Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach
“THER BEAR” (Hulu): Everything you’ve heard about Season 2 of ”The Bear” is true. The show is off-the-charts wonderful.
Over 10 episodes we follow Bassett-eyed Carmy (Emmy-winner Jeremy Allen White) and his misfit band of chefs as they struggle to turn their former sandwich shop into a high-end restaurant. Along the way Carmy finds romance with old flame Claire (Molly Gordon), opening up the possibility of a stabilizing relationship in his peripatetic life.
Around that through line, though, the showrunners and writers devote individual episodes to the experiences of peripheral characters. The pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is sent to Europe to study his craft at the elbow of a British baker (Will Poulter); it’s his first time abroad and an education in all sorts of ways.
Even more compelling is the next-do-the-last episode in which Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the sad, sour-tempered bozo who seems to infect everything he touches, is farmed out for a week to one of Chicago’s Michelin-starred eateries.
At first Richie rebels at the grunt work he’s assigned (a whole day polishing forks?) but little by little he starts to understand the pride with which employees of a great restaurant go about their jobs. On his last day he peels mushrooms with the joint’s founder (Olivia Colman, no less), soaking up kitchen wisdom and returning to The Beef a changed man. It’s simply a brilliant transformation.
But that’s not even the season’s high point. No, that would be Episode 6 (“Fishes”) which consists entirely of a flashback to the family’s last Christmas before brother Mike (Jon Bernthal) committed suicide. It is one of the greatest hours of TV I’ve ever seen, with an unbelievably furious appearance by Jamie Lee Curtis as the clan’s coming-apart-at-the-seams matriarch.
Cooking a holiday meal for a crowd can prove traumatic for even the most even-keeled of us…when you’re a raging alcoholic boiling over with resentment and guilt it’s an atomic device just waiting to go off. Curtis is terrifying and achingly sad…the perf has “Emmy” stamped all over it.
And the episode is crammed with heavy-hitting guest stars like Sarah Paulson, John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk and Gillian Jacobs in addition to clan members like Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), preggers sister Natalie (Abby Elliott) and her too-decent-to-be-human hubby, Pete (Chris Witaske).
The whole thing is played at breakneck speed with rattattatt overlapping dialogue and emotional pyrotechnics…raising the question of how many awards one episode of TV can possible earn.
Kate Box, Madeleine Sami
“DEADLOCH” (Prime): This Aussie whodunnit is an absolute hoot, a parody of the hugely popular “Broadchurch,” only this time with a gender bending approach that somehow manages to be screamingly funny without dipping into overt political incorrectness.
Like “Broadchurch” this murder mystery unfolds in a small town beside a huge body of water. Deadlock is a Tasmania burg on the shore of the redundantly-named Deadlock Lake, from which dead bodies keep washing up to disturb revellers at the food-forward Feastival.
Kate Box (she played the rogue lawyer’s Girl Friday in the Aussie hit “Rake”) stars as police chief Dulcie Colllins who, like about 80 percent of the women in town, is gay, Her partner (Alicia Gardener) is the New Age-y town veterinarian, a raw abrasion of emotional neediness and lesbian militancy.
As the bodies pile up it becomes clear that Deadlock has a serial killer problem (hmmm…all the victims were hetero men with histories as sexual abusers) the authorities send in big-city detective Eddie Redcliffe, a foul-mouthed bull-in-a-china-shop sort who is like every drunken, donut-scarfing cop ever depicted…with the novel exception that Eddie is a woman.
She’s played as a sort of smoking human fireplug by Madeleine Sami, who at times seems to have based the performance on Alex Borstein’s memorable turn as Susie Myerson in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Well, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best — this a gut-busting firecracker of a performance.
The show’s creators and writers (Kate McCartney, Kate McLennan) have a lovely time filtering the usual murder mystery elements through a sieve of gay awareness. There are some moments that had me on the floor…like the women’s choir whose voices sound absolutely heavenly until they get to the lyric about touching yourself.
“Deadloch” is more a case of concentrating on the journey than on the solution. But that journey is a well worth it.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 