CBS Mid-Season Pilot Review: Superior Donuts - Premieres February 2

[TJ]

Superior Donuts - Special Preview Thursday, February 2 at 8:30PM ET/PT on CBS
Moves to Mondays Starting February 6 at 9:00PM ET/PT

Superior Donuts is a comedy about the owner of a small donut shop that's located in a quickly gentrifying Chicago neighborhood. Arthur is a gruff, to-the-point Chicagoan who refuses to sell newfangled cronuts and macchiatos or renovate his dated shop that hasn't changed since it opened in 1969. That all changes when enterprising go-getter Franco fast-talks his way into Arthur's life as his new (and only) employee, and convinces him that he can bring the shop – and Arthur – into the 21st century. Arthur's supportive regulars include loyal patron Randy, a cop whose late father was Arthur's best friend; her overeager rookie partner, James; Tush, a colorful customer who uses the shop counter as a makeshift office, where he keeps tabs on a variety of odd jobs via fax machine; Maya, a privileged grad-school student working on her Ph. D; and Sweatpants, Franco's longtime friend who's willing to dress as a donut to help drum up more business. Looking to cash in on the urban renewal is Arthur's over-caffeinated neighbor, aspiring real estate capitalist Fawz, who pushes Arthur on a daily basis to sell the building to him. With his business in jeopardy, Arthur grudgingly realizes that he had better embrace the change around him and that Franco could be exactly what he – and the donut shop – need to thrive.

Read our review here:
http://blog.sitcomsonline.com/2017/0...-superior.html

[70s show watcher]

i enjoyed the show much more than i thought i would i even laughed out loud a few times i will watch it again

[Edison]

Hope the show can keep looking as good..superior.. as those donuts.

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/article/very-s...hole-si-249535

By Erik Adams@ErikMAdams
Feb 3, 2017 12:00 AM

When Tracy Letts debuted Superior Donuts at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2008, it represented an abrupt turn for the playwright behind such intense theatrical works as August: Osage County, Killer Joe, and Bug. Reviewing the play’s Broadway run for The New York Times a year later, critic Charles Isherwood wrote:

Don’t construe the sitcom comparison as a simple sneer. Who doesn’t like to spend the occasional evening, clicker in hand, with a few episodes of a beloved old favorite? The style and setting of Mr. Letts’s new play strongly evoke Norman Lear’s groundbreaking shows of the 1970s, which mixed smart jokes and social commentary in satisfying proportions.

It was a prescient observation: Nearly a decade later, Superior Donuts has become that exact type of sitcom, one that mixes smart(ish) jokes and social commentary in satisfying(ish) proportions. (The show premiered last night, and moves to its regular time, Mondays at 9 Eastern, on February 6.) Developed for TV by Bob Daily and former Community producers (and Greendale Human Being namesakes) Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan, it’s the story of a city’s changing face, centered on the relationship between set-in-his-ways donut shop owner Arthur Przybyszewski (Judd Hirsch) and the shop’s lone, enterprising employee, Franco Wicks (Jermaine Fowler). Arthur’s a baby-boomer immigrant who escaped communist Poland; Franco’s a black millennial whose Chicago neighborhood, Uptown, was long neglected by the people of Chicago, but is now seeing an increase in property values and Starbucks openings. The pair strikes an uneasy, but expedited-for-TV alliance, the type in which Franco introduces sriracha to Arthur’s signature glaze recipe, and Arthur chafes against the change, until he runs out of cons to compete with the pros of Franco’s inventive streak. As would be the case in one of those vintage comedies, there’s just no arguing with the long line of trend-chasers attracted by Superior Donuts’ spicy new treat.

Superior Donuts is itself part of a trend, one that’s injecting contemporary talking points into primetime comedy the way Franco updates Arthur’s tried-and-true breakfast pastries. Like Isherwood wrote about Letts’ play, it’s not a new idea: This was the method Norman Lear and other writers and producers staked their name to 40-plus years ago, dramatizing conversations that were happening on the other side of the TV screen with opinionated surrogates like Archie Bunker, Maude Findlay, Fred Sanford, and Ann Romano. Unlike their predecessors, today’s topical comedies aren’t all “taped in front of a live studio audience” affairs. There’s Superior Donuts, The Carmichael Show, Mom, and Netflix’s One Day At A Time remake, but there’s also the single-camera spawn of Curb Your Enthusiasm, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and Louie, like You’re The Worst, Transparent, or Better Things. (The overlooked link in this evolutionary chain: Mike White and Laura Dern’s soulful activist parable Enlightened.) Arguably, the modern-day champ of mixing laughs with issues that people face in the real world is neither real, nor a person: It’s BoJack Horseman, the equine star of an eponymous animated Netflix series in which silly animal puns and soul-dredging character studies are given equal weight.

[king of comedy]

I'll give it a try.

[caladon]

Funny thing; while I was watching the scene in the pilot where Franco walks in looking for a job, it reminded me of the pilot episode of Chico and the Man.

[TMC]

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/cul...lice-brutality

By Lindsay Kornick | | February 3, 2017 | 2:19 AM EST

The new CBS series Superior Donuts premiered on Thursday night with a surprisingly free-wheeling, non-PC attitude. Within the first few scenes it’s mocking a millennial in a gender studies course and a businessman from Iraq. However, to exist in this country, I guess you have to make one offensive joke for every decent one, and demonizing cops is as insulting as it gets.

[1960'sTVfan]

What I dislike about modern sitcoms is that it now seems mandatory for them to contain at least some amount of crude/foul language. Some of the humor is insult driven. Also, much of the humor is topical, meaning that many of the jokes make reference to things that are current, which usually doesn't appeal to me as being funny. It seems that sitcom writers of today either will not or cannot write a good story interwoven with genuine humor. So instead they take the easy/lazy route and use insults and topical jokes.