Series created by Christopher Storer
Staring Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ayo Edebiri, and Lionel Boyce
Season One now streaming through FX on Hulu

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

I’ll come clean up top: the closest I have come to working in a restaurant was the concession stand at my local AMC multiplex for two years in high school. Sure, it sucked, but my duties were limited. Instead of making delicious food I was making shitty popcorn (the smell still gives me terror flashbacks). Instead of doing coke in the walk-in, I was slinging Cokes (Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential made me think this was de rigueur for kitchens worldwide). 

The closest I got to adding an artful flourish to a dish, akin to tweezing some fresh herbs, was the way I handled the spray bottle filled with that fake butter stuff, coating a soft pretzel before dousing it in salt, cinnamon sugar, or parmesan garlic. That said, in addition to the accolades The Bear is getting for its terrific writing, phenomenal cast, and all that great stuff you love to see on TV, it’s getting a lot of love from folks who work in kitchens for finally portraying their experience on screen in a way that is at least close to reality.

The Bear chronicles fine dining chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto’s returning to Chicago, where he runs his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop in the wake of his brother’s suicide. The readymade conflict of the precision trained world class chef vs. the hardscrabble rabble working in the kitchen of The Original Beef of Chicagoland (“The Beef” for short) is foolproof—but the execution goes the extra mile to unite everyone towards a common purpose by the season finale. 

Though a premise like this would be hard to screw up, it’s the outstanding cast of characters who give The Bear its heart and soul, and make it such compelling television. There’s Carmy’s “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bacrach) who has been running The Beef and is committed to “not fucking with the system.” There’s Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), a fellow fine dining chef looking to rehab her career by taking a gig as The Beef’s sous chef. There’s Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), who has been working at The Beef longer than Carmy’s been alive, and is firmly set in her ways. There’s The Beef’s baker, Marcus (Lionel Boyce), who gets the pastry chef bug when Carmy comes on board and tries to elevate the restaurant’s fare. It’s the sort of diverse ensemble that breathes so much life into this show and makes it consistently compelling.

None of this works without a lead actor that can juggle all the various dramas and headaches going on around him. Jeremy Allen White makes good on all the promise he showed as Lip Gallagher over 11 seasons of Shameless, and turns in a brilliant and empathetic turn as a character in various states of broken-ness, working to piece himself back together. There’s a monologue from the finale you’re going to see come Emmy and Golden Globes season—you’ll know it when you see it. It’s the transcendent work of an actor who has arrived at his full potential and watching him going forward is just as exciting as what’s next for The Beef. 

The Bear isn’t precious with its protagonist and that the writers allow him to be flawed and, at times, a raging asshole is a net positive. It’s the sort of rags-to-riches story that we, as a species, are hardwired to love—but none of that is any fun if there aren’t hurdles, hiccups, and screw-ups.

At its core, The Bear is about Carmy’s ideology and ambition infecting everyone on the staff and how they all begin to take pride in their work. Even the most set-in-their-ways employees begin to come around, and it’s the perfect tee-up for season one’s penultimate episode “Review,” in which a screw-up in the new to-go ordering system leads to one of the most tense and claustrophobic episodes of television I’ve ever seen. 

Told almost exclusively in one unbroken shot, we see both the fragility of Carmy’s new vision for The Beef and his own shortcomings as a leader come to a head and meltdown in catastrophic fashion. It’s the moment where the show goes from, “a fun show with a lot of heart about working in a restaurant,” and into something more universal. Mercifully there’s one more episode to wrap things up and salve fresh wounds in advance of the now hotly anticipated second season, and it’s hard to overstate just how well The Bear sticks the landing and brings its themes of ambition, family, and perseverance. 

The Bear is the sort of show where, after I told my wife I burned through it in a weekend, she got mad because the buzz had apparently made its way to her feed, and she wanted to watch it too—why did I watch it without her? So, I happily watched it again and will probably watch it a third time in advance of season two dropping in 2023. This is coming from someone who never rewatches shows and barely rewatches movies, because there’s just so much stuff to get to and so little time on this earth to consume all of it. But The Bear is like comfort food. Despite all the stress and interpersonal drama that gets hashed out over the show’s first season, there’s just something undeniably cozy about this show that makes me want to spend time with all these characters, in this kitchen, for as many seasons as FX and Hulu see fit to give them.