[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for The Bear Season 2.]
The Pitch: “You ever think about purpose?”
It’s a question FX’s hit show The Bear puts in the mouth of its biggest loser, motor-mouthed fuckup “Cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), but it may as well be on the minds of everyone at the restaurant. At the end of Season 1, hothead young chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White, bleary-eyed and self-loathingly hot) received a miracle — some might say a contrived one — in the form of a stash of money hidden in cans of peeled tomatoes.
It’s a parting gift from his late brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal), and it’s enough to save the business, a failing Italian beef joint in River North Carmy’s struggled to run all season. Not just that, but it’s enough money to reinvent The Beef as a fine-dining restaurant that matches Carmy’s Michelin-star ambitions and those of the stalwart staff he’s come to know and respect over the course of the first season.
And so, The Beef becomes The Bear, and Season 2 of The Bear becomes, in turn, about that transformation: not just of the place, but of its occupants and their individual and collective sense of purpose. With six months to open and eighteen to pay back Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) for the money he’s putting up to assemble the place, the pressure is on to get the place and the people ready for service.
Michelin Impossible — Bread Reckoning: While Season 1 of The Bear was a compelling watch, it was also pretty uneven. There was the glaring dissonance of its Chicago setting, the thin scope of the show leaving secondary characters on the back burner, the shaky nature of its premise (Can you turn Mr. Beef into Avec? More importantly, why would you?). Though blessed with a performer as brittle and complex as White, Carmy was still the prototypical tortured genius we’d seen a million times before on TV.
The Bear (FX/Hulu)
