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The Bear ★★★★
Disney+, from Wednesday
Jeremy Allen White plays chef ‘Carmy’ Berzatto, who returns to Chicago to work in the scuzzy sandwich shop he inherited from his family.Credit:Matt Dinerstein/FX
There’s a huge buzz around this earnest but oddball kitchen melodrama set in a scuzzy family sandwich shop in Chicago. It’s hard to get a grip on at first, but it quickly captivates on the back of a compelling performance by Shameless star Jeremy Allen White.
White is chef Carmen Berzatto, who left Chicago – and his family – for a culinary career in the world’s finest restaurants. He returns haunted by his experiences and by the suicide of his estranged brother, who bequeathed the restaurant to him. The place is broke and in disarray. The chaos is exacerbated by the brothers’ loud, aggravating “cousin”, Richie (Girls’ Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who like much of the kitchen “family”, is bitterly opposed to change of any sort.
The restaurant scenes will instantly induce anxiety in anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen, the agitated score adding rapid-fire blasts of brass for extra stress. Carmen quickly finds himself selling off his treasured vintage denim to buy beef for the sloppy Italian rolls that are the restaurant’s main dish.
If those rolls look unappetising, that’s intentional. The food photography is intimate, but this is no Nigella Lawson joint – things mostly look awful, right down to the dripping eggshells and the glob of mustard on the floor. Such ugliness, though, is part of the series’ brilliant artistry, which reaches its apogee in an episode shot in a single chaotic 20-minute take.
Carmen has big ideas for the place, as does ambitious new chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), who has come to work at this dump because Carmen is her culinary idol. Trouble is that that Carmen is emotionally shut down and constantly flat out. It doesn’t help that he also has to pay off his brother’s debt to gangster Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), who is also a family friend or relative.
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White’s simmering Carmen and Moss-Bachrach’s expansive, explosive Richie are perfect foils. The series, created and mostly directed by comedy specialist Christopher Storer (aided by fellow writer-director Joanna Calo), has the look and at times the feel of a heavy prestige drama, but it revels in its own erratic sense of humour – not least when Carmen and Richie have to cater a children’s birthday party to start working off the debt to Uncle Jimmy.
It’s one out of the box, and one that zips by all too quickly.