The Bear Season 2: Binge, Fringe, or Singe?
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Binge, Fringe, or Singe? is our television series that will cover the latest seasons, miniseries, and more. Binge is our recommendation to marathon the reviewed season. Fringe means it won’t be everyone’s favourite show, but is worth a try (maybe there are issues with it). Singe means to avoid the reviewed series at all costs.
Warning: Major spoilers for The Bear season 2 are in this review Reader discretion is advised.
What is your purpose in life? What drives you? What gives you meaning? The Bear went from a sleeper hit last year to one of the most coveted series on television. The series creator, Christopher Storer, seemed to have made an encapsulated first season that worked just fine on its own should the world not have cared about The Bear: Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto leaves his prestigious New York City restaurant to try and save his late brother’s dying establishment (The Beef) from bankruptcy, and we get this hail Mary in the form of hidden cash (the money Carmy’s deceased brother, Michael, owed uncle Jimmy Cicero) that results in The Beef turning into The Bear. If the series of the same name didn’t get picked up again, this would have been a fitting conclusion: a “that’s all, folks” that puts a smile on your face since the suffering underdogs managed to pull the impossible off.
Well, in the same way that The Bear begins with a dream (Carmy imagining the titular animal while asleep), the season concluded with a more figurative example: the goal to renovate The Beef (a run-down sandwich shop in Chicago) into a high-end restaurant named The Bear. This second season is all of that time between the actual end of the previous season and the image of The Bear as an established restaurant. Carmy can’t just use the found money to solve everything, and Storer and company know better. This second season is the real story. Carmy begins to budget what is needed to turn The Beef into The Bear, and he realizes that he is a terrible project manager (sister Natalie will lend her services here) and that they are way too short on funds. They need to hire more staff, send some of their cooks to get the proper certifications, pass several health and safety tests, and so many other curveballs that Carmy didn’t account for previously.
We need to take a step back and slow things down for The Bear as a restaurant to make sense; considering how meticulous the series is in its first season, it seemed a little too good to be true that the restaurant is erected in no time at all. Now that Storer’s series is here for good, he can sit down with his team and get down to brass tacks with who these characters are and what makes them tick. For instance, Richie (or Cousin) is no longer just the boisterous friend of the departed Michael Berzatto that gets in the way of Carmy’s efforts to save the restaurant. He is a fully-fledged person who kicks off the second season questioning why he is even here. He gets teary-eyed while staring off into the distance and asks for Carmy’s assurance that he won’t be cut off from The Beef/The Bear for being useless. Carmy promises that this won’t happen.
The Bear was exciting in its first season, but it becomes beautifully sculpted in this latest run as Christopher Storer and company prepare for the long haul.
Purpose is the name of the game in The Bear’s second season as if Storer was presenting his very own concerns with approaching a continuation of a series that seemingly concluded satisfactorily. Why should The Bear continue outside of appeasing the masses that wanted it back? For this series to matter, the characters need to be better developed and season 2 devotes two additional episodes (ten to last year’s eight) and more time (quite a few episodes surpass the half-hour mark, and one is even seventy minutes) towards backstory and subplots. Now we get to dive a little deeper into the reasons that other characters keep going; Marcus has an ailing mother he visits frequently; Sydney has always dreamed about being a head chef, but she also has the pressures of her father’s worries about the struggling industry and her deceased mother’s legacy looming over her (she doesn’t want to disappoint either); Richie doesn’t need the Berzatto family as they need him to be the glue that binds them when they bite each others’ heads off, but Carmy — who was estranged enough from his family when he was over in New York City — doesn’t really understand this.
