Writers’ Room Eats: Superior Donuts
What is Writers’ Room Eats, you ask? It’s a new monthly series, each spotlighting a current TV show’s writers’ room. Specifically, we ask a few writers from the show what foods fuel them through the long days of pitching jokes and plot twists and late night rewrites. If you learn nothing else from this series, you’ll learn that every writers’ room ever is totally obsessed with lunch.
For our first installment, Paste talked to the writing staff of the CBS comedy Superior Donuts. The show revolves around an old-school donut shop called, you guessed it, Superior Donuts. The curmudgeon-y owner, Arthur, is stuck in the past while his Chicago neighborhood gentrifies around him. Everything changes when Franco shows up with lots of big ideas for the shop, and convinced Arthur to hire him as his lone employee. The series follows the unlikely pair and their cast of regular customers as they work to keep the business afloat.
Paste spoke with writers Emily Wilson, Peter Murrieta and Cindy Appel about workday snacks, their infamous lunch wheel and, of course, donuts.
Paste: Tell me all about donuts. Did you eat tons of them?
Peter Murrieta: I have loved donuts forever. I was one of the ones that brought them in from a couple of places that I think do them right:Bob’s in the Farmer’s Market and Stan’s in Westwood. But as production started and we got down to it, that kind of eased up. I love a good Maple Cake donut and won’t pass one up if it’s around.
Emily Wilson: We researched how donuts are made and when we first started writing there were a lot of donuts coming into the writers’ room. Lots of donut enthusiasm. But now that we’re shooting, we have access to BOXES of free donuts post shoot, so that’s how we get fat now.
Paste: Did you visit any donut shops?
PM: I visited Bob’s at the Farmer’s Market—I’m a long time client—and I got a chance to ask him some specifics about how it all goes down. I also got to ask him how come they don’t make the maple cake donuts until after 7 a.m. His response was, “Maybe everyone doesn’t like maple cake donuts like you do, Peter.”
EW: Peter sometimes likes foods that many others do not. Like pumpkin pie. Disgusting, disgusting pumpkin pie.
Paste: Let’s move on to other foods. What are the snacks like?
Cindy Appel: One thing I noticed with the writers’ room and food is that it’s all about timing. You get there in the morning, you’re fresh, maybe you worked out that morning and you’re feeling healthy. So you eat half a donut and even order fries with lunch. Lunch comes and you’re happy you got fries because you’re suddenly ravenous like you just wandered out of The Grapes of Wrath or something. Then about mid-afternoon, you feel like a viscous pile of lard sitting in a chair, but oh! here comes coffee! Yay, coffee! That gets you to about 8 p.m. when you don’t care about life anymore and will eat the second half of the donut you gingerly ate for breakfast, plus two pieces of pizza.
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