The second season of The Bear arrives today on Hulu on a tide of expectations. Is that a good thing? Last June there were no expectations at all. The Bear snuck onto our screens—a comedy-drama with a weird name and no big stars about an Italian sandwich shop in Chicago—and it ran away with the summer, a viral, word-of-mouth hit. It was thoughtfully written, full of insider chef lingo, unexpectedly funny, fast-paced, smart, and sexy, and it had that thing you can’t manufacture: authenticity, an ease with itself. Much of that was down to Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Carmy and Richie, squabbling but intensely loyal quote-unquote cousins who find themselves running The Beef after the suicide of Carmy’s older brother. Ayo Edebiri as a young chef who joins their crew was another standout. The show’s 30-minute episodes—only eight of them in that first season—were gone in a night or two of old-fashioned binging.
A year later the show, and The Beef, have leveled up. The motley crew of line cooks who staffed the place is still here, but the sandwich operation is shuttered and Carmy and Edebiri’s character, Sydney, are relaunching the place as a proper restaurant, The Bear, with Michelin-star ambitions. There is basically no money to do this, and they are on a breakneck renovation schedule, with everyone on staff pitching in, wielding sledgehammers. The first episodes are full of demolition amusements, and to be with Carmy and Richie and the others—Marcus, Tina, Fak—remains a chaotic delight.
But this is not quite the same show it was in season one—it’s far more ambitious, emotionally, tonally, in terms of location (Denmark!), in terms of focus (more character, less plot), and that’s (mostly) a good thing. It just takes a moment to adjust. The Bear was created by Christopher Storer and written and directed by a team that includes writer-director Joanna Calo and, for that Denmark episode, the actor-writer-director Ramy Youssef, and they make clear what they’re aiming for in the quiet opening moments of episode one, where pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is at his mother’s hospital bedside patiently putting lotion on her hands, then a wet towel on her forehead. The sequence is only a minute or two, but it’s slow, serious, full of indie-art-house-film-school vibes. By contrast, The Bear’s first season came out of a cannon.
But The Bear has earned its ambitions, even a little pretension. This is one of the best-written shows streaming, and the charisma of its cast is impossible to manufacture. Richie is still hilariously volatile, but he’s working on himself, and Carmy still walks around in what looks like a postcoital, sleazy daze, driven and wounded as they come. He’s the powerhouse of the show and in the second episode is treated to a meet-cute with an old Chicago flame, Claire, played by the irresistible Molly Gordon—and I was here for it. (You may roll your eyes: She’s an ER doc and mysteriously single, a reminder that The Bear is still TV through and through.) I really enjoyed the deepening stakes around Sydney as she considers what it means for her financial future to go all in with Carmy on The Bear. I got a little itchy at the endless Chicago montages and all the food-world romance (chef cameos, lots of perfectly framed shots of mouthwatering dishes), and I felt the excursion to Denmark—where Marcus trains in tweezer-wielding, haute cuisine dessert creation with a dashing young pastry chef—was a little indulgent and self-satisfied. But foodies will love it. Copenhagen has never looked better.
In short, this should be your new show. I previewed the four episodes available to critics earlier this week and am hungry to devour the rest. How long ago did Succession end? Summer TV needs a hit. The Bear is it.
