In the fourth episode from The Bear’s latest season, Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is on a European sojourn, trying to learn from a marquee pastry chef. This chef, who has a lateral connection with the show’s protagonist Carmy, admits to having accepted that someone was a better chef than he. “I started looking at it, like it was a good thing,” he says, before indirectly alluding to the toxicity of pursuing excellence.
At times, it’s probably just better to know you can only do as good as the guy who comes second. This is a wild departure from the first season, where chaos and spirit-breaking stress converged to exact a tortured canvas of excellence. In its second season, The Bear eases on the pedal, relaxes into a wider view of its world, with a focused, sobering but ultimately magisterial follow-up to the claustrophobia of the first season. No show has probably made this sort of tonal leap, but with this rarest of rare shows, it feels like a natural, progressive step.
Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, is on the cusp of another challenge. The band of misfits that made the first season so risibly loud and mad, must contend with opening a brand-new restaurant that is a classy upgrade on ‘The Beef’. Holding down a street corner is one thing but opening a fine dine with aspirations of a Michelin star, etc., is another. But the pace of the show this time round, isn’t as maddening or screechy as the first season. Despite facing another race against time to open a new restaurant, Carmy, Sydney (Ayo Edibiri), Richie (a stunning performance by Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Co., are afforded a sense of contemplation, moments to collect their thoughts. There is less screaming, for at least the first half of the new season, as the show takes turns observing the supporting, but meticulously crafted characters, that have populated the show’s varied canvas.
The episodic surveys of life on the frontier of manic food production is repeated to incredibly rich effect. The fourth episode, for example, follows Marcus, on a tour of Copenhagen, the disarming effect of which feels almost eerie and superlative compared to the show’s usual intensity. Carmy finds an inkling of love and purpose, Sydney scratches beneath the surface of ambition, while Marcus almost finds himself. It’s a wider net with not one but a flurry of guest stars, including Olivia Colman, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bob Odenirk. It says something about the deranged, unanticipated success of the show’s first season that the who’s who of entertainment, constituting Oscar-winning actors, want to park themselves on the chopping board. Except this time, the knifes aren’t slicing through meat and vegetables like out-of-control lunatics. There is a grace, a welcome restraint to this season’s ambit that is also willing to consider the distant regions of hope, kindness and order.
What makes The Bear thoroughly unique is its commentary on the nature of art and ambition. It takes a village to run any restaurant, let alone one that is iconic or successful. The point being that the food on the plate never quite expresses the journey it’s been on. It is voyeuristic, in a sense to qualify what we eat based on the flippant nature of the end, as opposed to the means it has passed through as a matter of experience. Not every mint chocolate cake comes out of a necessarily happy story. It’s something the show has represented through stakes that feel taut, if exaggerated at times. Naturally, then, the frenzy of the first season gives way to a comparatively sober, but considerate second coming where people, and not just the tasks they are faced with, become the story.
A still from The Bear Season 2, streaming on Disney + Hotstar. (Screen grab)
Created and directed by Christopher Storer, The Bear is also one of those shows that risk becoming too big, too entitled for their own good. A wide canopy of elite cameos almost spoils the broth here, with far too much stardust on offer. The sixth episode, cut from the frenetic fabric of the first season, is a chilling flashback, but at times also feels overwrought with star pedigree. That, however, would be going out on a limb to nit-pick a near perfect narrative that, quite incredibly, rewrites its own language.
In this second season, Carmy is no longer the anchor, which makes the series a broader, more mature study of suffering in the wake of your dreams; the cost, so to speak, of chasing targets or debts, financial or emotional. There is a scene in the show where Carmy discovers his late brother’s old cap in the restaurant locker room. “There was only a cap?” Sydney asks, bemused, after grief momentarily handcuffs a conversation before traipsing past on its heels. It’s in moments like these that The Bear soars above the grim ceiling of loss, to also become about the sheer oddity of wanting to chase something that comes with its fair share of pain. Without that proportion of grief, neither love, nor life, probably stand a chance at meaning.
The second season of The Bear is streaming on Disney+Hotstar.
Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
