‘Every second counts’: From The Bear to Industry, why workplace culture makes for brilliant TV drama

Restaurant drama ‘The Bear’ is electrifying to watch, but its relationships are ones we recognise from ‘The West Wing’, ‘Call My Agent!’ and many more. They’re the stuff of our own work lives, says Amanda Whiting

Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) trades haute cuisine for hoagies (FX)

InThe Bear, time’s the ingredient a restaurant kitchen can’t afford to waste. Someone smudged the persimmon glaze. Because of the smudge on the plate, the meal of a particular diner could not be served. And because at ultra-fine-dining restaurants an entire table’s food must be presented with simultaneous precision to rival Swan Lake, three other meals were stalled. Matching those plates to the smudged plate cost the kitchen where Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is serving an apprenticeship a whole 47 seconds.

In the crucible of a Michelin-starred kitchen, delivering locally foraged “tweezer food”, 47 seconds is cataclysmic. Imagine one of Tchaikovsky’s petits cygnes tumbling to the stage. On Richie’s first day as “stagiaire” – industry jargon for a junior chef’s unpaid stint at a high-performance restaurant – the smudge is two days old but not forgotten. “If you cost us that kind of time, you sure as s*** better own up to it,” pleads the incensed chef de cuisine to his tight-lipped staff. Eyes are averted. “Because we sure as s*** are going to pay for it.” An ominous placard hangs in the windowless kitchen: EVERY SECOND COUNTS.

Season two of the Hulu series (available on Disney+ in the UK) has radically switched things up, with Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy Berzatto reinventing the Chicago sandwich shop he inherited from his brother as an haute cuisine destination. But the series, from Ramy producer Christopher Storer, is no less electrifying after its bold context shift. In fact, it could move even farther. To, say, a hospital ward or a newspaper bullpen. It could be set in the conspicuously long hallways of The White House’s West Wing or the sterile ones of Holby City Hospital. Because as The Bear’s early themes of grief and filial duty give way to questions about Carmy’s ambition and the sustainability of his professional life, the series finds its footing as a bona fide workplace drama – a series, like the inimitable Mad Men or the hedge-fund saga Billions, that draws its characters deeper into an insular sphere with its own energy; that is governed by its own laws.