Friday, December 16, 2022

Master Chef, Terrible Food, Great Entertainment. Better Late Than Never: The Bear

 

 

As I have mentioned occasionally at this column, I had a love-hate relationship with Shameless for the ten plus seasons it was on the air. It took me far longer than it should have to realize what John Wells was trying to tell us in his saga of the utterly dysfunctional Gallagher clan and why so many people loved it. But even when I had my greatest difficulties with it, I was always drawn to the constant of its greatest performer: Jeremy Allan White as ‘Lip’ , the oldest son of the family and in many of the worst possible ways, the closest to being Frank’s son.

One of the most constant images of the series is of White looking battered down with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.  Lip was by far the smartest of the Gallaghers, the one with the most potential and for the first half of the series, the one who was the most self-destructive. He dropped out of high school in the second season when an old girlfriend (one of the most manipulative characters in that entire series) got pregnant and he was determined to  be his baby’s father – until he learned at the birth she wasn’t. He managed to get a scholarship to a local college, then had an affair with one of his professors and when it predictably ended badly, he spiraled from a heavy drinker to flat-out alcoholic, terminating his scholarship and ending any chance for a great future. He eventually joined AA and managed to pull out of the cycle slowly but surely he was in, trying to be the man of the house by the final season when his older sister Fiona began to spiral herself.  Like almost all of the actors on Shameless, White did not receive a single Emmy nomination for his work on the series. It is more than likely that this summer, the Emmys will rectify this mistake for his impressive performance in the new Hulu series The Bear.

Despite the early raves and my huge respect for White as an actor, I didn’t start watch the series until this past month after both the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice nominated The Bear for Best Comedy and him for Best Actor.  I’ll admit part of the reason I had doubts was that it didn’t seem that White was stretching himself that much for The Bear. After all, it is set in the South Side of Chicago in a struggling restaurant that you could easily see the Gallaghers getting a meal at.  Carmy, the character he is playing, is not dramatically removed from Lip as an individual; when we meet he has sacrificed his career as a up and coming sous chef to run the struggling restaurant his brother Michael was running into the ground until he committed suicide and left it to him. No one is happy about this, especially Richie (Ebon-Moss Bachrach in a tremendously caustic performance) who was Michael’s best friend and for reasons that I still can’t fathom, utterly resents everything that Carmy is trying to do.

Because Carmy seems to be relentlessly, almost ridiculously, bull-headed he seems determined to make the restaurant succeed by improving the quality of its food. The fact that no one comes to a Chicago sandwich shop for lemon chicken picatta doesn’t seem for a second to enter his mind. Carmy is willing to throw almost every bit of money he possibly can to save this restaurant, almost certainly because he hadn’t been there for Michael when he was alive. Failure is not an option, even though it seems destined to be the end result every time we look at what laughingly he calls a ‘restaurant’. His biggest move is to hire an intern named Sydney (Ayo Edebiri, a true discovery) who is the only person on the staff that has any respect for Carmy and is therefore immediately considered untrustworthy by everyone else.

It's clear almost from the moment we meet him that Carmy has even more demons than Lip Gallagher did, but whereas Lip was willing to sabotage himself, Carmy has been burying everything so deep that his old friends have to acknowledge just how bad it is. We see a flashback/dream in the second episode where Carmy is taking a torrent of abuse from a chef at the New York restaurant he worked at before, and its pretty clear that this is only slightly different from reality.  He has a nightmare that day after he falls asleep watching cooking shows and tells a friend he woke up having trouble breathing. He’s abusive to almost everyone at the restaurant and its clear that this wasn’t different before he returned to Chicago and we’re not stunned to learn that he’s checking out an Al-Anon meeting on his phone at the end of the episode – though we are somewhat surprised to know the reason why.

White’s performance has layers but is not textually much different from his work on Shameless which doesn’t make it any less powerful.  Just as when you were watching Lip throughout the latter’s run, you always knew it was a matter of time before Lip would self-destruct in some way and every time you see White on screen, you can almost see the fuse burning out, particularly in almost every interaction he has with Richie.  Carmy is more determined than Lip was to play by the rules and do things his way, but at a certain point we know he’s going to be overwhelmed. This was never more clear than when Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt, exceptionally cast against type), a local loan shark shows up and gently tries to tell him what everyone else has: that he needs to let go of the restaurant.  Uncle Jimmy is nicer than any loan shark in history (when Carmy asks him why he’s been admonished, Jimmy tells him: “I guess I’m here to break your legs”, sounding like a professor explaining why a proof is wrong) but at some point, he’s going to want his money back and even Carmy knows there doesn’t seem to be a way to get it even as he makes another promise we know he can’t keep.

The Bear is grungy, dingy, and set at the same near-poverty level that the Gallagher clan lived it for more than eleven years. And indeed, most of the staff is as unwilling to change against the tide that Carmy wants to set. If you loved Shameless, there’s an excellent chance you’ll love The Bear just as much. If you didn’t love Shameless or never saw it, there’s also an excellent chance you’ll  love this show. If nothing else, this show will make your mouth water in ways you wouldn’t believe whether you love fancy dining or grab sandwiches from a push cart.  And there’s a Street Fighter knock off arcade game in this shop that even though its completely fictional, you’ll still want to try and play when you see it in action. The Bear is already on pace for more award recognition in its first season than Shameless got in its entire run.  And when you see this show, you’ll know that it deserves a far better grade than the ‘C’ rating it gets in the second episode.  Hell, it practically deserves a Michelin star.

My score: 4.25 stars.

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