They Let It Marinate

The Bear returns, now with better plating.

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

IN ITS FIRST SEASON, the FX restaurant drama The Bear was about inheritance, avoidance, and grief. Its center was Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), and its overwhelming mood was Carmy's sensation of standing in quicksand. Doing nothing with his dead brother's struggling Chicago sandwich joint meant a slow slide toward bankruptcy and failure, but trying to escape seemed only to make the whole project sink faster. Season two, to its great credit, becomes a different kind of show-one with its own set of questions and preoccupations. It's still a series about inheritance and ambition and how a history of family pain can turn those two things into competing forces. But it's lighter than before-just a touch more hopeful while introducing new tension via inescapable relationship cycles and the costs of an all-consuming career.

The Bear's ten-episode second season relies on one of TV's best, most underused story arcs: a bunch of caring, flawed people coming together to build something they all love. It's a little bit Halt and Catch Fire in that respect and a little bit Ramy (an earlier show from The Bear creator Christopher Storer) in its mix of darkness and levity and the way it deploys its self-contained episode ideas. At times, it even has an '80s-drama vibe with sexy bluehued montages and unapologetically onthe-nose musical cues. This season is bigger and looser than the first and inevitably loses some of the taut, unrelenting rhythms that fueled its heady, nearly painful intensity. That is more than offset by other gains. Season two is more tender and wrenching, and its enlarged world hasn't diluted the show's characteristic intimacy.