The restaurant-the Original Beef of Chicagoland-is, Carmy learns, hopelessly in hock to meat vendors, the IRS, even a wiseguy-ish “uncle” who shows up one day and says he’s owed $300,000. The show’s setup is sparse and context is doled out along the way, but it follows Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a James Beard Award–winning chef who goes home to Chicago to salvage the Italian-beef sandwich shop left behind by his brother, Mikey, who we find out in the second episode died by suicide. The Bear is horrifically stressful it’s also thrilling, ambitious, funny, devastating. The seventh episode, “Review,” is largely filmed in one long semi-sadistic take, weaving in and out of different corners of the kitchen as it implodes. The effect is like living through a real kitchen shift at 24x speed. Storer, who directs five of eight episodes, builds intensity with quick cuts between characters that capture them peeling carrots, or browning giant slabs of beef. A Noma cookbook is brandished with the physical menace of a meat tenderizer. “So much yelling,” I wrote in my notes, followed by “ so so much yelling.” A gun is fired in the first episode. The new FX/Hulu series from Christopher Storer ( Ramy, Eighth Grade) is the antithesis of comfort TV it opens on frenetic chaos and gets messier by the minute. If you’ve ever spent any time working in restaurants, you know the kind of recurring anxiety dream The Bear immediately conjures: packed tables, malfunctioning equipment, orders piling up so fast that the kitchen can’t process them, frayed nerves, incipient breakdown.
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