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This show sucks because there's not enough loving episodes in a season and I don't want to wait an entire year for S3. I can't get enough of this show, it's just so good, I wish the eps were 1 hour long. I've got a constant sense of dread because I've blasted through 3 episodes already and I'm trying to pace myself but it's hard.
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Jul 5, 2023 18:16
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| # ? May 3, 2024 19:48 |
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I feel like if you're hung up on the show being classist then maybe a show about restaurants and the restaurant industry in general may not be for you. Unless you're upset about the gentrification of The Original Beef of Chicagoland in which case I don't have any idea how to help. Maybe I don't understand how the show is classist and just enjoy it for being a people drama with comedic moments. Regimented team working is very satisfying to watch too
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Jul 6, 2023 00:43
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They still had the sandwiches for lunch anyhow
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Jul 6, 2023 01:03
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I agree that their restaurant concept ended up being disappointingly basic and uninspired. Like there are almost no personal touches in the restaurant or menu other than the seven fishes (and why the gently caress would Carmen want to homage that terrible night??). “Chaos menu” ended up being just a mishmash of fairly standard new American type dishes. Bleh
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Jul 6, 2023 05:27
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I was just gonna' watch the pilot yesterday as I made a ham, gravy, and donuts to get me in the mood before returning to the show I was already binge-watching with the plan to return to The Bear if I liked the first episode. I am now out of The Bear and am quite sad. That is all.
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Jul 6, 2023 06:23
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Colonel Whitey posted:I agree that their restaurant concept ended up being disappointingly basic and uninspired. Like there are almost no personal touches in the restaurant or menu other than the seven fishes (and why the gently caress would Carmen want to homage that terrible night??). “Chaos menu” ended up being just a mishmash of fairly standard new American type dishes. Bleh They have their great moment leveling a table but they've still had barely any real conversations about what the hell they're actually doing. I think I fundamentally just demand a happy ending from this show which is why I'm relying on the next season to address that stuff.
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Jul 6, 2023 08:04
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Martman posted:I honestly think the point of this season was that despite all warnings, Carmy and Sydney went on a completely stereotypically destined-to-fail restaurant journey, and that that's reflected in the final product. I don't think we're getting a happy ending. 80 percent of new restaurants fail within their first five years, Richie is still a hotheaded whackjob, and Carmy is up to his eyeballs in debt with organized crime.
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Jul 6, 2023 08:46
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Haven't watched the finale yet. But I was wondering about the restaurant concept as Syd was going around tasting everything under the sun from fried sausages to some sort of Asian noodle to pastries. Restaurant looks basic AF so far, I think if I were them I'd try some sort of "elevated beef experience" theme. If Carmy is some sort of in-universe Gordon Ramsey then yeah they'd absolutely have waiting lines out the rear end regardless. Timby posted:I don't think we're getting a happy ending. 80 percent of new restaurants fail within their first five years, Richie is still a hotheaded whackjob, and Carmy is up to his eyeballs in debt with organized crime.
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Jul 6, 2023 12:22
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I enjoyed most of the season for what it was. The last episode, in particular, stood out as a bad end-of-season tv show reset. Felt like the writers were hedging bets with Claire. The following season could do without her unless they make her a real character. Locking Carmine in the fridge was funny in that it was his assignment to get it operational way back in earlier the season.
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Jul 6, 2023 14:54
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ilmucche posted:I feel like if you're hung up on the show being classist then maybe a show about restaurants and the restaurant industry in general may not be for you. I think people don't have a problem with a show portraying classism but imo it felt like the show lacked a certain awareness/self-reflection about this issue? Like it isn't even a topic within the show itself and that probably irritates some people. I honestly also found it a bit weird and the whole point about serving other people felt a bit self-masturbatory/tone deaf and not in the intentional kind of way which is rather unfortunate because everything else was genuinely great including Richie's arc (it's just tainted by the somewhat off putting subservience) and you'd at least expect some acknowledgment/conflict about this change in "identity" (on a personal level for Richie but also how the restaurant suddenly serves a very different kind of audience).
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Jul 6, 2023 17:29
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That would make it a different show about different things. I don’t think it has any obligation to acknowledge the class issue, even if I, the audience member, feel that fine dining is a pretty classist area of our culture. It’s about the characters finding purpose through their work and managing their trauma in a team setting, and trying to make the workplace a less toxic environment than what they’ve all been exposed to in the past. it doesn’t really matter what the specific work is. It could be a show about a basketball team or video game designers or whatever. If you want a show about class, that’s not what this is. I did feel that Richie’s transformation was incredibly unbelievable even though I liked that episode. He became an entirely different guy after a week of staging? Come on. I kind of wish they had all the characters going on their independent journeys throughout the entire season rather than just giving them each an episode, it would make it seem like they all went on a big personal growth journey in preparation for the opening rather than a short 1-2 week boot camp. We got an abridged character arc for everyone and none of them really felt earned or paid off at the end. I enjoyed it while I was watching but looking at the season as a whole it really felt undercooked (heh) and not well written on the larger scale.
