NBC's promising American Auto finally gives Ana Gasteyer her own comedy vehicle

Variety

"Ana Gasteyer — a shrewd, funny comedian adept at puncturing her characters’ pretensions — has long deserved a showcase," says Daniel D'Addario. “Saturday Night Live contemporaries of hers including Maya Rudolph and Molly Shannon have recently had strong and striking second acts on TV, and Gasteyer’s turn comes in the form of American Auto, a sitcom about a car company and its self-assured new CEO. And it’s Gasteyer who represents the most compelling reason to watch this show, which over its first two episodes is in the process of finding its voice. Created by Superstore’s Justin Spitzer, American Auto most keenly gives the sense of a network attempt to channel the scabrousness of Veep or Succession. Like those shows, this NBC series features a bunch of functionaries striving for the approval of a capricious and often short-sighted leader. But the early going suggests a show that is still figuring out what it wants to say."

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• American Auto wisely exploits a niche brimming with options for comedy writers looking for an on-ramp to the next workplace-set hit: "Take it from this one-time automotive writer, the gags are there to be had, from lampooning the process of creating a new model's name to skewering the incestuous relationship between car magazines and auto companies," says Marco della Cava. "Comedy gold awaits in a brand new mine. But while parts of the first two episodes of American Auto cruise effortlessly down this promising comedic highway, the show could stand a bit more time on the assembly line before it’s fully roadworthy."
• American Auto's early episodes do retain some of the irreverent bite that eventually made Superstore such a hit: "The pilot has the team scrambling to cook up a Plan B after a product announcement is derailed by the racism of artificial intelligence, while the second installment revolves around a snowballing PR nightmare that has Katherine praying for a deadly natural disaster to edge Payne out of the headlines," says Angie Han. "Work might be better paid in the corner offices and conference rooms of American Auto than they were for the big-box drones of Superstore, but it’s still mostly bullshit. In its darkest jokes, American Auto brings to mind the late great Better Off Ted, which balanced pitch-black cynicism about the absurdities of corporate life with genuine empathy for the poor weirdos trapped inside it. With some luck, American Auto could fine-tune its way to a similar equilibrium."
• American Auto creator Justin Spitzer says he first pitched the show to NBC in 2013 -- and it helped inspire Superstore: "I had recently come off The Office," he says. "I was just thinking I wanted to do another workplace show, but in the corporate world. That just felt like a very different aspect of it. It didn't go back then, and then the following year, I used actually certain characters from American Auto, a dead pilot, and put them in Superstore, and that one went. Then Superstore had some success, and a few years in, my agent kept mentioning it. It was interesting going back in, looking at some of the characters and making some changes so it didn't feel too much like I was copying Superstore. When in fact, Superstore was copying American Auto."