John Mulaney is a sweet outsider, cousin Michelle’s (Sarah Paulson) boyfriend, who bumbles his way through grace, brilliantly written - notable for its lack of profundity, a realistically off-the-cuff attempt to defuse a highly tense situation with limited success. Bob Odenkirk is an uncle you’d really like to punch in the face and who comes very close to getting one.
The series’ signature style is chaos. “Fishes” moves that chaos out of the restaurant kitchen, the focus of series one, and into the home kitchen of the Berzattos. There’s constant talking, yelling and agonising familial tension. Greg hit pause at some stage in the first 10 minutes and I audibly exhaled, realising my breath had become shallow, nigh on hyperventilating, from the stress on screen. Whether The Bear is good for your general wellbeing requires a separate investigation altogether.
Up until this episode, the second series had taken a not-unwelcome tonal shift away from the high-pressure chaos of the kitchen, as the restaurant was closed for renovations. One notable episode - set in the real kitchen of Noma, Copenhagen - replaced the intensity of the service period with the stillness before sunrise where pastry chef-in-training, Marcus, was taught techniques by one of the Noma chefs: two men, passionate about desserts, one quietly training the other in a way that seemed unusually devoid of the ego we associate with top chefs. Visually, the focus on food imagery was Chef’s Table-esque and the juxtaposition of this peaceful space against the kitchen as we’d previously known it was beautifully rendered.
The slower pace in the first half of season two was clearly in service of episode six, which jolted us back to the chaos that underpins everything in this series. I put The Bear on my top five watches of 2022 and it will easily have a spot on the same list for 2023. It’s phenomenal television and although the whole series is available to view now, I’ll continue to annoy Greg with my insistence that we limit ourselves to one episode a week to draw out our viewing pleasure.
HE SAW
“Fishes”, episode six, season two of The Bear, is one of the best, most compelling, most gut-wrenching, most powerfully understated, perfectly narratively paced, slow-burning depictions of addiction ever shown on screen.
What makes the episode so brilliant is not just that it gets addiction so right, but that in doing so it completely undoes and then rebuilds your understanding of everything that has happened in the series so far.
Addiction is great narrative fodder. The behaviour of addicts under the influence makes for both great drama and great comedy, but “Fishes” takes both these easy wins and transcends them, delivering a devastatingly note-perfect account of the quiet destruction wrought on the lives of the adult children of alcoholics.
Jamie Lee Curtis, as the alcoholic mother, is cordoned off from the family Christmas party, in a kitchen filled with chaos of her own making, into which the only visitors both willing and allowed to help are her own children. Mikey, the only one who has followed her into addiction, is the only one of the three who doesn’t. The other two, Carmy and Sugar, both try their best, watching her preparations for the dinner falling apart as the number of appliances smeared with sauce grows exponentially. They try to help, despite the fact they and we are all too aware she is helpless. Carmy hides his emotions behind his kitchen-efficiency, while Sugar’s assistance is undermined by her desperate, visceral fear that her mother is about to do something terrible to herself.
The episode reaches emotional climax after emotional climax but arguably the most climactic comes during the scene in which the mother, in an alcohol-fuelled fury, rages about blowing her brains out to her adult daughter. In that moment, Sugar is simultaneously elevated to the role of parent and rendered a helpless child.
There are few acts lower than victimising your children by threatening self-harm so they are forced to view you as the victim. Sugar can see her mum is slowly killing herself, but sees no choice but to treat her like a baby in the hopes she doesn’t kill herself more quickly.
Sugar’s repeated, heartbreaking, question: “Are you okay?” drives her mum crazy because she’s not okay and knows it. Sugar knows it too and they both know there’s nothing she can do about that, as do we. But because this is her mother, she has no option but to keep trying. This is the essence of the despair that is being the adult child of an alcoholic and rarely if ever has it been captured so perfectly on screen.
The Bear, season two, is now streaming on Disney+