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Jul 6, 2023 18:17
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mobby_6kl posted:Yeah this season everything somehow went a bit too well despite all the issues everyone is facing. Richie "found his purpose" and is instantly a new person? Fak is now a serious professional after just screaming "Jewish lightning" in front of the whole restaurant? Ebra overcame PTSD or whatever it was after watching a youtube video? Feels like there's a good chance things will go crashing down soon. It's my last point that I think is going to rear its head in a hypothetical season 3. Carmy's getting loan-sharked to hell and back by Jimmy Cicero and it is absolutely going to come back to bite him in the rear end; there's no way The Bear is going to have $500,000 in liquid cash sitting around to pay the mob back within fifteen months. Edit: Especially because they used all $500,000 that Cicero gave them just to get the place open. Given that this show is generally pretty accurate about the realities of the restaurant business, they're going to be operating at a deficit for a few years. (A new restaurant in downtown Chicago should be ready to lose $2-3 million in its first few years.) This is going to be a primary story in season 3, I feel; it'll be a year after this season ended, with three months left to go until the note is up, and Jimmy Cicero starts threatening to bigtime Carmy out of the property for default. And it's not like Oliver Platt will be tough to get; he lives in Chicago for eight months a year because of his supporting role on Chicago Med. Timby fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jul 6, 2023 |
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Jul 6, 2023 18:22
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I go back and forth on Richie's transformation, but I think where I come down is that it's believable enough to justify how fun it was to watch. It didn't come out of nowhere, there's been a lot of setup establishing that he's adrift and in search of a purpose. And his ep 6 conversation with Jimmy specifically teed things up. The guy has been in a state of arrested development for so long that when he finally found himself in a supporting environment and developed an ounce of self respect, the transformation was both sudden and natural. And I enjoy muttering "who remembers what the ferryman said to Siddartha on the banks of the Ganges River" in a Chicago accent too much to reconsider.
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Jul 6, 2023 18:36
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Yeah I mean it was very fun to watch. I just think they could have done a few small things to make it fully believable and earned.
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Jul 6, 2023 18:38
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The Richie ep landed for me since I've been on both sides of that situation. I was less of a dirtbag and not divorced, but still poor and a fuckup with a pair of young kids and I didn't know poo poo about fine dining and I learned everything from a true believer. I ended up on the other end of the table being the guy in the suit that was training new kids who had not done the kind of service that a top end restaurant entailed. I had not drunk the koolaid, but at that point I was a professional. I had a lot of respect for doing the job well even though I despised my clients, and the second I was through the swinging doors we were flinging expletives about the douchebag on 4 who returned his black and blue for being "too rare." I wanted to make the shmucks on 14 happy because it meant they came back and I could afford gas to get my kid to school. I got really good at remembering faces and drinks and today I can still tell you exactly how I've been Richie intentionally misaligning the silver and place setting to see if my potential coworkers gave a poo poo, but not to the point of torpedoing an interview because by god we've been desperate for servers for years. It was too valuable a learning opportunity for someone who may have started from nothing like I did. I'm out of the FOH almost entirely now though, mostly in the books and management end of the place I've been at for almost 20 years now. I've been through a major renovation. We've fired guys day one for coming in obviously coked out of their minds. Other than not being a head chef, i've done all the poo poo jobs in this place, so every role on the show has the kernel of something that I've experienced, or people I've worked with. It was very contracted sure, and exaggerated for the theatrics but it all came from a place that felt very real to me.
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Jul 6, 2023 19:04
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Timby posted:I don't think we're getting a happy ending. 80 percent of new restaurants fail within their first five years, Richie is still a hotheaded whackjob, and Carmy is up to his eyeballs in debt with organized crime. This is decidedly unlike one of those shows about horrible people. It's a show about flawed people getting over their past and becoming better, epitomized in the metaphor of the restaurant itself. Richie's transformation rang super true to me because occasionally horrible people will have their circumstances change and will, in fact, have an honest moment of self-reflection that sets them on a path to something better. It's literally a show about second chances. Every second counts. Every single character flashes back to failure. If they all leave the narrative as failures, what the hell was this all even for? Things are going to be messy, horrible, and downright grimy on the way there, but if it's not going there, it'll be a far worse show than it currently is. Even the hosed up mother who drunk drove her car into the family house had a "she's growing into a better person" moment.
