Superior Donuts

It could get very good in the future, even though it’s not there yet.

It doesn’t always work, but it has the potential to break through its own built-in limitations.

With its talented cast and a willingness to reference current events, Superior Donuts evinces some potential, especially if the show’s writers can come up with better, less redundant sitcom plots.

Superior Donuts may well get stale in a hurry. But it’s on a network that somehow has kept the idiotic and likewise eatery-themed 2 Broke Girls on the air for an astonishing six seasons. And this one is better than that.

There’s potential here, if the show could relax on the gentrification jokes and maybe commit to finding more depth in its characters, who in the first three episodes are little more than archetypes.

The staging is suffocatingly old-school: Stand up, deliver laugh line, walk to other side of shop for no reason other than to make room for the next character to stand and deliver. That’s not to say that the material isn’t moderately amusing.

Superior Donuts is far from unwatchable. The snappy repartee between the crusty old white owner and his hustling young black employee may not quite draw the blood that the thematically similar "Chico and the Man" did, but it's not without its chuckles. And Fowler brings a madly exuberant charm to his role that marks him for future stardom.

Reminiscent of “Chico and the Man” (the mid-’70s NBC sitcom about a cranky garage owner and his Chicano employee), but it also aspires to a contemporary relevance--but manages only a weary crustiness.

Superior Donuts feels like the kind of sitcom that would have struck audiences as a cozy place to visit every week if it had premiered in the days before cable and streaming. As it is, it feels at once odd and stale.

Superior Donuts has the potential to be something special and groundbreaking. Instead, it’s just another plain-glazed TV show--too sweet and empty in the middle.

A bigger problem for Superior Donuts is that its humor feels as tired as Arthur appears to be. The comedy is based on a play by the talented writer and actor Tracy Letts, but at times, the watered-down Donuts feels as though it was dredged up from a comedy vault that closed decades ago.

However good Arthur's donuts are, as sitcoms go, this product is pretty inferior.