In its second season, the television show The Bear (created by Christopher Storer; streaming on Hulu) aired an extended episode in the chaotic home of the Berzatto family on Christmas Eve as abusive, alcoholic matriarch Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) attempts to prepare a traditional feast of the seven fishes. It is a breathtaking hour of television, generating the same anxiety in the viewer that it depicted in the claustrophobic rooms, the frantic camera movements, and the volume of the conversation rising with the blood alcohol content. Characters yell, bicker, sooth, cajole, and talk over each other, punctuating their discontents with fork throwing and a dramatic vehicular incursion. The show’s main protagonist, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), spends most of the episode pummeled by his family’s anger and recriminations. I felt exactly how he looks, wide-eyed and shell-shocked, helpless to stem the tide but unable to look away.
The Bear’s first season followed Carmy’s return to Chicago after his older brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) took his own life, leaving the family’s sandwich shop—The Beef—in disarray. A world-class chef who has already racked up accolades, Carmy arrives back home grieving his brother, psychologically broken by a sadistic boss, and looking for a new start. Part prodigal son, part conquering hero, Carmy is greeted with ambivalence by the friends and family he left behind for the big-city pretensions of haute cuisine. In the Christmas Eve episode, a pregnant family member is suffering from nausea and asks for a Sprite. Since there is none on hand, Carmy offers to make his own from scratch. His family looks at him with disdain and disbelief—ordinary people don’t just “make Sprite.” But this is how Carmy approaches the chaos of his family and the world: he breaks it down into its component parts, discovers the secret of how it works, and tries to put it back together again.
Carmy tries to apply this technique to his new management of The Beef, a hole-in-the-wall pit of chaos, staffed by misfits and stragglers, none of whom have any training in a kitchen. He introduces disciplined cooking lines and service stations, orderly prep and timed dishes. Most of the first season is a pitched battle between the creativity of high kitchen discipline and the sloppy comradery of a dive bar, between elite knowledge and street knowledge, between the kid Carmy was raised to be and the chef he has tried to become. By the time we get to the second season we understand why Carmy might have been driven to work in a high-stress, high-stakes profession with cruel and capricious bosses: as a means of reenacting and trying to repair the same dynamics in his high-stress, high-trauma family of origin. Only now that he has his own kitchen, he is the one with the power to pass on the same trauma to his kitchen family or try to break the chain.
