The smartest thing Storer and his writers’ room do is lean heavily on their ensemble cast, handing multiple episodes over to a single character. Season two is more tender and wrenching, and its world has gotten bigger without diluting The Bear’s characteristic sense of intimacy.
But that marginal loss is more than offset by other gains. Altogether, this season is bigger and looser than the first, and inevitably, The Bear loses some of the taut, unrelenting rhythms that fueled its first season’s heady, nearly painful intensity. At times, it even has a “late ’80s drama” vibe with sexy, blue-hued montages and unapologetically on-the-nose musical cues. It’s a little bit Halt and Catch Fire in that respect and a little bit Ramy (an earlier show from creator Christopher Storer) in its mix of darkness and light and the way it deploys self-contained episodic ideas. The Bear’s ten-episode second season relies on one of TV’s best, most underused story arcs: a bunch of caring, flawed people who come together to build something they all love. But it’s a notch lighter than it was before - just a touch more hopeful while introducing new areas of tension via inescapable relationship cycles and the costs of an all-consuming career.
It’s still a series about inheritance, ambition, and how a history of family pain can turn those two things into competing forces. Season two, to its great credit, becomes a different kind of show - a season with its own set of questions and preoccupations. Doing nothing with his dead brother’s struggling Chicago sandwich joint meant a slow downward slide toward bankruptcy and failure, but trying to escape only seemed to make the whole project sink faster. Its center was Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), and its overwhelming mood was Carmy’s sensation of standing in quicksand. In its first season, FX restaurant drama The Bear was about inheritance, avoidance, and grief.
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