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Notes -
Have you guys watched "The Bear"? A couple of notes on this show:
This show is absolutely excellent. If you've worked in a kitchen, or if you've ever worked in any sort of extreme-stress environment, this show captures the feeling perfectly.
Just to stress again, I absolutely loved this show. 10/10 acting, cinematography, story, music. It's a perfect show.
-------BEGIN SPOILERS--------
There is a heavily implied theme here, which is that the main character, Carmy, has a toxic personality, and that he needs to overcome this in order to succeed. Some of the other characters, the young female chef, as well as the older "gentler" male cake making chef have conflicts with the Carmy over how mean he is being to them. Eventually these two quit, then "forgive" him, then they eventually return.
Many bits have been spilled about how the theme of this show is "toxic masculinity".
The problem I have with this is: Carmy is presented at the beginning of the show as an absolute savant level of chef. He is young, has already been declared as the most promising up and coming chef by some prestigious magazine, and has worked at both The French Laundry, and Noma, two of the top restaurants in the world. In one scene the younger female chef is explaining to the cake maker chef how when she finished culinary school (she also went to a very prestigious school, CIA, but hasn't done anything yet) she went out on a tour of top restaurants, and that Carmy (the man she now works for) cooked the best meal she has ever had in her life.
The people who work with Carmy, who complain about how mean he is, are morons. Young chef girl screws up multiple times in ways that could be disastrous for the restaurant. Cake maker man has been essentially trying to teach himself how to bake while on the clock, and the "blowup moment" where he quits is during a high stress situation (that young female chef created and Carmy is in the process of trying to solve). Cake maker wants Carmy to taste/give feedback on some donuts he has been trying to learn to make. Carmy yells at him that he doesn't have time for this right now, and cake maker quits.
In the setting of the show, where Carmy is one of the top chefs in the entire world, the reality is that he would have an endless list of people willing to work for him for free, who would be willing to follow every command he gave to a t. Additionally, if this top chef was known to be working at some crappy beef sandwich restaurant in Chicago, they'd have a line around the block of people wanting to taste his food.
Again, this show is amazing, and the CW elements are easily ignorable. I'm curious if anybody else watched this show and had similar frustrations about it.
(Also: I'm not sure why I like writing posts like this as numbered lists.)
Watched it over the last two days because you said it was amazing. My wife loved it I really liked it. We didn't pick up on much of these culture war angles. She liked how diverse the cast was, and while that does bug me it didn't feel out of place here. I never got that they were going with toxic masculinity when it came to Carmen; Richie sure. In the meltdown scene one could critique that one should never scream at someone unless it's life or death and they might not hear you, but in the case of the scene Sydney and Marcus both ignored Carmen multiple times before he started screaming. Even warning one of them that he was going to "fuck up their day" if they didn't stop doing exactly what they kept doing. Sydnie was not functioning well, and while Richie is an ass he only had a (by his standards) very light "see, I told you so" before getting to work the best he could to get through the crisis while Sydnie kept spiraling.
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