“On some level, the show lets her [Olivia Coleman] off the hook for her role in the industry and its abuses, simply because Carmy doesn’t view her as the root of all his problems. If the writing were more intentional here, it could have examined the ways that kitchen dynamics function almost entirely on a razor’s edge, the inherent struggle between pushing someone to grow in a high-stress situation and doing so respectfully. Instead, The Bear simply accepts that some amount of abuse must be inherent to restaurant work.”

Really? She’s the root of all Carmy’s problems? That seems like an overly reductive reading.

I think the show’s writing does an excellent job of communicating that she, Camy’s mother (and brother), and Chef David have all contributed to who he is.

Does the show let her off the hook? Well, the show is not about her. Carmy is the one on the hook.

Yes, the stunt casting of real chefs was narratively unnecessary, and some of these real chef's behaviors sound awful. But ultimately, I think that including the likes of someone as….complicated(?) as Thomas Keller, is kind of the point. It would seem, at least to Carmy, that he is a real-life Chef Terry and Chef David rolled into one.

And the last line, I think misses the whole point of the show. Carmy is trying to both push people AND be respectful to them. But he’s a broken human who’s really bad at that.

I totally agree with this. I think the author really did not understand what's happening in the show here. Carmy is trying to do better than the kitchens he was taught in, but he struggles and fails at it constantly.

> Like Carmy, the series blames him, not the systemic toxicity in the restaurant industry. It never reckons with the reality that the abuses in the industry were never limited to just one or two bad apples.

This is such a fundamental misreading of the entire show that it kind of blows my mind to see it stated like that. Carmy has been in absusive restaurants his entire life and that has caused him to become abusive, too, and the show does not celebrate that. You can see the pain it causes people, like the wedge it drives between him and Richie and how much emotional damage control Sydney has to do with Tina after Carmy insists on throwing away a dish. Carmy blames David, but the show blames the industry for creating an atmosphere where this is acceptable.

> Terry is a sort of surrogate mother to Carmy, even though she’s still explicitly committed to that same pursuit of excellence at all costs. On some level, the show lets her off the hook for her role in the industry and its abuses, simply because Carmy doesn’t view her as the root of all his problems.

Except nowhere is the show's indictment of the abusive restaurant industry more crystallized than two scenes in the premiere of season three. In the first, Carmy is behind and not up to Terry's standards and she berates him, asking if she neeeds to come over and do it for him, and we see how it hurts him. A few moments later, we see Carmy's risen up in the ranks and is now saying the same thing — verbatim — to another chef, and we see how it hurts him, too.

> Instead, The Bear simply accepts that some amount of abuse must be inherent to restaurant work.

I think the author has the fundamental misunderstanding that showing something is the same as condoning it. We constantly see the abuses doled out to chefs, but we also see how it affects them. And we see how Carmy is trying not to do those things, fails, and has to pick up the pieces.

I also feel like the author is tapping into the lazy, "Okay, we've all given this thing too much praise, time to tear it down before we build it back up again" critical cycle. (sigh) I just received Ann Friedman's weekly newsletter (which I love, btw) where she asserts "The Bear" is overrated(!?!). I guess she believes "Survivor", which she lists as under-rated, has spent enough time in pop culture jail now to finally earn a reprieve.

Is this like saying The Wire suffered from real-life criminal cameos?