The best series manage to change the view of the world: Only a few viewers before the NDR series thought about the job of “crime scene cleaner” and “Weißensee” was an urgently needed fictional supplement to everyday life in Germany after two decades of reunification the former GDR.
Now the streaming provider Disney starts “The Bear: King of the Kitchen”. And this series ensures that a visit to the restaurant will never be the same again.
The focus is on the young chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, who recently worked in a fine star restaurant in New York, but is now taking over his deceased brother’s sandwich shop in Chicago. He must navigate a feuding team and solve the shop’s financial problems in a rough part of town, and somehow deal with the death of his brother.
The series leaves nothing to be desired
That sounds depressing and often feels like a documentary thanks to the fast camera and perfectly settled characters – but it’s also worth seeing from the first moment.
“The Bear” makes excellent use of little space – both visually and figuratively, the series gets extremely dense. The camera constantly circles through the narrow kitchen, there is always hissing and sizzling somewhere, there is never room to take a deep breath.
The same applies to the plot: there is always screaming, the next hard-but-hearty insult is never more than a few seconds away, the background of a character is rarely explained and between the episodes things happen off-camera that change the Viewers have to rhyme together – just like in real life.
The fact that this “Bear” buzzes so grandiosely is also due to the ensemble. Jeremy Allen White plays the tousled-fit, tattooed, weary-eyed, and straggly-haired Carmy so much a “he seems so lost I can change him” dream guy that Twitter users wrote, “I’d love to watch this, but my therapist told me to actively stay away from guys like that.”
With burns on his arms
At his side is Ayo Edebiris Sydney, a young black colleague who is not willing to accept the established restaurant kitchen system with its macho demeanor. Both actors got to know the work in a real kitchen for several weeks – some burns on the forearms are likely to be real.
When the two then also tangle with “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who is never entirely clear whether he is really related to Carmy or whether that is just a nickname, great television emerges – with highlights such as the intense penultimate episode, which after a short opening credits manages without a single cut. Or like that seven-minute monologue in the final episode, for which White can already register for all television awards for the coming season.
The series “The Bear: King of the Kitchen” (eight episodes) is available from Wednesday (5.10.) at Disney.