As The Bear is being constructed (literally regarding the restaurant, and figuratively, as the series uses this opportunity to establish its world and players a little more than it was allowed to last year), our characters are forced to look at the bigger picture. Richie tells Carmy that running The Beef/The Bear is fun for him. Carmy admits that he loves what he does, but that doesn’t make it fun. As Richie soul searches, Carmy begins to feel the need to do the same. At the epicentre of the season is the episode “Fishes”: one of the greatest episodes of 2023 (and the strongest of The Bear thus far). It is a seventy-minute feast that takes place years ago during the holidays. Not only is Michael still alive, but we meet the rest of the Berzatto family for the first time, including mother Donna (recent Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis), Uncle Lee (should-be-an-Emmy-winner Bob Odenkirk), cousin Michelle (Sarah Paulson) and her boyfriend Steven (John Mulaney), and Richie’s now-ex-wife Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs). In this spectacular hour (and a bit) of television, we see the most hectic meal preparation in recent memory (Donna is living in pure hell throughout this episode as most of the family refuses to help her cook the Feast of Seven Fishes, which is exactly what it sounds like), and tensions flare for most of the episode until several outbursts erupt.
At the core of these tantrums is the same modi operandi: characters trying to figure out their place in life. Michael keeps sharing the same stories because it’s how he can relate to others, but Uncle Lee gets annoyed because Michael owes him money and he feels as though he is being fleeced. Richie wants to be a good husband to Tiffany and is trying to sell himself for hire with Uncle Jimmy, who is also over for dinner (lest we forget about the future money woes that the Berzattos would face with him). Then you have people on their best behaviour, like Steven who tries to save the day when actual fights break out. What’s pretty important is how much of an outlier Carmy feels throughout this whole ordeal: as if this is another nightmare he cannot break out of. He’s also made to feel like he’s no longer really family ever since he left to work in New York: perhaps a reason why he felt indebted to save Michael’s restaurant after his suicide. Left for last is Donna’s existential crisis: a deep depression that stems from her feeling as though she matters the least (this leads to an absolutely shocking climax that not even astute viewers could predict): Richie is there to try and rescue her before anyone else. It seems like Richie thought he had it all figured out in the past while Carmy didn’t (not when it comes to family); season 2 begins with the tables having been turned.
The second season of The Bear is so assured in its own capabilities, as it should be.
This wouldn’t be the case for long. Carmy asks Uncle Jimmy to fund more money for The Bear and gambles ownership of the building and the property should Uncle Jimmy not get his investment returned in a year and a half. As The Bear gets constructed, Carmy gets distracted by a new character Claire: an ex-girlfriend of his that he gets back together with. Sydney — newly appointed as head chef at the end of last season — feels the burden of having to pick up on where Carmy is lacking to guarantee that The Bear isn’t like all of these other closing restaurants that she has been reading about (The Bear briefly brings up the effects of the pandemic for relatability without going too into this brutal time in recent history). Additionally, we begin to see more sparks between Carmy and Sydney but neither will act upon this chemistry (although Marcus tries and fails to ask Sydney out, and Carmy, as discussed, is fully invested in dating Claire again).
This leaves Richie who has a terrific twenty-five-minute episode, “Forks”, to turn things around. He is sent to one of the most coveted restaurants in the area to clean forks, likely as a tactic from Carmy to humble him and light a fire under his ass (Richie thinks it’s just to get him out of The Bear for a bit). Frustrated, Richie feels the need to prove himself and move up from just washing forks (something he is initially terrible at, by the way). Somehow his character growth in this short amount of time is commendable and believable, and Richie winds up becoming a person you start to root for. When he comes back to The Bear, he’s reformed and you can put trust in him as that opening night looms closer and closer (especially since everyone has had to speed up the launch date from six months to only a few weeks for budgetary reasons).
We reach the opening night in the episode “The Bear” (about The Bear on the show The Bear: what a fucking mouthful). This precisely executed season finale hits the series’ highest highs at first, with the deadline being narrowly met and everyone ready to serve. The restaurant is finished and it looks terrific (save for some hiccups like the toilet that won’t stop running, but who is noticing this right away?). We want everything to go as well as possible, and it does at first. Things are fine until Carmy gets stuck in the big fridge once the handle outside breaks off (again, not everything is ready, sadly). Richie helps Sydney crush the chits being churned out during rush hour, and everything goes well. Carmy doesn’t know this, as he is stuck in the fridge and begins to panic about what is actually going on out there. All of those feelings of guilt and purposelessness start to hit him. No one felt good at the dinner table in “Fishes”, and his sense of worthlessness hits him tenfold. Meanwhile, Richie has never felt more confident in himself outside. None of this matters to Carmy who is assuming all of this hard work is blowing up in his face, and he starts to really contemplate his life in the way Michael has in the past (the Berzattos are clearly in need of some serious psychiatric help).
