The Bear

The restaurant drama deserves the three Michelin stars most are giving it

Friday, July 5, 2024

The Bear has been called “the most stressful thing on TV” and I think that’s probably a fair description. It’s set in a Chicago restaurant and — as has become de rigueur in all films and TV series about restaurants — the kitchen scenes are invariably fraught, jerkily shot, uptight, pent-up, explosive, inflammable, past boiling point, chaotic, horrific and generally conducive to the prevailing notion that while war might be hell it’s an absolute picnic when compared to being a chef.

It’s also, if you can bear the stress part, possibly the best thing on TV. At least it has been for the first two series, which have built on that “cuisine is hell” cliché to create a strong, character-driven drama that is often rich, rewarding, moving and surprising.

In the first episode we saw a troubled but brilliant young chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) returning home from his stint in a three-star Michelin kitchen in New York to take over the struggling family restaurant after the sudden death of the big brother he idolized. The rest of the next two seasons — eighteen episodes — gradually answers all the unresolved questions it has raised.

Like: why, if Carmy is so talented, does he have such trouble coping? Turns out that it’s all down to his adorable, but deeply troubled family riddled with alcoholism, drug addiction, self-doubt, neediness and recklessness. This is encapsulated in a bravura set piece in season two, depicting an epically disastrous Christmas dinner, which culminates in nightmare, passive-aggressive matriarch Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) drunk-driving her car through the sitting room wall.

If only that bravura set piece episode didn’t know how bravura-set-piece-episode it was, it would have been perfect. But I’m afraid that this try-hard self-consciousness is a problem with even the best American-made TV (Yellowstone being the worst current offender).

The cool, eclectic soundtrack says: “Hey! Did you catch how cool and eclectic I am?” The camera work — almost indecently invasive close-ups when characters are conversing; insane dervish-whirling when we’re at the stoves with everyone yelling “Yes chef!,” “Behind!” and “Corner!” — wants you to know how artily naturalistic it is. The haute-cuisine scenes want you to know how much research was spent in top restaurants watching how they prepare mushrooms.

And the lightly implausible characters do sometimes feel like therapy works-in-progress on a healing journey of self-discovery way-marked by heartache and tragedy (the beloved old mum, dying in her hospital bed; AA meetings; the divorced dad desperate to get it back together with the ex-wife who has found someone less dysfunctional; the dead brother). I do wish American directors could learn to be more emotionally continent rather than foisting all this stuff on us so that we end up becoming more and more like them.

All that said, The Bear does deserve the three Michelin stars most critics and viewers are giving it. Once you’ve got past the chaos and initial incomprehensibility, it feels like hanging with old friends whose tics and insecurities can be utterly maddening, but whom nonetheless you can’t help loving. There’s a lovely, warm central relationship between the two main chefs, Carmy and his eager, patient assistant Sydney (Ayo Edebiri). And the incidental characters — though hopelessly unconducive, you suspect, to opening an actual, functioning haute-cuisine restaurant in a city where everywhere is closing — are a likeable gang of misfits you’re rooting for.

Probably my favorite is Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), the bizarrely sweet-natured mobster who funds the venture and who never loses his cool even when the small children at a party he has organized are rendered unconscious by a pack of sedatives one of his idiot, druggy relatives has accidentally dropped into the fruit punch.

Inevitably, the pillock responsible is the gang’s resident loser Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), an unshaven malcontent with ambitions above his abilities. In series two — there’s definitely a fairy-story element in the plotting, which may make cynics wince — he will be miraculously redeemed when sent as a punishment to perform as a stagiaire in a top kitchen, where he mostly has to clean forks. He discovers his inner suit-wearer and is transformed into the perfect maître d’.

Having only watched one episode of season three I cannot yet be certain, as some are saying, that it has run out of ideas. But such is the way with TV: once you have your audience addicted to an appealing cast of characters you can get away with murder. Here we are at the beginning of season three and still the restaurant hasn’t actually opened yet.

Fun fact: the guy who plays the rotund in The Bear, Super Mario-like handyman Neil Fak (Matthew James Matheson) is a chef in real life.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.