9 Reasons Game Show Enthusiasts Will Love ‘Supermarket Sweep’, A Show That We’re *BEGGING* ABC To Renew

It’s been a few years since ABC got back into the primetime game show business. Revivals of shows that contemporary viewers might only know from decades-old reruns on GSN are back, polished up with higher production values and hosted by actual movie stars: Alec Baldwin on Match Game, Elizabeth Banks on Press Your Luck, Zooey Deschanel on The Celebrity Dating Game — not to mention celebrity versions of syndicated mainstays Jeopardy! and Family Feud. I’m sure these other shows have their merits, but there’s only one that’s become appointment television for me: Supermarket Sweep.

For the uninitiated: Supermarket Sweep is a competitive grocery-shopping game show. In the first round, teams of two play grocery-related trivia and price-guessing games to earn time for the show’s main event: Round 2, aka The Big Sweep. Here, contestants take all the time on their clocks to race through the show’s supermarket store set, filling their carts with merchandise and grabbing available bonus items where possible. The team that ends the round with the highest total, between groceries and bonuses, proceeds to a bonus round, where big money is up for grabs. The show originally ran from 1965-67. Lifetime brought it back in 1990; including a jump to PAX, that version ran until 2003. ABC’s primetime revival premiered in the fall of 2020 with host Leslie Jones, straight off her run as a cast member on Saturday Night Live.

Unlike the aforementioned Celebrity Family Feud and Press Your Luck, both renewed this week, Supermarket Sweep is still on the bubble since ending its second season last year. And I get it: a game show in which players manically fling multi-foot beef ribs into grocery trolleys is not going to be for everyone! But here are nine reasons it may, in fact, be for you.

1. It airs on Sunday nights. It’s been nearly 30 years since another ABC icon — Angela Chase (Claire Danes) of My So-Called Life — uttered this truth: “There’s something about Sunday night that really makes you want to kill yourself, especially if you’ve just been totally made a fool of by the only person you’ll ever love, and you have a geometry midterm on Monday, which you still haven’t studied for because you can’t, because Brian Krakow has your textbook, and you’re too embarrassed to even deal with it. And your little sister’s completely finished with her homework, which is just, like, so simple and mindless a child could do it. And that creepy 60 Minutes watch that sounds like your whole life ticking away.” A midterm probably isn’t something you’re dreading on Monday (anymore), but the sense of obligations choking off your weekend might still resonate. Don’t invite that watch into your last few hours of freedom; put on something goofy instead! 
2. It’s fun from the very first second. The original theme song had its charm, to be sure. But the new Supermarket Sweep uses the classic Salt-N-Pepa track “Push It” over footage of Leslie gleefully pushing it (“it” = her cart) through a graphics package. If you can hear that song without breaking into a chair dance, or at the very least a shoulder shimmy, see a doctor.
3. The players are living their best lives. They may just be hopped up on free Starburst from the green room, and certainly they’ve been coached. But the players are SO EXCITED to be on the show that some of them literally scream their answers even when Leslie’s just engaging them in getting-to-know-you banter. This version has player pairs give themselves a food-related team name, and the production has done a great job of casting a wide diversity of contestants: for example, Team Graham Cracker are a biracial couple who call their blended family S’Mores; Team Chai are Indian-Americans who’ve prepared a little Bollywood choreography; Team Blue Crabs are cousins who remember how feisty those could get at their family’s Filipino grocery store. Nearly every episode also features at least one queer player (and many queer couple teams); we also see a lot of straight/queer friend pairs and, in one recent episode, a man and woman who’ve remained best friends since his coming out as gay ended their marriage. It feels like a meaningful moment for the contestants to get to tell America their unique stories. Which brings me to my next point.
4. It’s so wholesome. Contestants cheer on their teammates. Contestants are warm to other teams. Everyone feels united in the controversy-free project: competitive shopping! (My favorite are the teammates who specify that they’re in-laws — mostly brother- and sister-in-law pairs, but we’ve also had a son-in-law who sweetly identified his wife’s mother as his “mother-in-love.” When you get family members playing together who aren’t directly related, you know the path that brought them here wound through many game nights where they found common ground in their extreme competitiveness.) Also contributing to the wholesome atmosphere: the comics who appear in recurring bit roles. Leslie does bits with Neil the security guard (Neil Potter) and cashiers Bethel (Bethel Caram), D.C. (D.C. Benny), Rich (Rich Brooks), and Spencer (Spencer Harrison Levin). These comedic interactions are written in a way that will delight the youngest viewers — Leslie scolding Neil for coming to work in his fuzzy slippers; Leslie teasing the youthful-looking Spencer about what his mom will or won’t permit him to do, to his consternation — and won’t offend the oldest or most conservative viewers. The bits may be totally extraneous to the game play, but one appreciates the effort taken to cram joy into every moment.
5. Game play is laughably easy. Look: Jeopardy! this is not. Each episode opens with a Mini-Sweep, in which Leslie reads a riddle and one member of each team has to scramble to find the marked product she’s looking for; the winner’s reward is more time added to their Big Sweep clock. Here’s one from a recent episode: “If you want a world-famous sanitizing gel, put your hands together for ______.” The contestants have to remember the riddle from merely hearing it and locate Purell (er, spoiler?) on the store shelf; those of us playing along at home see the entire riddle in an on-screen chyron, which helpfully highlights the word the answer will rhyme with to make it even easier for us. During the first round, contestants play three games from a pool that — not to be rude — would not challenge any child who’s been exposed to a TV commercial in their life. Can you identify national brand logos? Do you remember ad taglines? Can you make out a photo of some food item or other before too many of the “coupons” concealing it are “cut away”? One of the more embarrassing moments of 2022 for me so far came when my husband passed by while I was earnestly playing along, because who am I trying to impress yelling “cashews” to an empty room? In its original iteration, the show’s first round revolved exclusively around knowing the prices of various groceries; there are games in the current version that hinge on players’ familiarity with this data and is by far my biggest Supermarket Sweep blind spot. Is orange juice more expensive than Reese peanut butter baking chips? I don’t know and I will never know.
6. The Big Sweep. This round is the show’s centerpiece, and the feature for which it’s still best known, for a reason: it’s so much fun to watch. In addition to trying to collect the highest-dollar-value groceries, contestants may also earn bonuses by grabbing the items from Leslie’s shopping list; by finding a golden can; by retrieving a pool floatie-sized inflatable food item; and by attempting episode-specific mini-challenges like covering a whole pie with spray whipped topping or digging through a barrel of coffee beans for a valuable plastic token. Without the bonuses, it would be a compelling enough exercise in strategy: do you go for large slabs of meat (less money but also less cumbersome in the cart) or pricey dry goods — diapers; housewares — that take up a lot of space? Some players come in with knowledge of stealth high-price items, like a particular brand of honey or protein drink mix. Others seem like they’re primarily guided by the bonus opportunities and just grab whatever happens to be around them. On top of all that, there’s the difficulty of finding things in this unfamiliar space. Based on my observation, the aisles seem to be laid out to bamboozle contestants: I think cleaning products and laundry products are on opposite ends of the store. But if you’ve ever had the experience of having your local supermarket make even a tiny change to its layout, you can probably empathize with these poor fools blindly running all over the joint trying to find hot sauce or Oreos against a ticking clock. And this is actually the segment of the show that encourages the most armchair-quarterbacking: I dare you to watch this and not immediately come up with your own strategy.

