone bite into all 4 KitKats in a bar at the same time.
Our Call: STREAM IT. American Auto isn’t on par with a workplace comedy like Abbott Elementary, but the ensemble works well together and there is more than enough character-based humor to overcome some plotting problems.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
