It's never a good idea to count your chickens and whatnot, but Ben Feldman admits he may have been the annoying one when the cast of Superstore was waiting to hear whether they'd be picked up for a second season.
"It's a very optimistic cast," Feldman told E! News right before the NBC sitcom's second-season premiere last week. "In fact, I'm probably the biggest pessimist in our entire cast. When we shot the pilot everybody talked about, 'Well, when we got to series we're going to do this and do that, and I'm going to get out of this apartment and get into a nicer one.' And I was always the one being like, 'Guys, relax. Let's just wait until...'
"And then we got picked up and it was like, 'Guys, wait till the numbers come in.' I'm always that guy."
Happily for everyone involved, including America Ferrera (who's also a producer on the series), Lauren Ash, Colton Dunn, Nico Santos, Nichole Bloom and Mark McKinney, Superstore remains open for business.
"Inevitably, now looking back, I in retrospect look like the jerk of the cast," Feldman admitted good-naturedly, "and everybody else got it and I didn't."
Most importantly, viewers got it, and now fans are invested in the fates of Amy, Dina, Jonah and the rest of the Cloud 9 crew.
Feldman had more to tell us about what Jonah's going to get up to this season, how he feels about being part of NBC's resurgent Thursday-night comedy block and how he would fare if he got himself locked in an actual superstore overnight—all of which is in the video above.
The actor, who previously logged scene-stealing screen time on Silicon Valley, Mad Men and Drop Dead Diva, also took our E!Q in 42—and, among the various things he shared with us, it turns out he was as interested in finding out all there was to know about the Brangelina breakup as everybody else was last week.
"My wife was just texting me about it a second ago," Feldman shared. "If you walked outside on the street yesterday and said, 'Name the one couple that would send everybody into a fury if something happened, it would obviously be that couple."
We're guessing the writers' room got the memo. Superstore airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on NBC.
(E! News and NBC are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)