The restaurant owner dies. He leaves the business to his brother. The brother is the main character in the show. He is trying to fix the toxic workplace culture left by his brother. When I stopped watching, he’s trying to switch to an alternate toxic workplace culture inspired by the French kitchen structure, but purely because that’s the culture that he knows how to navigate, not because it’s actually a good idea.
Scott, if you were the focus of this show, you would be the villain rather than the hero. You do see that, right?
Ah, so it sounds like the new chef is not a savior who is going to fix things. They are also bad, but a different type of bad. Yeah, no interest in suffering watching shitty people who deserve each other.
Neither the chef or the employees are “bad.” They just come from different backgrounds and cultures when it comes to working in a restaurant.
The arc of the show is the chef realizing that he can’t run the restaurant the way he would a fancy restaurant, and the employees realizing that the changes he wants to make are actually good for the quality of food and business.
No one is “shitty.” They’re complex, full-fleshed out characters with different opinions and motivations.
Ah. Well it was described as a toxic work environment. I thought it was going to be full of sexual harassment, racism, misogyny, etc. Being in reasonable conflict over how to actually conduct business is just life.
Right. I also said humans have emotions and emotions are real. That was my signal to you to employ some empathy!
There is no villain in the show. Nor is there a savior. There are just people with a full range of human emotions, and someone trying to manage the situation along with his own range of human emotions.
Again, your complete lack of knowledge about or respect for or understanding of or dismissiveness towards human emotions would mean that, if you were a character in this show, you would be the villain.
Seems, I think, there’s just a difference in basic application or understanding of the term “toxic work culture.” Which is interesting to see.
Like it reads as though Luke is implying things were not going great; like the situation was just not very good and a bit dysfunctional. (I’m assuming here a lot of that through various failures to address core issues due to the complex interpersonal relationships that mire up professional practices) so it had become toxic: not healthy and thriving, with some major issues to work out to bring things back around.
And then Scott reads “toxic” and gets instant visions of a whole pile of the most wretched, hateful, people being extra wretched and hateful and angry to each-other while on camera. Which to be fair a lot of American Reality TV has mostly devolved into showing various forms of exactly that. (Including, restaurant rescue type shows.) So it’s easy to see where folks here in the US slip into assuming more and more the worst possible case as a baseline, and dismiss the whole scenario as irredeemable bad people being bad.
I never said “they were toxic”, that is a misreading by Scott. I said there was “a sandwich shop with a toxic work culture”.
I wasn’t passing judgment on the people, but the environment and the expected forms of behavior that allowed them to keep working there. In the four or five episodes I watched, it’s very clear that everyone is damaged and shaped by their experiences, not the cause of the situation they find themselves in.
Watching the Bear was pretty cathartic for me as someone who worked in restaurants and bars for a year and my father having been a sous chef. It is an a very intense show, but it is only 8 episodes and it both earns and spends that intensity dearly. If you can work through it I highly recommend it, but I also know how for some people that’s too uncomfortable of a viewing experience and that’s totally fine to skip over.
Finally got around to watching Devs (2020). I thought it was pretty good and thought provoking in a Philosophy 101 kind of way. Alex Garland’s recent stuff seems like a more thoughtful, higher budget version of what Charlie Brooker does with Black Mirror. A simple premise with vast paradigm shifting implications for humanity. And the show is absolutely gorgeous.
At first I thought that having Nick Offerman star as a silicone valley tech billionaire would be too distracting, but he actually pulls it off quite well. His flat speech inflection and subdued demeaner are, it turns out, a subtle part of the plot.
Must also admit that Devs hit a certain sweet spot with me for sci-fi, in that it leans heavily into biblical allusions and direct religious references to Christian theology. I love that shit In speculative fiction. Devs floated my ex-evangelical boat.
We very much enjoyed Welcome to Wrexham. Turns out professional comedians can make a very funny documentary series. And it’s like Ted Lasso but actually real life.
I know I said that I would watch anything the Drive to Survive team put out, but I just saw that they did another docu-series on golf. I haven’t watched it yet, but outside of the whole PGA/LIV (Saudi Arabia is evil) controversy, I couldn’t care less about golf.
Also, I saw the two seasons of Altered Carbon and really enjoyed it. I read the books about 15 years ago, but barely remember them, so I can’t really compare the show to the books. That being said, while the show wasn’t perfect, they did an amazing job at creating a fully-realized cyberpunk/transhumanist world, and just for that alone, I loved the show.
Maybe it’s just me, but Max Verstappen seems like the most boring human being on the face of the planet.
Also, Guenther steals every scene he’s in. I wish the Haas team was doing better just so we could get more of him. I honestly thought he was German or Austrian, based on his accent. I was shocked when he was speaking fluent Italian and someone said he was an Italian citizen.
Interesting, I assumed he was German or Austrian too. I checked his Wikipedia page and he’s from waaaayyy northern Italy, almost Austria. That area of Italy gets really mixed between Italian & Austrian culture and languages and such. From the Wikipedia page on the city he is from:
Society
According to the 2011 census, 50.47% of the resident population spoke German as mother language, 49.06% Italian, and 0.47% Ladin.[29]
I really dug the first season of Altered Carbon, but for some reason I couldn’t get past the first two eps or so of season 2.
The first season is definitely better than the second season. While I don’t remember the books all that much, I remember the first book was the best in the trilogy as well, but maybe that’s just because I prefer cyberpunk neo-noir detective stories. The second season is much more generic action plot compared to the first season.
Season 2 is still worth watching, but Season 1 is definitely superior. Anthony Mackie is great though, and I think I may prefer him to Joel Kinnaman, as Takeshi Kovachs.
It’s too bad they cancelled the show. They could have kept using a different main actor and almost turned it into an anthology-type show.
