Note: This review contains spoilers from “The Bear” Season 2.
There’s a convenient little portrait of exactly how “The Bear” has progressed, and what it’s pulled off, in the first shot of the Season 2 finale. The episode opens with a virtuosic, 12-minute long take that is, intentionally, a rejoinder to the 18-minute single take from the first season’s penultimate episode. Whereas the Season 1 shot maneuvered through the crumbling hellscape that is the sandwich shop known as The Beef, this one weaves through the carefully controlled chaos and polished corners of the newly opened, high-end establishment The Bear.
That juxtaposition is the easy answer to what the sophomore season of “The Bear” is about, as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney (Ayo Edibiri), and the ragtag Beef crew pick up right from where we left off and get to building an ambitious new restaurant.
But in a season that is in many ways a complete, daring reinvention of “The Bear” — remarkably, after being the sleeper hit of last summer — the places that are most telling about the show’s evolution are far quieter. Amid showy moments like this long take and an all-star lineup of cameos, two better examples come in ordinary, almost pedestrian conversations: one between Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and Chef Luca (Will Poulter), who Marcus has been sent overseas to learn under in Episode 4, and another between Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Chef Terry (Olivia Colman), the head of a world-renowned restaurant in Episode 7.
In both scenes, they talk about nothing particularly noteworthy — mostly about how each chef ended up here, in a fancy, silent kitchen, working their hands slowly, lovingly, through food. They’re a pair of patient, tender scenes that cut through our dominant impression of the show. While the last season was essentially a season-long panic attack in the cramped, dirty corners of a neighborhood joint, here is Marcus, massaging dough with a tattooed Will Poulter in Denmark.
In other words, this new season of “The Bear” is tearing it all down, literally and otherwise; a remodel that allows for big and small swings that mostly result in the show cementing itself as one of the best on TV. Marcus and Richie both get standalone episodes because they’ve been sent off, as do Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), to get a proper education in the nuances of fine-dining. It’s a fruitful second-season strategy — giving episode-long, focused arcs on the inner lives of individual characters — that takes a page from “Ramy,” a show that “The Bear” creator and showrunner Christopher Storer produces and directs on (the creator and star of “Ramy,” Ramy Youssef, in turn, directs Marcus’s episode — one of the best of the season in its lush, delicate slice-of-life eye).
There is something almost laughable about the premise and structure of the season — believably turning a crumbling hole-in-the-wall spot into a literal Michelin-star-level restaurant within six months — and still somewhat unbelievable when you see it become something of a reality by the finale. But these new landscapes and stiller moments manage to ground the show and create a deeper, more expanded emotional landscape for its characters. The cast, in turn, steps up to the plate.
White remains compelling, and Moss-Bachrach further proves to be one of television’s best secret weapons as a character actor — his ability to be supremely and consistently subtle within what is largely a powder-keg role cannot be overstated. With more shades to work within, Edibiri and Boyce reveal a new set of layers in their performances this time around as well.
One of the show’s bolder leaps this season is in its greater reliance on the ensemble as a family unit. Rather than doubling down on what made it entertaining — the frenetically poisonous punk rhythms of the kitchen — it does something scarier: it allows its characters to get better. Carmy develops a love interest (Molly Gordon) and develops a real, if sometimes shaky partnership with Sydney. Richie simmers down and finds something akin to purpose. Tina sheepishly sings karaoke in front of her younger culinary school classmates.
It’s a move that is not always perfect — at times it leans too heavily into its sweetness and loses itself tonally. But for all your “Successions” and your “Barrys”, prestige programs whose drama is often predicated upon the tragedy that people are in some ways doomed in their efforts to change, it’s a bold feat for a show like “The Bear,” saddled by grief, to concern itself so earnestly with the real possibility of growth.
Of course, that process is far from a straight line. The shadow of the past looms large. Undoubtedly, the most talked-about episode will be “Fishes,” an hour-long flashback that intends to knock you out immediately with its parade of guest stars. It’s the biggest swing of the season, an emblem of a show that, following its unexpected runaway success, is eager to outdo itself again. As a result, it sometimes overindulges and comes close to crumbling under the weight of itself — it’s a messy, bombastic and altogether absorbing piece of television, one immediately for the books.
The best thing the episode does is narrowly avoid over-explanation. As much as the show has been undergirded by the vague shapes of pain in Carmy’s family, we finally see a version of it in front of us. Carmy shows Mikey (Jon Bernthal), who died by suicide four months before the events of the first season, an illustration of the restaurant he hopes they’ll open one day, prompting Mikey to begin sobbing the moment he’s alone before slapping himself out of it. And Carmy’s mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), drunkenly breaking down over the kitchen stove, can’t bring herself to the dinner table, try as Carmy might to help get her there.
They are glimpses into the demons that can’t be outrun or fully understood — as abstract and frustrating and deeply sad to us as they are to Carmy, who still doesn’t fully know how to let something good happen to him as much as, or perhaps because, he could never figure out how to save his mother and brother. “This isn’t easy,” Pete (Chris Witaske), the show’s punching bag, tearfully tells Sugar in the finale. “Lot of people, lot of history.”
The Bear is officially, improbably, open for business, but you still have to figure out how to carry on.
“The Bear” Season 2 is now streaming on Hulu.