Yahoo News ‘The Bear’ Review: FX/Hulu’s Hit Dramedy Serves Up a Satisfying Meal of a Second Season
It may not have been immediately apparent in the raw and gritty early episodes, but FX/Hulu’s The Bear has always had a certain sweetness at its core. The first season had screaming matches, fistfights, even an accidental stabbing. It also saw Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) learning to break toxic cycles, and coming around with the staff to a mutual understanding and admiration.
So as season two begins, the whole team is united in the ambitious project of retooling the grimy hole-in-the-wall that was The Beef into a sleek fine-dining establishment to be called The Bear. Just as not every dish survives a menu retooling, some elements get lost as the dramedy transitions from a series about working in a kitchen to one about launching a restaurant; the boiling tension of season one is now more of a rapid simmer. But the series doubles down on its deep affection for the characters and the relationship between them — and in doing so, delivers a second season that’s even more delectable than the first.
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First, though, The Bear takes a beat to consider what it’s doing at all. “Yo, you ever think about purpose?” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) asks early in the premiere. Though Carmy initially sighs that he doesn’t have time for this, he relents when he sees how much the question weighs on him. Richie worries the rest of the Beef crew will drop him once they realize how little he has to contribute; Carmy, for his part, admits that as excited as he is about the new venture, he doesn’t find any of this fun.
They’re not the only ones taking stock of their life’s work. Sydney, a gifted chef who wants a Michelin star so desperately she can almost taste it, feels the possibility of failure closing in. Veteran line cooks Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) have their skills put to the test in culinary school, where she flourishes while he flounders.
With The Bear closed to customers for much of the season’s ten half-hour-ish episodes, the show’s view necessarily turns inward. I missed some of the raucous camaraderie of The Beef at lunch rush, when the kitchen staff would sweat over open flames and shout over clanging pots. And with less interaction with the surrounding community, The Bear loses some of the distinctive Chicago-ness that defined season one — though an episode-three montage of Sydney eating her way through the city, communing with fellow restaurant workers and dreaming up brand-new dishes as she goes, stands as an effusive love letter to the local culinary scene.
But most of the dramedy’s charms remain intact, even enhanced. An insanely compressed three-month timeline to debut keeps the stakes high, the emotions heated and the momentum brisk. From chapter to chapter, the unopened eatery careens between disaster (extensive mold, faulty equipment, an exploding toilet) and promise (Carmy and Syd pitching ideas for a “chaos menu” consisting of every unique and scrumptious combination they can conceive of).
But while the renovations at The Bear might look chaotic, The Bear itself remains fully in control. Its banter takes on an almost musical rhythm as Syd and Tina nerd out over sauté pans or Richie and Fak (Matty Matheson) nearly come to blows about how best to paint a wall. Its tone veers from laugh-out-loud funny to achingly sad to third-act-of-Goodfellas-level frantic, and back and forth again.
Meanwhile, the series takes advantage of its more condensed focus to flesh out the ensemble around Carmy and Syd. Natalie (Abby Elliott), barely an afterthought in season one, gets a big screentime bump in season two as the de facto operations manager. (She also gets a literal big bump, in the form of a pregnancy that brings up all sorts of complicated feelings about her family.) Hair-trigger Richie gets to display a softer side. One episode centers almost exclusively on Marcus (Lionel Boyce) as he meets with a Copenhagen chef (Will Poulter, one of many big-name guest stars this season) to learn advanced dessert-making techniques and muse on what it feels like to be the Scottie Pippen of the kitchen instead of the Michael Jordan.
By contrast, Carmy’s individual arc, centered around a flirtation with a childhood friend (Molly Gordon), is among the season’s weakest. Perhaps it’s because The Bear has never really been a love story in that sense. Its sense of romance is directed toward the characters’ passion for their work, and its most palpable chemistry is rooted in the bonds between colleagues who’ve worked elbow to elbow. Season two’s most heartwarming show of devotion comes not in the form of a kiss between lovers but in a heart-to-heart between two platonic colleagues, trading compliments and reassurances in the golden afternoon sun.
If the first season saw Carmy and Syd being tossed into the deep end to sink or swim, the second allows them more space to fret about what it means to provide amusement or pleasure, to wonder where inspiration comes from, to stress about living up to their own expectations or others’. Sometimes, excellence under pressure just begets more pressure. Asked what it felt like to earn a Michelin star at his old job, Carmy’s response is not exactly inspiring. “First 10 seconds felt like a sort of panic because I knew I just had to keep them, had to retain ’em. My brain does this weird thing where it just bypasses any sense of joy, it just like attaches itself to dread,” he recalls. “After those ten seconds, I had to turn over a really slow table because the entire United Nations security council was coming in.”
It can be tempting for critics like yours truly to read too much into TV shows as metaphors for themselves, and so I won’t presume Carmy is speaking directly to creator Christopher Storer’s worries about following up his acclaimed first season. I’ll only say that whatever fears or anxieties or struggles went into the second behind the scenes, the delicious results speak for themselves.
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