The Bear: back on the boil

In its first season creator Christopher Storer’s smoke-filled, claustrophobic Chicago restaurant drama, The Bear, gave television its most unflinching and warts and all portrait of the realities of life in the food services industry.

The first season followed the struggles and personal traumas of fine-dining wunderkind chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), who in the wake of the death of his beloved, troubled older brother Mikey, returns from his life in the pristine modern kitchens of Michelin-star cuisine in New York to his native Chicago, where he’s tasked with trying to keep the family restaurant alive.  

While the struggling restaurant — a solid, crowd-pleasing, working-class beef sandwich joint, The Bear — is being kept afloat in a struggling economy by a man with the scars of the unprocessed traumas of his relationship with his brother and the ghosts of his own personal history, things reached an unbearable high-pressure point in the first season’s penultimate episode.

That proved to be one of the most tense and furious moments in recent television history and by the end of it all, we were left uncertain as to whether The Bear would survive, even if it seemed that Carmy and his beloved Chicago, just might.

Without spoiling things too much, suffice to say that Carmy and his family are thankfully still with us and as the second season begins they find themselves in a position of uncertainty, anxiety and excitement as they prepare to relaunch the restaurant as a high-end dining establishment, in a city where the restaurant business has been decimated by the Covid pandemic.

Self-taught former college football hopeful turned McDonald’s fry-cook and now talented pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is looking after his sick mother, while trying to imagine a new range of deserts that will wow high-end diners.

High-anxiety, overachieving Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) is embracing her new role as Carmy’s right hand — traipsing the length and breadth of the city in search of advice and inspiration from its recently hard-hit but generous and supportive chef community.

Even Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Mikey’s best friend and partner in crime, is doing some soul-searching and growing up as he learns that the service in “service industry” is all about listening to and caring about others. As for Carmy, well there’s the potential for him to find love, if he can finally just learn to love himself first.

Season two is very much about learning for the characters, and as we watch the preparations for the fast approaching launch of The Bear 2.0, we learn with them.

We learn the ins and outs and bureaucratic frustrations of what’s needed to open a restaurant in the US: fire tests, gas safety, building permits and of course menu and dining experience planning — all as engaging here as if they were the elements of a global conspiracy thriller.

We also learn far more about the personal lives and emotional triggers of the characters beyond Carmy and get to follow them from Chicago to Copenhagen as their erstwhile leader quietly sends them on training missions that his own haute cuisine journey took him.

Just as we and The Bear crew are settling into reasonably quiet, idealistic complacency and beginning to believe that maybe this screwed up, dysfunctional, self-sabotaging family of misfits might be able to pull it all off, Storer and his writers slam the brakes on and pull us back into Carmy’s world for a flashback family Christmas meal episode that’s easily the most tense, uncomfortable and psychologically mind-fu**ing experience in small-screen history.

Featuring a screen-stealing performance from scream-queen Jamie-Lee Curtis and a hard-hitting supporting cast that includes Bob Odenkirk, Jon Bernthal, John Mulaney and Sara Paulson it’s your ultimate family festive get-together nightmare dialled up to gas mark 1000 and when things implode, they do so with the emotional force of a hydrogen bomb.

If you were worried that the show had settled into some sort of easily recognisable personal-story cum workplace-detail drama — episode six of season two is here to remind you of what The Bear does better than any other show: place groups of disparately messed up people in a pot, put them under increasingly high heat, wait and watch as they boil to a point where it’s inevitable that things are going to spill messily and terribly all over the stove.

This time, though the focus is not so singularly on Carmy and his many demons and though it travels beyond the stockyard built, hard-living, no-nonsense honesties of its beloved Chicago, the show’s creators are still very much pulling the strings behind the scenes. Their excellent writing and delicately timed direction is there to remind us that this is not just a show about the restaurant industry and the madness of chefs; but also about a particularly psychologically tormented Chicago boy trying to change the world and taking it all on his shoulders.

Hopefully this time, he has support from those around him to succeed with them rather than in spite of them. Whatever the final result, the new Bear is a labour of unconditional, dirty, raw love whose creation has indelibly changed all those involved in it.

The Bear Season 2 is available to stream on Disney Plus from July 19.