In Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, a satirical noir thriller about a Hollywood movie studio exec who literally gets away with murder, a minor subplot involves two hustling screenwriters pitching a dark-spirited “independent” picture called Habeas Corpus. It’s a gritty drama about a woman wrongly accused of murder who still fries in the gas chamber, but only after falling in love with her prosecuting attorney, who tragically then manages to produce evidence of her innocence moments after her death. The writers are dreadfully serious about the intended integrity of the project, including the depressing, justiceless ending in which our innocent heroine dies and the most important hallmark of anti-Tinsel Town authenticity, on which they insist: “No stars on this project. We’re going out on a limb on one,” one of them asserts.
That said, I’d easily still take half a dozen Meryl Streeps in fright wigs over the latest stage-to-screen monstrosity Letts and Steppenwolf hath inadvertently wrought, namely CBS’s 22-minute midseason replacement situation comedy Superior Donuts, which finished its eight-episode first-season run on March 20 and, as reported today, will return for a second season. Just as the Pulitzer-winning script of A:OC is now taught in college playwriting classes around the country, so, I’d argue, should Letts’s 2008 stage play Superior Donuts and at least four episodes of the wretched network afterbirth it spawned. This would impress the archetype of the sellout even on young minds, and could be a thing of legitimate value.
The above rip-snorting, razor-sharp Rahmbo jab kicked off a recent episode called “The Amazing Racists,” the plot of which involved the millennial clerk getting stopped and frisked by an Uptown cop who’s friendly with the fuzz who hang in the doughnut shop. The shop then hosts a town hall dialogue for harassed citizens and harried police to air their mutual grievances, arbitrated by a cloying white-girl undergrad snowflake who seems to represent both Uptown gentrifiers and anyone who might be watching this show in Nebraska. This is followed by a second stop-and-frisk mistaken identity incident involving the same kid, which results in the hippie proprietor telling his cool young employee not to wear a hoodie if he wants to avoid cops. Needless to say, though, by the end literally everything is resolved. There’s even an apology and promise from the bad-apple cop to stop harassing the jokingly proclaimed “Black Bart Simpson.”
Hippie doughnut guy: You know I’m actually glad this happened, because I think I learned a lot today.
Cool millennial employee: Yeah, I think we all did. A’ight, bring it in.
[They hug.]
Zany dry cleaning proprietor from next door, observing two men in an embrace: Gay!
Fin.
Letts has a new work beginning previews at Steppenwolf next week, Linda Vista, that, at least for now, seems to star only members of the ensemble and Chicago-based actors, including Letts himself, and with an excellent cast and the fine director Dexter Bullard at the helm, there’s no reason not to look forward to it. But in the meantime, hopefully Letts’s Superior Donuts will eventually get the authentic Chicago enshrinement it richly deserves: a dessert item named after it at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company on Navy Pier. v
