Streaming on: Disney+
Episodes viewed: 10 of 10
Early in The Bear’s superlative second season, Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) strategises with Chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) on the kind of food their new restaurant will be serving: “a chaos menu, but thoughtful” is the approach they settle on. The second season of Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo’s restaurant drama is pure chaos menu, too, but there is clearly also a heck of a lot of thought invested into it. Just as these characters are reimagining their beloved restaurant, so too are the showrunners reconfiguring their show, building on a strong debut and making something significantly better. If that first run of episodes was the starter, this is the main course.
Season 1 was about conflict and compromise and unresolved trauma; there’s plenty of that in Season 2 as well, but these new episodes have a fresh optimism, finding growth and self-betterment. Passion for the food — endless, gorgeously shot, drool-inducing food — is never in doubt; behind it all, though, there’s an ambient theme of happiness, the characters pondering, in such a high-risk, low-reward industry as theirs, if it is possible to eke out any kind of joy — if there is room to do better by yourself, and the people around you.
The Bear is what happens when people who care about everything make a TV show.
White’s Carmy is again the centre of that journey, now sharing top billing with Edebiri’s Syd (both as good as they’ve ever been — he all stoic blue-eyed intensity, she all naturalistic wit). But this season shows remarkable attentiveness towards its entire ensemble. Spiky sous-chef Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas ) has softened her early hostility, finding a new groove in middle-age at culinary school; pastry king Marcus (Lionel Boyce) spends an entire episode learning new tricks in Copenhagen, his gentle curiosity richly rewarded. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — last season, a kind of self-destructive, Italian, hothead douchebag — enjoys an especially astounding, authentic arc: learning empathy through acts of service.
It builds on ideas chewed on in the first season. Cooking is, in so many ways, a selfless act. But does it hold all the answers? Standout episode five, a tense hour-long disaster movie, goes some way to explaining Carmy’s personal issues, a flashback to an insane Italian-American family Christmas meal (with more A-list cameos than you can shake a cannoli at), which wisely posits that food is both an expression of love and pointless if you’re going it alone.
Amid the chaos, there are insights and wisdom like this throughout, endless pathos-rich gut-punches. What other show could turn something as mundane as a fire-suppression test into its most emotionally resonant moment? At one point, Carmy tells Syd that chasing Michelin stars means, “You’re going to have to care about everything.” The Bear is what happens when people who care about everything make a TV show.