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Jul 7, 2023 01:33
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if we can suspend our disbelief and assume he's paying a chicago living wage to everyone in that restaurant, we can suspend our disbelief about a lot of things.
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Jul 7, 2023 14:31
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The Beef in S1 always seem crazy overstaffed to me, why does a sandwich shop have a pastry chef?
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Jul 7, 2023 15:56
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ninjahedgehog posted:The Beef in S1 always seem crazy overstaffed to me, why does a sandwich shop have a pastry chef? I figured he made the bread for the sandwiches
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Jul 7, 2023 16:05
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LinkesAuge posted:I think people don't have a problem with a show portraying classism but imo it felt like the show lacked a certain awareness/self-reflection about this issue? Like it isn't even a topic within the show itself and that probably irritates some people. I honestly also found it a bit weird and the whole point about serving other people felt a bit self-masturbatory/tone deaf and not in the intentional kind of way which is rather unfortunate because everything else was genuinely great including Richie's arc (it's just tainted by the somewhat off putting subservience) and you'd at least expect some acknowledgment/conflict about this change in "identity" (on a personal level for Richie but also how the restaurant suddenly serves a very different kind of audience). Yeah, I think it loses something in the transition. The Original Beef of Chicagoland had a very working-class feel, with the teamsters and the mobsters and the arcade games and the sandwiches. You can say a lot about how noble service-work can be in that situation -- you're serving working people who need something to eat at the end of a hard day, and there's something very rewarding about the idea of bringing joy into their lives with an amazing meal. But when you're running a high-end restaurant that charges hundreds of dollars, it's hard to feel that same kind of pride in what you're doing because the customer base tends to be so much less relatable. Great, you've given the millionaire another fancy meal. Wow, that real estate executive really enjoyed the shellfish after he spent another day driving housing prices out of reach for the working-class clientele you used to serve. I liked Richie's arc too, but I'd feel a lot less dissonance there if his takeaway was that he wanted to bring that same impeccable experience to the Original Beef's usual audience. I mentioned it before, but they told that little story with the maitre d at the high-end restaurant, where he'd identified two teachers that had saved up for months to afford to eat there and wanted to give them an amazing experience at no cost, and I think that made it worse instead of better -- I think we were supposed to think "okay, there are regular people that they'll be serving too," but for me it just highlighted that they were the rare exception, and that the vast majority of the time they would be serving the incredibly wealthy.
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Jul 7, 2023 16:17
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I'm curious where the sandwich window goes. It looks like they'll still be serving the beef. I didn't think a character based show around a restaurant would lead to discussion on the impossibility of watching it because of classism
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Jul 7, 2023 16:48
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ilmucche posted:I'm curious where the sandwich window goes. It looks like they'll still be serving the beef.
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Jul 7, 2023 18:15
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Yeah, I don't really understand why that discussion is happening when they're still selling the same poo poo to the same working-class Chicagoans, just out of a window instead of over a counter. It's not like those sandwiches are gonna' be eight hundred bucks now.
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Jul 7, 2023 23:53
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I also liked Richie's transformation, although I thought he was out for a month? I binged the entire season in one sitting on a plane so idk. Richie’s new found purpose sort of felt like AA, he just dove into serving others and it gave him purpose. Without all the religious bs.
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Jul 8, 2023 02:26
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Haptical Sales Slut posted:Richie’s new found purpose sort of felt like AA, he just dove into serving others and it gave him purpose. Without all the religious bs. Minor derail, but as someone who's been in recovery since March 23, 2009, AA isn't religious (bear in mind that the original literature was written in 1939, when it was anathema to not be a white Christian). It's spiritual. All the "God stuff" means is accepting that you're not king poo poo of your mountain and that there are forces more powerful than yourself in this life. For me, I feel that every time I walk to the banks of the Mississippi River.
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Jul 8, 2023 04:09
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Speaking of AA I was hoping someone could clear this up for me: Is Carmy only going to the al-anon meetings as a way to process Michael's death and addiction or is Carmy an alcoholic/addict himself?
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Jul 8, 2023 04:14
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Speaking of death I hope they're nice to Marcus next season. Even with his mom dying, they better not do something loving stupid unless it's "goes off to Denmark to be the best pastry chef"
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Jul 8, 2023 04:27
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Timby posted:Minor derail, but as someone who's been in recovery since March 23, 2009, AA isn't religious (bear in mind that the original literature was written in 1939, when it was anathema to not be a white Christian). Thank you, it bugs me every time someone flippantly writes off AA as religious.
