By Hap Haggerty, Content Coordinator

Jeremy Allen White tops himself in the unseemly dramedy, The Bear. 

The premise is iffy: Mikey (Jay Berenthal) kills himself and bequests his sandwich shop to his brother Carmine (Jeremy Allen White) who is actually a world renowned chef having sacrificed an illustrious career to revamp the struggling family restaurant. Their best friend/cousin/manager, Richie (Ebon Moss Bachrach but we’re pretending it’s a young Gary Senise), is stalwart and resistant to change, piling on the antics to the point of being stabbed in his posterior by new sous chef, Sidney (Ayo Edebiri), who might be the second best chef in the world but has also taken a step down to work under Carmine.

Now, we’ve worked in a sandwich joint or three over the eons and we don’t remember any of the cooks referring to each other as “chef” or giving a diddly dad blame whether the food was good or not, so the scenario was a bit preposterous at first. Most of each episode takes place in the kitchen of the Original Beef sandwich shop located in Chicago’s River North, where over the top bickering between the employees (or chefs) borders on slapstick. Segue scenes featuring drug use and walk-in freezer sex might have made it all a bit more realistic.

But the spot on cast of The Bear portrays characters so beguiling and familiar that we keep watching until we feel as though we’re in the kitchen with them. A love affair with food and its preparation is elegantly put to allegory illustrating the cliche that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and The Bear is definitely well done. By the time dead brother Mikey’s mysterious recipe for tomato gravy yields unexpected good fortune, we’ve completely forgotten how absurd the notion of employees who love working in a sandwich shop even is. And boy are we hungry. 

Creator Christopher Storer is onto something with The Bear. Scoring 100% on Rotten and 88 on Meta, the most watched series in the history of FX, The Bear was inevitably renewed for a second season. The prospect of more scenes with Oliver Platt as Uncle Jimmy was enough to keep us at the ready. Season 2, rated an entire 1% less than the first, shows promise indicative of more to come.