(A note about the contestants’ looks in this round: each team gets customized Supermarket Sweep sweatshirts for The Big Sweep, and the longer the show has gone on, the more baroque the modifications get. Team Shrimp got their sweatshirts altered to give them tails on the back; Team In-Flight Snacks, a pair of flight attendants, got theirs tweaked to look like old-school uniforms, complete with fleece pillbox hats; a firefighter team got lengths of fleece hose wrapped around one shoulder. Adorable.)

7. Philanthropy. If the idea of food being squandered for the sake of a game show stresses you out, let me reassure you: it doesn’t go to waste. According to this Good Housekeeping post from early in the revival’s run, meat is donated to wildlife organizations, and other food is donated to Los Angeles-area food banks and charities. On top of that, each episode of the show shouts out a real frontline supermarket worker from somewhere in the U.S. and gifts them $2000. I’ve also noticed a pro-union flyer on a corkboard in the show’s break room set, and appreciated that the show supports grocery store staffers in ways both big and small.
8. The Super Sweep. As previously noted, the prize for having the highest cart total after The Big Sweep is the chance to play in The Super Sweep. If they can (a) solve five riddles of increasing value in 90 seconds and also (b) physically locate the products in the store, they win $100,000 plus the cash value of their Big Sweep haul. (This is a bonus round; if the team completely washes out, they still take home their Big Sweep total in cash.) The Super Sweep riddles are no more difficult to guess than any other riddle in the game — “This hip, trendy food has yet to go STALE. It’s leafy and green, I’m talking about ____” — but, again, the challenge lies in contestants’ familiarity with the store layout. Most get two or three of the five clues, and keep the money for however many they solve; I’ve also seen teams get none, and a team get their last one with literally one second to spare. Something this silly should not be this suspenseful, but it is!
9. LESLIE JONES. My favorite game show host, maybe ever? Jones was a standup comic before she was cast on SNL, and her loose, improvisatory style serves her beautifully here. Generally, her manner conforms to the show’s all-ages wholesomeness: she cheers contestants on even when their answers are wrong by saying (or pretending) she thought the same thing, and reminding them it doesn’t cost them anything to throw out an incorrect guess. However, she also can’t quite hide which teams she prefers on sight — chatting and joking with them the most, suggesting they go out for drinks, and the like. Since the viewer at home may also form snap judgments of this sort, feeling like Leslie is our avatar on set only adds to the pleasure of watching. We also get to see her intently monitoring the players during the Big Sweep and Super Sweep, either complimenting good moves or complaining about bad ones, e.g. “She literally started walking. She walked.” (Anyone who’s followed Leslie on social media will have already experienced her funny but also serious play-by-play commentary on everything she watches on TV.) It’s clear that Leslie is both a host and a fan, and her show wardrobe — t-shirt, blazer, jeans, and sneakers — give the impression that if a team needs a sub, she would be ready to leap in and Sweep herself. I love her.

I realize that, with more and more TV competing for our attention, an extremely ridiculous game show that revolves around wringing drama from grocery shopping won’t make the cut for everyone. But Supermarket Sweep isn’t trying to compete with, say, Better Call Saul. There’s a time for shows that demand you engage with them intellectually and emotionally. When that time is over and you just crave pure foolishness and a five-foot-tall avocado, Supermarket Sweep is waiting for you.

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.