This week I’ve been a bit obsessed with a new TV show called The Bear.
I knew its lead, Jeremy Allen White, from Shameless, a show that I tried (but repeatedly failed) to keep up with when it was on cable a few years back. That show was a low-class comic-tragedy set in Chicago, with White playing a character known as “Lip” Gallagher.
When it comes to TV, I tend to follow specific actors from project to project, and thought I was done with White until a few years later when I was in Chicago myself and kept running into people who’d made the pilgrimage to see the Gallagher house and refused to believe that I didn't know (or recall) who these people were. “You know, Lip and Fiona and V,” they’d say while we were waiting for trains together on Chicago’s “L.” To a one, they seemed convinced that some remnant of the Shameless family would be found in a run-down house in Canaryville, a Southside neighborhood I still felt no pull to visit despite their rampant enthusiasms.
While I did wonder if I'd somehow been missing something, I never investigated White or Lip any further until some Philadelphia friends wondered if I’d caught a new streaming series called The Bear (which I’d not), put it on for a quick preview, and there he was again—still in Chicago, still around the same rung on the socio-economic ladder—but this time the focal point of an f-bomb filled kitchen in a local sandwich joint grabbing me by my tee-shirt and insisting that I stop and pay attention to his pathologies this time around.
It didn’t take long for me to submit, in large part because The Bear gets everything right that Shameless got wrong—except for White himself of course.
You’ve got to watch this show at home, or find some kind people—thank you B and T!—who will let you watch it with them (eight episodes on Hulu).
Unrelenting, make-this-kitchen-work tension is the backdrop for how a raft of unpredictable characters landed in the same cramped workspace. Carmy (White), fresh-off a James Beard award, has recently returned to his family’s “famous” sandwich emporium—The Original Beef of Chicagoland—that his idolized older brother abandoned when he committed suicide and that’s now hanging-on for dear life itself.
Carmy’s lead nemesis in his resuscitation efforts is Richie, who’d been his dead brother’s sidekick and wants, through brute force and commentary, to be his spiritual heir. Then there’s Sydney, a by-the-books would-be kitchen entrepreneur herself, who’s followed Carmy’s industry cred into the cruddy back rooms of this neighborhood food hall. There’s Marcus, who’s looking for a muse in his little corner of the food assembly and whose gradual conversion to the “new regime” ends up meaning the most for viewers like me. Finally, there’s Tina whose brass had operated as a kind of organizational glue until now, so she's skeptical that anything around "how it's done here” should ever change.
In other words, the place is literally a meat sandwich of compelling interests and storylines, delivered to our tables in a swirl of virtuoso screen-writing, directing and acting (by White, in particular) that never stops tantalizing us with its complex flavors.
Will Carmy turn the business around? How traumatized will he get while trying? And why, exactly, is he bothering to do this at all?
The Bear lets you drop from its jaws now-and-then, but only to catch your breath for the next bout of chewing.
Jeremy Allen White
Why did the creators call their show The Bear?
Well in order to explain itself, the season begins with a nightmare.
We’re with Carmy in a long shot across the Michigan Avenue Bridge facing a luminescent box—no, it’s a bear cage!—that he can’t help but approach despite its snarling dangers. When he reaches the door, he releases the bear, who grunts, groans and growls menacingly as Carmy says simply, “I know.” The dream sequence ends with the bear lunging at him as he wakes to a bell that’s ringing in his family’s restaurant.
We’ve all been there, haven’t we?
Work. Life. Reward.
This is going to be a story about a would-be savior or champion who knows that when he goes into work today, he just might be eaten alive.
The Original Beef of Chicagoland is not a real restaurant, but its backstory locates it in Chicago's Near Northside, where it is wildly popular with its blue-collar crowd.
When a show like The Bear grabs me, I’m always curious what other people have to say about it. Rarely have the talking heads and kitchen confidentials out there been more illuminating or enjoyable.
If I’ve not convinced you already to give this show a watch, then maybe some or all of the following might.
Jason Gay, a humorous sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal finds that The Bear “is (really) the best sports show on TV!”
“Kitchen life has seldom been depicted with verisimilitude in film and TV; often, it’s presented as a white-linen fantasy, with zero feel for the grease under the surface. Sports are the same way….
“[But] “The Bear” nails it. That’s a feat unto itself—a credit to its creator and real-life chef consultants. We could sit here with a stack of Carmy’s fancy sandwiches and tick off the myriad things the show gets right, but at the heart of “The Bear” is the very human desire to be part of something bigger than oneself, and the small victories and defeats that happen along the way. Take it from a sportswriter: That’s also sports.”
--or any kind of work that takes a group effort to pull off.
High-brow commentators, like the streaming reviewer in The New Yorker, calls attention to Jeremy Allen White’s “Botticelli” eyes in the series--a $1000 metaphor if I've ever heard one—because that’s exactly what they are as we see them in close-up after close-up, always on the watery cusp of both victory and defeat. And since I liked White so little from my previous encounter with him, it was almost revelatory to discover an entirely different side of the actor in his “This Guy” profile for In Style magazine. Intercut with a photoshoot where assistants tossle his hair to give it just the right amount of spontaneity, we learn about the last time that White cried, how somebody described him as a “Ketamine Gene Wilder” on Twitter (“pretty funny,” he thought), how he learned about Carmy’s character by choosing his tattoos, and that the first thing he does every morning is change a diaper.
The foodies among you will be delighted that the recipe for “the Original Beef,” also know as Braciole and “the ultimate comfort food,” is on-line too.
“EPISODE 6 of the FX on Hulu series “The Bear” opens with the Berzatto family in the kitchen. It’s a flashback scene in which viewers are finally introduced to deceased brother Michael (Jon Bernthal). The family is gathered to make braciole, a classic Italian “Sunday sauce” dish of stuffed and rolled meat. Michael is the center of attention as he seasons the beef and spins a yarn about an epic night out. Brother Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) grates the Parmesan. A pot of red sauce simmers on the stove. Michael’s best friend, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)—so close he’s called Cousin—sits on the counter, drinking a beer, adding color to Michael’s story. Sister Sugar (Abby Elliott) shakes a bag of raisins at Michael, and he protests. “Mom always added raisins,” Sugar pleads. Michael stays firm: “We’re not doing [expletive] raisins!” In a joint effort, the family layers thinly pounded beef with prosciutto, breadcrumbs, cheese, pine nuts, parsley, garlic and no [expletive] raisins before Carmy carefully rolls the meat and secures it with toothpicks—a ballet of sorts, carefully choreographed by the show’s culinary producers.”
The dish includes 3 pounds of flank steak “butterflied and pounded thin, about ¼ inch (ask your butcher to do this, if possible).” ((My butcher? Oh yes, my butcher.)) Anyway, if you’re up for the challenge and flavor, with or without the raisins, the recipe for Braciole can be found here.
Notwithstanding these high points, I found that the YouTube explainer from Thomas Flight (“Why The Bear Hits So Hard”) provided the most compelling rationale of all for watching this show. Flight, a thoughtful, hard-working young video buff (whom I’ve subsequently enjoyed analyzing the most recent Dune and the groundbreaking Better Call Saul), elaborates on how The Bear draws us into its many dramas so quickly and so well. From at least 3 different angles, he breaks down the show’s artistry by considering a single 55-second segment. It’s a high-wire act that loses none of its magic as Flight lets us view it in stop-action slow-motion right here. It’s also a terrific way to introduce the show to its few remaining strangers.
So if you’re on the lookout for one more way to enjoy the last full week in August, may I suggest The Bear?
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As always, thanks for being out there, reading. I’ll see you again next week.
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