Some of the best – and most intense – TV in years, Jeremy Allen White turns up the heat as a world-class chef forced to take over his brother’s sandwich shop
I am always thinking of fun and interesting new ways to kill people and get away with it. My current favourite method is this: I invite someone with a weak heart to my house with the promise of a quality TV show. I put on the first two episodes of The Bear. If they do not die of that, I’ll put Uncut Gems on for a bit, which has roughly the same tempo. At this point even I am thinking I might die. If they are still alive (flushed, puce, asking for water), I will show them the penultimate episode of The Bear), which nobody who has ever had to switch to a plant-based spread because of their cholesterol can survive unaided. I flop the body out of the window to the flat downstairs. That is a downstairs problem now.
This might sound like I do not think The Bear – a show about a very intense sandwich shop, essentially – is one of the finest TV shows of the last five years, which it is, but we cannot tiptoe around the fact that it starts out stressful. Even Jeremy Allen White’s head chef Carmy is stressed by the whole affair: here he is, look, waking at 6am; here he is frantically chopping an onion then shouting for “hands!”; here is he reliving a personal trauma; here he is reliving a family one; the doorbell buzzes, a pan is on fire. The best food in the world is made by people with tattoos and scars they refuse to explain, who are all operating on three feverish hours of sleep and are yelling, and The Bear sinks you into the hot oil of that, skin-side down. Watch the first two episodes and know what it is like to be hissed at because you boiled a stock on too high a heat. Watch The Bear to know what working back-to-back shifts in hospitality feels like. Watch with a snack, because somehow it will still make you hungry.