Carmy begins to regret seeing Claire, thinking that his restaurant is tanking on opening night due to his negligence (again, nothing is actually the matter); Claire hears this without Carmy knowing she was there at first and leaves tearfully. Richie — who has been rooting for Carmy and Claire to wind up together (clearly having his regrets since divorcing from Tiffany) — inquires about this exchange, and Carmy (assuming everything failed) blames Richie and calls him a leech festering on the Berzatto family. Richie leaves him to suffocate in the fridge (the agony I felt knowing Richie saved the day and Carmy, again being too far removed to know the real story just like he was in New York City, blindly blames him for no reason). There is an exquisite call back to the breaking open of the late Michael’s locker via power saw when Carmy is finally freed from the fridge. You see the sparks from the inside with Carmy blankly staring in this confined area as if he is in his own locker and just as dead as Michael is (perhaps on the inside). Did breaking open Michael’s locker and retrieving his baseball cap set his spirit free? Will Carmy be free of his demons once he leaves the fridge? Unlike the promising conclusion to season 1, season 2 feels far more doomed despite the success of the opening night.
The Bear raises the stakes and the weight of punishment in its second season, ensuring that no one is safe from harm.
The question of purpose is so important in a kitchen setting since every cook has their specific role in this team effort to face the hungry, impatient masses daily. With the often showcased mantra “every second counts”, we’re encouraged to look at how small increments of time add to larger durations in the grand scheme of things. Every detail matters. Every ingredient is important. Does the garnish realize what it adds to a dish? This is no longer about a restaurant that is struggling to get by: this is a story about people trying to figure out how to get by in their ways. The restaurant is doing fine the last time I checked. In fact, it’s doing extremely well! It’s the people inside that aren’t. Even if they seem like they are okay, they secretly are conflicted deep down. Take Carmy for instance, who seemed to have his shit together in the first episode of the season (despite his horrendous math skills) and is now the most isolated and nervous character at this point. We all know that the restaurant industry (one typically of slim profit margins) relies on stability at all costs as any unforeseen circumstance can send establishments crashing down. This is how people function as well: all it takes is one more straw to break the proverbial camel’s back and send one plummeting down. All those years of verbal abuse, self-torture, and stress are finally getting to Carmy. We’ll have to see what happens to him next in the future (we may have to wait a bit longer due to the writer’s strike).
If you want to see a show figure out a way to prepare for the long haul, The Bear’s second season is exactly this type of preparation. No longer is The Bear just a thrilling, antsy comedy-drama that you can just flip through during the summer of June 2022. It is a certified titan on television at this very point, especially with so many major series concluding. If anything, this second season builds upon what makes the preliminary run so good (the electric energy, the intense panic, and the thrilling conflicts) and doubles down with proper build-ups (character and scenario establishments) ensuring that the collapses hit even harder. We care more about these characters and what they’re going through. We’re squirming to see what happens next in what may be the strongest series that is still ongoing at this point.
As the second season was released all at once via Hulu, you have the opportunity to watch all of The Bear’s second season in one sitting or to take your time with these ten episodes. Fortunately, either option works well. You feel the urgency and the gravity of the eventual downfalls during a binge session, but each individual episode is constructed properly enough that enjoying the series bit by bit leaves you wanting more yet feeling satisfied at every checkpoint (I discuss this a little more here). No matter what your preference is, The Bear is going to astound you. It’s remarkable to watch a show that went from being under-watched to becoming everyone’s favourite word-of-mouth sensation last year; The Bear would evolve furthermore into this highly set bar on television in the wake of what may be the end of the Golden Age of Television (that is if The Bear will allow it to end, of course). This first season wasn’t luck or a brief run. This was the testing of the waters. Season 2 proves that The Bear isn’t playing around as it crafts its lore on a much larger scale. I think it goes without saying, but I’ll go ahead anyway: I think we’ve got something truly special with The Bear.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.