I love y’all’s commentary. This show is like the anti Ted Lasso. For ep6:
My fave moment was early on when Sugar surreptitiously empties a bottle of vodka into the sink so deep into frame that she nearly slips it by the audience, too.
Am incredible performance from Jamie Lee Curtis fueled by her own path as an addict finding sobriety.
I tried to track the episode under the theme of whatever each catalyst action each character mirrors. Every scene begins with another character trying to ask someone (or everyone) to make space for them.
But a strange thing happened at the midpoint when Michelle (Sarah Paulson) offered Carmy a place of refuge in New York. Carmen didn’t ask for that. Michelle is just being generous.
The dynamic flips from asking for what we need from those who have nothing we want to those same people offering whatever they have to the people who always want something other than what they already have.
I empathized with Carmy as an adult child of an alcoholic and how he claims the same family role in kitchens and restaurants, where he hopes to recreate and redeem what should have been good.
The body keeps the score, and his is wired for that kind of chaos. He grew up in it starting from the womb. The fast pace of the kitchen is where he returns to the same setting as that flashback dinner.
Now I’m going back to this scene and just gonna cry having seen what he was describing.
My podcasts of choice forced me kicking and screaming to binge-watch this season of The Bear since I preferred that to simply skipping any of my regular listens.
S02E07 left me with some sort of perma-grin long after it was over. That shit was some good medicine after episode 6 (which I did like, but obviously the vibe was as different as it gets).
More Bear (sorry to multi-post, just still digesting).
I fear that there’s some chance that Lionel Boyce’s stellar performance as Marcus may get lost in the shuffle of just insanely good performances across the board, but man oh man does he deserve some roses. He carried the hell out of episode 4, and it continued to pay off after that because I was seriously invested in his stuff for the rest of the season, and found myself suddenly welling up when they showed his phone late in the finale with the ominous texts/missed calls about his mother.
Richie is my favorite character on the show, but Boyce made Marcus surprisingly competitive in that ranking.
So that guy on The Bear who plays Pete? I had to play the “where do I know this guy from??” game for a decent while, and then I landed on it: that he was the same dude who played Greg on Mad Men. And then I spent the rest of the season thinking, “I remember who you are, and I hate you. I don’t care how nice you act on this show.”
Today I find out that I was wrong and he was played by some totally different dude. Oops. To be fair, it doesn’t seem like too wild of a mistake to make.
That I haven’t seen. I see that he’s had credits in Lady Bird and Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I have no recollection of him from those even though I’ve seen them.
There was the slight red flag that he had a weaker chin than Greg from Mad Men, but I just figured he had gained some weight or something and also didn’t grow a great beard. Ah well. I suppose on rewatch I can successfully discard the “yeah, but you’re secretly a terrible person” read that I was hung up on.
Mild spoiler from 24, I suppose:
I remember a late season of 24 casting Bob Gunton. When he made some sort of heel turn, my friend gave a reaction on the order of, “Called it!” I said, “Dude, you do not get to claim credit for ‘calling it.’ It’s Bob Gunton. Of course there was something wrong with his character.”
As much of a critical darling as this already was before season 2, I am surprised by how much of a budget they managed to get. The extended Berzatti family, even for one episode (and in one case two episodes), could not have come that cheaply. And I assume that the rights to a Taylor Swift song have to be especially expensive? I guess I thought that the binge-drop was a sign that this show was a forgotten child no matter how good it was, but even before the triumph that this season was, they obviously got some real monetary backing.
Richie saying “I love Taylor Swift too, but I just needed a break” to his daughter seemed like it was just a good funny line in a vacuum with no other meaning; I absolutely loved that it turned out to be a precursor to an extremely well-executed needle-drop.
Charlie Brooker reveals why he set “Beyond the Sea” in the 60s instead of the typical Black Mirror near future
Quotes start around the 1 minute mark, brief transcript in spoilers below
Interviewer: Setting it in the ’60s is an interesting idea ’cause it could have easily taken place now, or in the future, but why did you want to do a retro version of the ‘60s?
Charlie Brooker: When I’d originally conceived this, it was set in the sort of near future, and everybody’s looking at holograms and crying, sort of thing, which is your trad “Black Mirror,” and initially, I’d conceived of a forest fire created by climate change that wipes out one guy’s family at the start, and then I think I was just, there was something about having shaken up my own thought process a bit that made me think, well, what if I set it in the past, what if I just say it’s set in 1960, in the late ’60s, what happens then? And then that sort of led to me thinking about the hippie cult that show up. And the other interesting thing is that it means that the characters are behaving like characters of their era, rather than of now or the future, so it made it just a very exciting thing to explore.
The old lady and I just started this, somehow we missed it completely the first time round. So far it’s great. Freeman and Billy Bob are awesome. Could use more Odenkirk (like everything else ldo), but just starting ep 6 so we will see?
