There’s so much joy when you find a show that is so well done that you can’t even think of what you would critique. This happened to me last year when I got around to (confession: I was late to the game) FX on Hulu’s The Bear. Of course, the scary thing was, if a show as great as The Bear got a second season, then how would the talent involved pull off that same level of quality? That’s the dreaded sophomore slump. However, it brings me great pleasure to report that The Bear Part Two (as it is dubbed by a title card in episode one of season two) doesn’t just meet the lofty expectations one might hold for its second season, it actually exceeds them.
Season one focused on the efforts of Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) to keep his dead brother’s Chicago sandwich shop going—leaving his job as chef at a three-star Michelin restaurant to do so. As season one came to its brilliant close, Carmen finds a large sum of money hidden in spaghetti sauce cans and comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t have to choose between keeping his brother’s dream alive and manifesting his own vision. Carmen aims to turn The Original Beef into one of Chicago’s finest dining destinations, as tribute to his lost brother Mikey (the heartbreaking Jon Bernthal).
If season one was about Carmen coming to terms with his brother’s suicide and trying to save his family business, season two is about elevating that legacy to the next level. While the terrific Jeremy Allen White as Carmen is certainly still the essential linchpin of the show, one of the many pleasures of season two is how the supporting cast (even the extended supporting players) are given sizable arcs of their own, or, at minimum, lovely grace notes during this new season.
Dessert chef Marcus (the impossibly likable Lionel Boyce) is sent to Copenhagen to learn new culinary experiences under an old friend of Carmen’s. He sleeps on a Danish boat, learns new recipes and techniques, and in one of those great but not necessarily necessary scenes (think Marge with her sad high school friend in Fargo or George Clooney stopping to look at horses in Michael Clayton), Marcus happens to find a Danish man on a deserted roadway who has wrecked his bicycle and is trapped under fencing. Marcus stops and helps him. The older man then gives Marcus a long hug for getting him get free. Now, does a scene like this move the plot forward at all? No. But what it does do is reveal character. Marcus is a kind, sweet man, and during this chance encounter, we see just how good he really is. That encounter also echoes a recurring illustration in The Bear: the way fate guides us down paths toward incredible opportunities that would have been missed if those unlikely roads had not been taken.
There’s also a pretty hard to beat scene between Sydney (hopeful Emmy nominee for season one, Ayo Edebiri) and Tina (a terrific Liza Colon-Zayas), where Sydney offers Tina the opportunity to move up to sous chef. The look on Tina’s face is glorious. Sydney has seen her and expressed a belief in her abilities. Tina’s beaming expression lets you know it’s been a long time since anyone has made her feel that way. Sydney then sends Tina to culinary school, and when her much younger fellow students ask her to come out with them, she sings a jaw-dropping version of Freddy Fender’s “Before the Last Teardrop falls.” Also pretty damn hard to beat.
There are so many things to love about this show. The gritty cinematic photography (shot often in close up, punctuated by occasional stunning wide shots), the frequent cascade of a dazzling montage of food prep and dish presentation,, the authentic use of Chicago locations, and the extraordinary work of music supervisors Josh Senior and Christopher Storer (also the show’s creator). The eclectic choices these two make for the show’s needle drops (everything from Otis Redding to The Replacements to the obscure band The Durutti Column can be found here) make for easily the best soundtrack of any television show.
A wonderful example of how perfect their song choices are takes place when troubled “Cousin” Richie is sent to learn to stage and work tables at a local fine dining spot. Richie (so well played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is surely the most wayward character on the show. All of his bravado masks a deep insecurity that at 45 he’s developed no great skills and has little to look forward to. But, as Richie sees that he can learn, that he can get better, you see him emotionally bloom for just a moment (Richie is the kind of cat who is always going to be up and down), driving home and singing along to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” at the top of his lungs. It’s hard to overstate what this does to the heart of the viewer, but it’s fair to say that it makes it swell, particularly when the usage of Swift’s song emotionally re-connects him to his daughter. That connection isn’t something explicitly spelled out, but through small allusions here and there, we understand it exists, and it makes the characterization (and the show) all the richer for it.
