Latest news with #Carm
The Herald Scotland
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review, The Bear, Disney+ returns to the original recipe
*** AFTER the blood, sweat, tears, burns and shouting - lots of shouting - the review is in. What review you ask? How quickly they forget. Season three of The Bear, the Disney+ tale of a Chicago restaurant desperate for a Michelin star, was taken up with waiting for a make-or-break review. Sounds dull, was dull. The new 10-part series, which dropped today, opens with said review. As expected, it's a mixed bag, at once praising the restaurant's ambition while slating it for chaos and inconsistency. Sounds about right, both for restaurant and series. The Bear's creator, Christopher Storer, had a choice here: to double down on the misery and introspection, or strike out for pastures new. That he opens with a clip from Groundhog Day is a detectable-from-space clue to where he is heading. As is culinary wonderboy Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) breaking into a smile, and something approaching a chuckle. The Bear gets happy - I kid you not. That's the good news. The bad is the restaurant is bleeding money and will be forced to close in months if the team can't land that Michelin star. Finally, a cause that everyone can rally around. Front of house manager Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), still the show's best character and its secret sauce, can forget his ex is getting married and his daughter has a new daddy. Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) can seize the day and sign the partnership agreement. Carm can start helping people again instead of screaming at them. There is so much motivation going on, I half expected the theme tune from Rocky to strike up and the staff to run out en masse to climb the nearest steps. Wrong city, but everybody loves a comeback tale, right? Whether the hardcore fans of The Bear will feel the same I'm not sure. Can a show built on the unhappiness of its characters change so much and have the same appeal? Storer gives viewers no time to ponder. All that good stuff of old comes to the table - breakneck editing, pumping music, a sense of the team against the world, everybody yelling 'Doors' as the restaurant opens, and of course calling each other chef. There's a new character, the maitre d from Olivia Colman's old joint, who looks promising. There's even an attempt at some comedy, though so far that's still a work in progress. While it is fun getting back to The Bear basics, the show will stand or fall on its main characters, led by Carmy. In the last series, however, he was the weakest of the bunch, and you do wonder how much he has left to say. Others can take up the slack, starting with Jamie Lee Curtis as Carm's mommie dearest, Richie and Carm's sister Sugar (Abby Elliott). They will have to. Whatever its more passionate defenders thought, The Bear did not change television in the way, say, The Sopranos did. It was always soapier than it seemed, and it's no bad thing to go back there.
Atlantic
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
‘The Bear' Isn't Wasting a Second
'You ever feel like you're stuck in the same day, like over and over again?' Carmen Berzatto asks another chef early in the new season of The Bear. Carm, of course, played in fine haunted fashion by Jeremy Allen White, is the jolie laide centerpiece of the series, the sad-eyed Chicago son whose face launched a thousand 'Yes, chef' memes and whose grief and PTSD preoccupied almost all of Season 3. Stuck? I can forgive The Bear almost anything, because it's one of the few shows on television now still willing to wrangle with the mess of being human—with what it means to try to live differently. We all know what it's like to feel stuck. Most of us have loved The Bear since it debuted in 2022: an impossibly gorgeous and teeth-grindingly stressful show that put viewers through the restaurant-kitchen wringer so that it could reward us with moments of transcendent payoff. Season 3, relentless in its examination of the sticky contours of Carm's trauma, offered fewer bursts of that kind of respite. These new episodes, though, bear fruit, in the form of progress, and forward momentum, and the impossible optimism of people changing for the better. In Season 1, Carm—a burner-scarred veteran of some of the world's best kitchens—returned to Chicago to try to save his dead brother's hopelessly dysfunctional sandwich shop, sparring with Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), his coke-dealing 'cousin' and a poster boy for woeful masculinity. In Season 2, with the help of his protégé, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Carm prepared to open the restaurant he'd always dreamed of, while Richie found his own sense of purpose. At the end of Season 3, the Bear—the restaurant—received a thoroughly mixed review from the Chicago Tribune, leaving the team scattered and uncertain. On the plus side, this means there's no time left to waste. The motif of the new season is a clock that Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) unceremoniously plonks down in the kitchen, counting the number of hours until the restaurant runs out of funds. If the team is going to save the Bear, it has to be now. Christopher Storer, the show's creator, turns the last minutes of the first episode into a rousing, synth-scored, preparing-for-battle montage reminiscent of a Cold War action movie. Every Second Counts reads the sign on one wall. 'Why am I crying?' I wrote in my notes, as lockers slammed shut and knives rasped against sharpeners ahead of service. The biggest obstacles, beyond money, are the ones in the chefs' heads: Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is still slower and clumsier with the desserts he's trying to perfect than he can afford to be; Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) can't turn the pasta around quickly enough; Sydney can't decide whether Carm's genius in the kitchen is worth the risk of sinking her own career and mental health. The Bear has always had an expansive understanding of what restaurants represent—the task not only of elevating food into an art, but also of making every guest feel cared for, affirmed, at home. And for the people who spend 80-hour weeks sweating all the intimate details of service, the job means so much more than work, the team so much more than colleagues. 'Please, help me out with this place,' Richie prays one night. 'If it's fucked, then I am fucked. It's like the last thing that's actually keeping me attached to anything, so please, help me out here. Amen.' Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), whose work in the sandwich window is the lone financial bright spot in the Bear's books, seeks a mentor to try to figure out how he personally might be able to help. Sydney agonizes over the question of whether to abandon Carm and the Bear for a more functional (if annoying) chef who's trying to poach her. The new season, as is series tradition, makes space for some intriguing curveballs. An episode co-written by Edebiri and Boyce takes Sydney outside the restaurant to a hair appointment at a friend's house, where she considers what it means to have people who really know her, and to feel like she belongs. Another episode that runs upwards of an hour brings together virtually everyone in the show's history for an event that seems to promise chaos and destruction—say, a car driven through a house, a gunfight—but goes somewhere wholly unexpected. Almost more than ever, The Bear is preoccupied with what we as humans inherit and what we pass on in turn, and whether we can actually choose, as Carm wanted in Season 3, to 'filter out all the bad.' Carm's sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), trying to raise her own child differently, starts using gentle-parenting techniques at work, almost unintentionally, with understandable lapses in patience. Richie's work on himself continues to, in my opinion, sustain all hope for humanity. ('Neil Jeff, you're beautiful,' he whispers to his and Carm's childhood friend, Neil Fak—Matty Matheson—in a heartbreaking instant of pure television.) Marcus and Sydney, both of whom have lost their mothers, interlock neatly with Carm, who still dreads seeing his own. In Season 1, the show seemed intent on conveying how toxic masculinity poisons not just kitchen culture but all hierarchies; now, because the team members have opened themselves up to more nurturing models of care and communication, their potential is fully unfurling. All of this wrestling with pain and purpose and guilt and growth is intermingled with Storer's musical callbacks and quick cuts of dishes being plated, red lines on charts running menacingly downward, clocks ticking, casual conversations that become so unexpectedly profound that they rip your heart right out. The pace isn't always so rapid-fire—when episodes slow down, it's for a reason. There are still a handful of dream sequences and surreal interludes that seem to want to underscore the show's deep psychological curiosity, and its unwillingness to be an easy watch. But after the slow-drip, languorous suffering of Season 3, it's thrilling to see the characters and the action move so purposefully and gratifyingly forward.
