<i>Superior Donuts</i> Tries to Update an Old Classic
The new CBS multi-camera sitcom, based on a Tracy Letts play, is stodgy in format but has moments of freshness.
It’s not overstating things to say that is definitively the only Tracy Letts play that could ever be reworked as a multi-camera sitcom. (Although it’s fun to fantasize about what, say, Marti Noxon or Lisa Hanawalt might do with ). When it premiered in 2008, the same year Letts won a Pulitzer and a Tony for , was something of a surprise: a gentle, odd-couple drama about a crunchy old Chicagoan running his family-founded doughnut store and have interpreted the play as a love letter to the Norman Lear comedies of the 1970s. So CBS’s new half-hour sitcom feels like an organic development, if not an entirely fresh one.
