Supermarket Sweep

from What2Watch October 2020

Understanding TiVo

Host Bill Malone of the original Supermarket Sweep

If you’re going to win the big prize, you’d better have a strategy. With the exception of meat, tobacco and alcohol, here are some higherticketed items we found on Milwaukee supermarket shelves.

The Classic Show Is Back And Better Than Ever By Taylor Neumann

There’s a good chance that you have fond memories attached to the show Supermarket Sweep — maybe you watched it at home sick as a kid, or found it on a weekend browsing the channels years ago. What you may not know is that the show actually premiered in 1965! It aired for two years before being revived decades later in the ’90s and early ’00s on Lifetime and PAX. Now it’s back again, this time on primetime.

The rules of the show are simple. “The show allows three teams of two to come into a dream supermarket, one of the most beautiful supermarkets I’ve ever seen, answer a lot of trivia questions to build up time that they’re going to then use to race through the supermarket, putting as much stuff as they can in their cart,” explained executive producer Wes Kauble. “Whoever has the highest cart total is then going to get to race through the supermarket one more time in a scavenger hunt with their partner for a chance to win a ton of money.” The new iteration of the show is hosted by comedian Leslie Jones, who many know from her memorable run on Saturday Night Live. What you may not know, however, is that Jones is a superfan of Supermarket Sweep and was instrumental in bringing the show to being. “The love is palpable — every pore of her body exudes the fact that she loves that show,” said executive producer Alycia Rossiter. “[What] makes her really stand out is along [with] that infectious energy, she lives and dies on the success of each contestant,” added Kauble. “You can see her feel the pain when something doesn’t go well. And you can see the over-the-top elation when our contestants succeed.”

But more than anything else, the show is a candy-coated romp through a place most of us visit on a weekly basis. “What it really is to me is a fantasy ride through the supermarket. … You’re allowed to run as fast as you can and grab as much stuff as you can, from all of the highest shelves, the lowest shelves, the frozen food section, every part of the supermarket. And it doesn’t matter whether you can afford or can’t afford to have four carts full,” said Rossiter. “It’s a fantasy of kind of breaking the rules and just doing what you want.” Premieres on ABC Sunday, Oct. 18