The Bear Season 2 Review: In Search of Lost Time

This review will be written on the spur of the moment, in a hurry, on the fly, with no second thoughts or drafts to correct pending publication: an exercise in style, perhaps, in an attempt to follow the flow and the frantic pace set by The Bearthe award-winning series created, written, directed and produced by Christopher Storer FX and distributed in Italy by the on-demand streaming platform Disney+or perhaps the inability to give up that flow, that rhythm, that frenzy that new episodes give you as you watch them flow by from one shot to another, from one dish to another..

Perhaps we were simply on holiday when Disney+ offered us a preview of The Bear 2 and now we have to run, hurry and scramble to catch up, to keep up with Google’s dictates as rigid as Michelin star ratings. Because, you see, it’s all a matter of timett is in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (here our review of Oppenheimer), finally arriving (extremely late compared to the rest of the world) in Italian cinemas from 23 August, but is also in The Bear 2, in which time runs away bringing life with it.

The Bear 2: In search of Lost Time

We quote Proust not so much out of vehemence as because in the second season of The Bear, which as in the greatest and most illustrious tradition of television seriality begins with a first episode that could very well be the last of the previous season, counting is not so much the narration of the sequencing of events as much as their existence at a specific moment in time, in a given instant, destined to pass as all instants do and never return (provided you do not take the freedom that streaming today grants viewers with regard to audiovisual works, which can be stopped and rewound indefinitely).

The premise of The Bear 2, if you like, is even simpler than that of the first seasonwhich exploited the popularity achieved on TV by the world of haute cuisine thanks to the many more or less delirious talent shows and the figure of the star chef as a superstar and VIP to do anything but and revolutionising the narrative forms of television through his sit-dram style (a neologism just invented in this stream article, so let’s raise the copyright and put our hands down): Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and Richard “Richie” Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) have to sweat seven shirts to turn their shabby sandwich shop into a superior establishment, amidst soaring costs, debts to be repaid, regulations and permits to be obtained and private lives to be neglected, because time is running out and the opening date is approaching.

But of course also in this case the story told is just an excuse: Storer is interested in something else entirely, namely in raising the bar of what is possible in television today.

And everything The Bear 2 does is built on rhythmover the advancing time: there are dates on the calendar to be circled in red, captions reminding us how much time is left until a given date, clearly visible digital clocks positioned in every corner of the frame at specific points in the protagonists’ narrative arcs, and then again romantic dates to be skipped (in the script, something is done with a telephone number that is of the superfine kind), weeks counted, days counted, hours counted, minutes passing. Like in a Robert Altman film, the characters speak one over the other, overlapping and overpowering each other and creating a cacophonous cacophony (or a cacophonous symphony) that conveys all the notes of haste, of the impossibility of ‘losing time’, of having to constantly chase the future around the corner.

So much so that then the most incredible thing, not surprisingly, is the use of silence and pauses, the opposite of the heart-stopping rush: The Bear 2 goes so fast that when it stops it feels like the whole world has paused, that that single moment is worth ten hours of life and that with that underlining, the series is trying to tell us something inescapable about itself and its protagonists.

With no more Better Call Saul and after the final season of Succession, The Bear 2 confirms that Christopher Storer’s is the most beautiful and artistically accomplished TV series of recent years: with the first season it was love at first sight, but now passion has broken out. To be consumed in a hurry.

VERDICT: 5/5