Quite simply, up there with the best TV shows of the year.
There are a couple of moments, early in the first episode of the second season of 'The Bear', where you think you have a handle on how it will go. Carmy, played with renewed focus and intensity by Jeremy Allen White, sits upright in his cramped apartment and bolts straight into action while the familiar riff of 'New Noise' by Refused begins to build up. The upcoming remodelling / renovation / gutting / whatever of The Beef, soon to be renamed The Bear, needs to happen sooner and faster. It's got to be bigger, better, it's got to be a "destination", and it's got to have all of these qualities right away. Yet, what makes 'The Bear' one of the best sophomore seasons of any TV show in the past decade is that it understands that serving up the same thing with a bigger budget might be good, but it's not enough.
Instead, the show then pivots from chaos upon chaos, to trying to understand and develop its characters and their reasons for doing all of this. As anyone who's worked inside a kitchen or in service will tell you, and as was expertly demonstrated in the first season, it's not glamorous nor should it be portrayed as such. 'The Bear' makes absolutely no attempts to turn it into other sexified industries like law or medicine or the military. What it does show, however, is that the people who tough it out, who weather the uncertainty and the very real likelihood of failure, are very often people with a deep reservoir of emotions. They're shaped by different beings and beliefs, but they're all of a certain stripe that is immediately recognisable to their own kind. Some are carers and nurturers, while others do it out of a driving need to succeed where doubt is a luxury and resilience is a religion.
In the second season of 'The Bear', the crew behind the restaurant get a much deeper examination of their characters and begin to develop. Chief among them is Richie, played with gusto by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. While he was given the mantle of shiftless but loveable fuck-up in the first season, the second season sees him grappling with his divorce, his unwillingness to change, and ultimately confronting that in a way that is truly believable and convincing. There's an entire episode dedicated to Ayo Edibiri's character, Sydney, pulling together the influences and tastes for the menu, and we can see the spark of creativity happen in real-time. Carmy gets into a relationship with a childhood friend who's now a doctor, Tina and Ebra go to culinary school, Marcus goes off to Copenhagen to develop new recipes - everyone is going through changes and growth, all of it funnelling into where the restaurant and the show are heading.
Far and away, the episode that'll be talked about the most is the sixth episode, titled 'Fishes'. It's not just for the truly impressive number of guest stars, or the fact that it's a "Christmas" episode, or even that it's a wholly contained episode that is set five years before the events of the series. Rather, the sixth episode explains and develops so much of how and why two of the main characters of the show - Carmy and Richie - are as they are. As much as origin building is often a tedious effort, here it's turned into a pressure cooker of an episode. It's best to experience it completely cold, and if you're blasting through the season, you'll want to stop here and take a break right afterwards because, well, it's a lot to process.
Much like the first season, 'The Bear' grapples with all kinds of themes and ideas. There's the idea of creativity in an industry that succeeds by repetition, there's the concept of channelling that creativity into a business and selling off pieces of yourself to get it. There are also deep and considered examinations of how people who try to throw themselves into something they love end up losing sight of themselves along the way. All of this is thrown into the pot, all of it stews and cooks together, and all of it comes out served to perfection and topped off with a cracking and varried array of episodes that lingers long afterwards.
There are precious few TV shows nowadays that remain consistently excellent in their second season, and fewer still that do so and change up the formula almost completely. It's not that showrunner Christopher Storer is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but rather that it's accepting that change means growth, and growth is sometimes scary and not always pleasant - but that it is ultimately for the betterment of the person and their skill. In the end, 'The Bear' Season 2 is a masterpiece of television. Come with a clean palate, and leave with a full heart.