The comedy "Tour de Pharmacy" premiered on HBO last July 8 and opened to largely favorable reviews. It is a sports doping mockumentary directed by Jake Szymanski.
"Tour de Pharmacy" highlights a comical group of characters which includes Marty Hass (Andy Samberg), Juju Peppi (Orlando Bloom), Adrian Baton (Freddie Highmore), Gustav Ditters (John Cena) and Slim Robinson (Daveed Diggs). They are professional cyclists who get mired in a doping controversy in the 1980s. The show has received 91 percent on RottenTomatoes from critics and 74 percent from audiences.
Ray Rahman from Entertainment Weekly wrote, "You don't have to know or care much about the sport to enjoy the broad sight gags, amusing tangents, and cartoonish accents."
Indeed, the actors take on foreign accents that are humorous. For instance, Bloom's Peppi has an Italian accent while professional wrestler Cena takes on an Austrian accent for his character Ditters.
Boston Globe's Matthew Gilbert expressed, "The never-ending jokes are profane, obvious, ludicrous, repetitive, absurdist, puerile, crass, tasteless, and, of course, totally freaking stupid. Yeah, I loved it."
The premise of the show is that police discover that narcotics were used by cyclists who bribed Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) president Ditmer Klerken (Kevin Bacon) to forego drug testing. The culprits involved in the doping were banned from the 1982 Tour de France and only five were allowed to participate: Hass, Baton, Robinson, Ditters and Peppi.
One ongoing gag is that Ditters' muscular body frame is due to the steroids he took the year before. Authorities later find out that he had been taking cheetah's blood thus disqualifying him from the tournament.
The Atlantic's Sophie Gilbert wrote, "It takes the thorny subject of doping in professional cycling and turns it into pure, gleeful mayhem."
The show also has cameos from Mike Tyson, J.J. Abrams and Lance Armstrong.
"Tour de Pharmacy" is now showing on HBO. Viewers can check their local HBO listings for the next airings.
