On Thursday, all eight episodes of the comedy-drama series The Bear will drop on FX on Hulu.And it? Is fantastic.Smart, funny, raw, tense, warm but not sentimental and, most of all, real. Mark your calendars, clear your schedule. Trust me on this. I see a lot of TV for this job, and I don’t find myself feeling the way I feel about this show terribly often. I can think of only a handful in the past few years that have hit me this hard, have made me want to shout about them from my virtual rooftop: Hacks. Severance. Girls5evah.The Bear Season 1 Download
Ramy. We Are Lady Parts.The premise: Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) is a young wunderkind chef at one of the world’s finest restaurants. But when his brother (Not Gonna Tell You The Actor, It’s A Surprise) dies by suicide and leaves the family’s greasy-spoon sandwich joint in Chicago’s River North neighborhood to him, he dutifully returns to run it. He’s grieving, and clashing with his sister (Abby Elliott) and with the restaurant’s staff, which includes his brother’s abrasive best friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).When Carmy hires a Culinary Institute of America-trained sous chef (Ayo Edebiri) to help him run the place, the staff resents them both and resists the changes the two attempt to bring to raise the level of the place’s food.Sound wacky? Zany? A classic fish-out-water sitcom? It’s anything but, happily.
What The Bear is, more than anything, is naturalistic, grounded; I’ll say it again: real. Oh sure, there are stylized touches of the surreal, in the form of dreams, panic-attack visions, etc. It’s Prestige TV in 2022, baby; that stuff comes with the territory.But mostly, the series captures life on the line in a restaurant kitchen – the urgency, the tension, the heightened emotions, the raised voices. It is by no means a chill hang of a viewing experience – one late-in-the-season episode consists of what seems to be a single take, the camera weaving restlessly through the various kitchen stations as orders pile up and everyone starts to turn on each other.