I would also add that REM’s “Strange Currencies,” which is used in three episodes, has been rescued by Senior and Storer from an album that even fans of the Athens band tend to think of as a lesser work. But when Carmen has a very well-staged meet cute with Claire (a delightfully esoteric Molly Gordon), a woman he went to high school with but despite nursing mutual crushes never had a moment together, the song plays over their lines as the two flirt and almost make a date, the moment is greatly enhanced by Michael Stipe’s tender vocal. Carmen, by his own admission, knows how to love what he does, but he doesn’t know how to have fun. Claire represents both a hopeful romantic future for Carmen but also a likely complication considering the level of time and commitment required to open a new eatery at breakneck speed. Can Carmen do both? Love a person and a job and balance the two? As Carmen tells Sydney what it takes to earn a Michelin star, “You’re going to have to care about everything more than anything.” That doesn’t leave a lot of room for a personal life, and much of Carmen’s season two arc is about his ability to open a restaurant for patrons and his heart to another person.
The Bear isn’t the easiest show to categorize. Most episodes are sitcom length, and all include uproarious moments of humor, but The Bear isn’t a comedy. It’s really a (mostly) half-hour drama that makes you laugh due to situations and the ace-level specific character development the writers provide the actors.
A great example of how deep and clever the writing goes takes place in episode one, when we learn that Cousin Richie’s alarm password is “gofastboatsmojito.” That’s a joke that is funny if you don’t know the origin of the password, but even better if you do. Go fast boats are the ocean cruisers Colin Farrell drives in Miami Vice, and mojitos are Farrell’s character’s favorite drink in the movie. I mean, seriously, who puts that kind of deep cut Miami Vice movie joke into a show like this?
Not only do I think it’s the best show of the new TV year, but the show’s sixth episode, “Seven Fishes” (which stretches out to 66 minutes) is probably going to be the best hour of anything I’ll see this year. This episode goes back five years to a nightmarish Christmas family gathering, which uncovers the root of the dysfunction Carmen is saddled with and likely drove Mikey to his death. We see their mother (a terrifyingly great Jamie Lee Curtis) try to cook dinner without having a nervous breakdown. To put it mildly, she fails, and the escalating family drama feels like something equally at home on the stage and in this episode. It must be mentioned that the casting for “Seven Fishes” is truly stunning. Aside from regulars Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bacharach, Carmen’s uncle Oliver Platt, Abby Elliot (so good as Carmen’s sister and the new restaurant’s project manager), and Bernthal as Mikey, you also get Bob Odenkirk as the contentious Uncle Lee, and, well, I’m not going to spoil who else shows up. Just know that your eyes will pop initially by the cameos, but as the episode moves forward, you forget that you’ve seen these fancy people in other places, and just get pulled into the ride. The table scene where Odenkirk lays into Bernthal about being a loser who never finishes anything is both unnerving and hysterical. The level of agitation is near fever-pitched, but within that hour and six minutes, you are provided with an understanding of why these people behave the way they do. Again, character first.
It’s a true sign of how great The Bear is that even when actors like Robert Townsend (as Sydney’s dad) and a certain Oscar winning actress (as a chef for another restaurant) show up in guest spots, you don’t catch yourself thinking, “Wow, that’s so and so!” for long because everyone involved in this show just melts into the storytelling—they just play their parts brilliantly. There is no sense of stunt-casting, which is a pretty damn remarkable accomplishment when you think of it.
And maybe that’s the thing that brings me the most joy while watching The Bear: you are constantly surprised by the writing, the framing, the acting, the everything. It’s so smart and bold. It may seem odd to say that a show about a group of people opening a restaurant is a true original, but all I can tell you is that every minute I’m watching The Bear, it’s in the back of my mind every second: I have never seen this show before. Every episode feels like a discovery.
As season two closes with the new restaurant (titled “The Bear,” naturally) opening itself up for business, expertly showcasing the exhilaration and terror that comes with an opening night, I started thinking about what The Bear is about to me.
Most of us are typically born into a family with some level of dysfunction (although the Berzattos are next level), but, as we go on in life, if we are smart and maybe a little lucky, we build new families. Ones made up of co-workers and friends who fill in the gaps that our birth families don’t provide us. That to me is The Bear in a nutshell: the family you are born with and the one that you make. For all the human flaws these characters have built into their DNA, I absolutely recognize all of them to some degree. In that way, the show is somewhat familiar, but the magic is all in the doing, and no show is doing the “doing” better than The Bear.
It’s barely the end of June, and The Bear Part Two is the best show of this new season. This is the show every other show to come will be chasing. Good luck to all of them, but they are racing against Secretariat.
And no one is beating Secretariat.