Leslie Jones' Supermarket Sweep revival is the perfect coronavirus-era game show

Rolling Stone

Supermarket Sweep has had three previous incarnations, each of which was a product of its time. The original 1965 version exploited the booming consumerism of post-World War II America. The 1990s version on Lifetime felt out of place after premiering during a recession. The 2000s version premiered in the wake of 9/11. "Each time around, Supermarket Sweep has been a screen grab of America," says David Browne. "In the coronavirus era, there may not be a more perfectly timed show than Supermarket Sweep," he adds. "The sight of people frantically racing up and down aisles, lunging for piles of meat products and king-size paper goods and beverages, suddenly doesn’t feel like wish fulfillment. It feels like life in America for the past six or seven months. A game show once steeped in fantasy now feels perhaps a bit too entrenched in reality — or, at least, core survival instincts. It makes you realize we’ve been living in a real-life Supermarket Sweep for a while; we just didn’t realize it."

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• Leslie Jones hosting Supermarket Sweep as a fan is the best part of the reboot: "A long-time fan hosting a game show is the single best part of this revival," says Andy Dehnart. "Leslie Jones is not trying to be 1990s and 2000s Supermarket Sweep host David Ruprecht. Instead, she hosts by leading with her enthusiasm for the format, and it’s both endearing and successful, because she just merges the two together seamlessly."
• How Supermarket Sweep kept its produce fresh and its shelves stocked amid the pandemic: "All the food is real and all the food was ordered prior to there being a pandemic," says executive producer Alycia Rossiter. "Right as things were about to start shipping to our warehouse for rehearsals and run through so we could figure out how we were going to lay out our gondolas—I learned words like that, by the way. Gondolas are the shelves in a grocery store. But right as we were about to do that, we were sequestered at home in L.A. Not only that, we learned that there was a scarcity of some ingredients and some products, so we changed our list and we took everything that was scarce in regular supermarkets off our list. Because of that, we had to reconfigure what our grocery store would look like, because we had no paper towels, no toilet paper, no Lysol, nothing like that. But everything in the store was all real and we used it for the run of the show. When we had to shut our show down, we had our rehearsal warehouse ready. Not 100 percent ready, but, nine-tenths ready. And then we all stayed home for quite a few months. When we came back to life, we moved all of those groceries to where we eventually ended up shooting the show, which was at the Santa Monica airport’s Barker hangar. So, an airplane hangar. Instead of parking airplanes, we parked our store and we rebuilt our gondolas and we put all of our products on them." Rossiter adds that a lot of leftover food was donated to the L.A. Mission and the L.A. Food Bank.