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Jul 8, 2023 04:30
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Penitent posted:Speaking of AA I was hoping someone could clear this up for me: Is Carmy only going to the al-anon meetings as a way to process Michael's death and addiction or is Carmy an alcoholic/addict himself? I believe Al-Anon is a separate organization specifically for people who have a loved one who’s an addict.
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Jul 8, 2023 04:40
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Timby posted:Minor derail, but as someone who's been in recovery since March 23, 2009, AA isn't religious (bear in mind that the original literature was written in 1939, when it was anathema to not be a white Christian). I didn’t know that! That’s the only thing I’ve ever read negative about the program.
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Jul 8, 2023 04:41
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Timby posted:Minor derail, but as someone who's been in recovery since March 23, 2009, AA isn't religious (bear in mind that the original literature was written in 1939, when it was anathema to not be a white Christian). It's a decentralized organization, as it should be, but that means Christians who already think of themselves as the only real people, and their morality the only right and true morality, can, in fact, wind up running meetings, chapters, and by extension, whole cities. And if you're a Christian with substance abuse issues, there should absolutely be a place for you, but you shouldn't demand everybody else's recovery conform to yours. The first half of the Blue Book was awash with religion. The back half was far more useful and helps me with keeping the money off my back to this very day, because it was like the platonic ideal of a meeting itself: hearing other people tell their stories. You gotta' find the right meeting.
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Jul 8, 2023 05:14
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Timby posted:It's spiritual. All the "God stuff" means is accepting that you're not king poo poo of your mountain and that there are forces more powerful than yourself in this life. For me, I feel that every time I walk to the banks of the Mississippi River. Craig Finn over here
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Jul 8, 2023 12:22
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Binged the new season this morning and the show is still pretty good. I liked all the character development episodes and "Seven Fishes" was a joy from start to finish. Jamie Lee Curtis killed it, but really all the guest stars did. I was especially happy with finding out who Chef Terry was (I just wanted a hug from her at the end of that episode). I thought they were gonna do something more with the crackhead and Sydney going outside. I had a moment of panic that he was gonna still be in the alley when she went out there and that she'd get stabbed or something. Well only another year and half until we get season 3. The writers guild strike is gonna slow things down, but I'm positive it'll get renewed. I was kind of hoping Richie would ask that chef out, I think her name was Jess, as a part of him fully coming to terms with moving on from his ex-wife. But now I have a feeling he's going to be working at the fancy place in season 3 and possibly dating her while there. Carmy and Richie just had a huge blowup afterall.
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Jul 8, 2023 17:42
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Binged the season in two days. Nothing I’ve ever seen matches the frenzy of the Christmas episode. The Bernthal and Odenkirk stuff was just nuts. And Jamie Lee Curtis wins the guest Emmy for this. The Ritchie episode was also great. The Taylor Swift song was inspired; they must have blown their budget on it. The cameo at the end was a hell of a cherry on top. These two episodes were peak TV for me. The other episodes were mostly good too, all except the finale. They tripped at the finishing line with this one. The conflict is pretty contrived. I liked moments of it but on the whole it seemed kinda lost and they maybe wrote themselves into a corner or had no time left or something. Agreed that Claire was a misfire. The actress is great. But she’s playing the textbook definition of a manic pixie dream girl. This was pretty backward storytelling.
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Jul 10, 2023 07:23
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mcmagic posted:The last episode was very "TV" in a way that the rest of the season wasn't which is why I didn't love it.
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Jul 11, 2023 02:10
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Carmy should become emotionally mature and get with Sydney and they should have committed to some light mafia hijinks like season 1 promised
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Jul 11, 2023 02:25
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I wish Southside didn’t get cancelled.
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Jul 11, 2023 04:27
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i think they all probably shouldve been a little more sympathetic to a dude that was trapped in a walk-in for an entire service, and that they probably shouldve done a single thing to get him out of that walk-in during that same service.
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Jul 11, 2023 04:46
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ruddiger posted:I wish Southside didn’t get cancelled. Bust Down had a similar vibe, despite not sharing the Chicago setting. RIP.
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Jul 11, 2023 04:53
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| # ? May 3, 2024 19:48 |
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i just finished season one and is it me or is carm entirely justified in losing his poo poo at sid and marcus in the penultimate episode? sid accidentally fucks them over, but gets belligerent and refuses to accept culpability, arguing with carm instead of trying to help fix her mistake, and ends up loving stabbing richie. marcus meanwhile is repeatedly told to get cutting cakes, is well aware that the kitchen is undergoing a meltdown, and still decides to gently caress around rain manning his ultimate donut. i’ve worked as a line cook in kitchens. i didnt think a situation could be written in which i could feel sorry for chefs. but here we are.
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Jul 11, 2023 08:16
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