Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Season one was angry and angsty. It was grief and mourning and trying to cope with change and absence and personal failure.
Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) returns home and struggles to process his own grief and trauma. He’s left his career as a world-class chef to pull his brother’s sandwich shop out of debt.
But it’s not easy when Carmy struggles with the pressures of running his brother’s business, trauma within both his own family and the restaurant industry wrapped up in unprocessed feelings surrounding his brother’s death.
The show is unrelenting towards the viewer.
Immediately, you’re catapulted into the cut-throat world of a professional kitchen environment. We meet the other members of the cast amidst grease fires, egg yolks on the floor, dirty counter tops, and people colliding despite constantly yelling “Corner!” and “Behind!”.
Everyone’s struggling and you can feel it.
While Carmy was off climbing the ranks of international cuisine, his brother was back home building a small business. What makes it all the more difficult for Carmy to grieve is also that he inherits his brother’s terrible business decisions as well as a team who are very wary of Carmy’s intentions.
Season one is an exploration of what it’s like to have an all consuming career that takes you far away from everything and everyone you know. While you’re off doing your thing, life continues back home, and things both change and don’t change.
To balance him out, there’s young and ambitious Sydney who has the same kind of fire Carmy has about food. She’s passionate and smart about the restaurant, and they often end up battling over what to do to save the restaurant with Carmy in their chaotic but well-intentioned ways.
The show doesn’t shy away from the real issues in the restaurant industry and I’ve seen many a restaurant worker say they can’t watch the show because it’s just too real. And I get that, after a long day at work doing just what they depict on the show, you don’t come home to unwind to more of the same.
That just adds to the real and gritty feel of the show.
While Carmy gives it an honest go to save the restaurant, by end of season one it’s clear that there’s just too much baggage that comes with it, and they decide to start over fresh.
But opening a new restaurant on a whim is far from easy.
And season two shows The Bear in deep shit from the start.
Carmy’s standards are high and he wants to bring his high-level skills to a small establishment, elevating his brother’s memory as he comes to term with his own past.
Using work as a way to ignore your emotional struggle takes a toll on his sense of self and his relationships. Carmy starts to learn how to balance an all-consuming career with a life. He’s often out of his depth and struggles to find purpose in the more mundane things.
Season has a much slower pace and it works so well.
While the intensity of the first season set up the world really well, season two takes time and focuses on life, on love, on family, on food.
While the restaurant is being revamped, everyone has to find how they fit into it all.
Things have been shuffled around and Carmy and Sydney do their best to elevate the skills of the team.
Season two takes long, languorous journeys into the world of food outside of the restaurant and shows us what food means, not just to the characters on the show, but to humans in general.
Food is love, food is care.
And in their own way, everyone in the restaurant is striving to find their way back to a love they’ve lost, a love for themselves and those in their life which they can best express through food.
I loved the moment Sydney had in making that omelette (I made one myself and it was delicious, though I substituted the sour-cream & onion chips for balsamic vinegar chips) where, amidst all the stress of completing an impossible task, she was able to reconnect to what cooking’s really all about.
In fact, many of the characters that we see feeling lost in season one, find new inspiration in season two. And watching those journeys is heart-warming.
Cousin Richie probably has the most inspiring journey of all in season two, and having that not only culminate in an incredibly honest apology to Sugar, but also in running the kitchen in a pinch, was a real victory for a character I was cheering for despite him being the most infuriating thing ever.
Season two has echoes of Netflix’s Chef’s Table in it, with the food journeys we go on which makes it a beautiful exploration of food.
But what I really love about this show is coming away from it feeling uplifted and like I’d just experienced something real.
I’m really glad they didn’t rush through the backstory elements, but took their time in bringing us into where each character is coming from. This is especially true with Carmy’s family, and we get to see the origins of his chef’s career in his unstable family life.
Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance as Donna Berzatto is so incredibly real it hurts. Donna is incredibly emotionally unstable, has a martyr complex and is severely codependent. I’ve had echoes of this in my own family, and seeing how she struggles to handle the success of her children was very reminiscent of how I’ve seen some of my family members struggle.
The most beautiful thing about The Bear is that each of the people in the restaurant have come together in this one project as a means to try and heal some part of themselves which they haven’t been able to elsewhere.
This makes it greater than the sum of it’s parts.
And this is why you need great (human) writers writing these stories.
I love that each character gets to go on an individual journey during which they discover things about themselves they didn’t know, uncover kindness and bring back wisdom — such as the “Every Second Counts” which crops up a few times during and ends season two.
With a renewed focus and a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, it’s gonna be interesting to see where season three takes us.
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