It took me two hours to watch the final episode of season two of The Bear. The show itself is about 40 minutes . The additional 80 were mostly spent not wanting the season to come to an end and hiding behind the sofa from its dramatic tension.
It's an unusual premise: celebrated Michelin chef Carmy returns to his hometown of Chicago to run The Beef, the sandwich shop left him by his brother. Early episodes - most episodes you learn eventually - depict the chaos and conflict of the restaurant and the chaos and conflict of Carmy's tempestuous extended Italian family. Carmy tries to impose some of the discipline of his haute cuisine experience on his motley crew of cooks and cousins in The Beef, while also trying to bring financial order to the debt-ridden money pit. There is no prospect of bringing order to the family.
I liked The Bear instantly. It is noisy and busy, with whipsmart dialogue and intense, exhausting performances. It is beautifully shot, moving seamlessly between the wide-angled beauty of Chicago and the close-up hostility, emotion and rawness of The Beef. It also changes up the pace of the narrative nicely, chopping between chaotic restaurant scenes that might as well be fight sequences and more considered time spent with individual characters, taking time to make them real.
And although the first season, and the first half of the second, make for innovative, compelling and entertaining viewing, The Bear achieves genuine greatness in the final three episodes of season two, perhaps the best three episode snap I can recall.
The first is a retrospective examining the dysfunction in the Berzatto family. The second takes a member of the crew on a journey of discovery and redemption. And the third, and season finale, takes us inside the restaurant on an important night and places several of the team under the most intense scrutiny.
These episodes features two memorable cameos, and I won't name those involved because they come better as surprises. The episodes are not only tours de force in their own rights, but there is also a balance between them that gives the series power. And finally they strip back yet more layers of the onion of each of the series main characters, whose motivations, emotions and stories have been under the microscope across 20 breathless episodes.
Jeremy Allen White as the shy, repressed and traumatized culinary genius Carmy is irresisitble and the camera loves his uncertainty and vulnerability. The Bear is defined by Carmy and his relationships with "cousin" Richard, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and sous chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri). Moss-Bacharach brings anarchic energy to Richard, for whom anger and potential disaster is rarely more than a hair's breadth away. And Sydney brings balance to the screen, a rare island of relative calm in a sea of frenzied movement and noise. Edebiri is a born scene stealer.
Elsewhere, there are tremendous supporting performances from Abby Elliott as Carmy's sister, permanently exasperated and worried by her brother's choices, and Oliver Platt as a mafioso uncle bank-rolling the thing.
It's vibrant, smart, challenging television, made with care and great craft and beautiful music and it tells fascinating and intimate stories. I'm hoping that a season three awaits.