Great fuckin’ posts, @Banquet_Bear.
hanks for the post, BB. I know NOTHING about the restaurant business.
My very first jobs were in restaurant kitchens and, remembering an episode of The Brady Bunch, I checked the freezer latches very carefully the first day.
Thank you, @Banquet_Bear !
You’ve thoroughly answered my question, now I’ll see myself out and come back when I’ve caught up (thanks for the spoiler tags!). See you in a week or so… 
Man - don’t wanna yuck anybody’s yum, but the show may have lost me after last night’s 3 eps. First, a long slog of Tina looking for work, then just a “meh” ep, followed by an interminable maternity ward ep. Maybe I was too tired last night, but these eps just aren’t for me.
I’ll likely watch through the end - if my wife wants to, as they are short and there aren’t too many. Maybe not.
IIRC, that episode has some scenes with her at home with her husband, played by David Zayas, who also played Angel on Dexter. He’s her IRL husband as well.
I remember liking the Ice Chips episode, but I love the way Jaime Lee Curtis/Donna is able to bring her own special blend of chaos and manipulation and martyrdom to just about every situation she finds herself in. Come to think of it, we never had a Donna-specific episode. I’m curious how she acts when she’s on her own, without the rest of the Bears around. I’m guessing similarly, but toned way down. But she also seems like someone that will yell at a cashier for accidentally dropping the change they’re handing to her or putting something in the ‘wrong’ bag.
Anyways, but you are going to have a few more episodes that focus on a specific character. Maybe just half pay attention to those episodes while your wife is watching and then find a good recap you can read to make sure you don’t miss anything important.
Oddly, one of the things that sticks in my head from the Ice Chips episode was that necklace Donna was wearing, and fidgeting with, throughout the show, is an Italian Horn, a good luck charm. It was a nice touch. I don’t know how many people that didn’t grow up in an Italian family are even aware of those. Just about every Italian female relative of mine wears one.
Yeah - I think that overall the style of this show just doesn’t appeal to me. Which is fine. We don’t all have to like the same things.
-Early on my wife commented that we didn’t need as many extended shots just looking at Carmy’s face. They do the same for other characters. I guess those express something for some people, but not for us. Yeah, I know a lot of life is boring inaction. I just don’t need to watch that for entertainment.
-Sorta related - the long shots of Chicago. I enjoyed them at first. But as time passed I sorta wonder did they just not have enough to fill this ep?
-And I wonder if they re-use the same shots of whomever chopping the onions and carrots. Just seems like whenever they go to show some food prep, it is heavy on the onions and carrots.
-Then it just switches to everyone yelling at each other. Maybe that does happen in kitchens, but I’ve never perssoally experienced it at anything higher than a shithole hole-in-the-wall. And, again, it gets old as entertainment - SOLELY IMO.
-And just about any time the Faks are on screen, my interest fails.
-The Tina ep had some decent parts, but I got hung up on her simply going into every conceivable type of business seemingly at random and asking if she can leave a resume. What kind of job search is THAT? And I know the market sucked back then. My wife was looking for a lawyer job - with ZERO success. But I would imagine some people were hiring somewhere for some jobs - if, as she claimed, she was willing to do anything.
Final stupid observation: the episode Violets, where Marcus takes a photo of a white flower vining up a fence? I’m no expert horticulturalist, but I have pulled many a thousand violet outta my Chicago area lawns. Can someone direct me to where I can find about the vining violet that climbs fences?
I watched Always Sunny in Philadelphia last night and I have to ask here:
Were they mocking/spoofing The Bear?
If you watch both, do you know? Charlie was cooking quick food and demanding to be called Chef and there was a lot of quick cutting.
Did anyone else see the latest episode of ASiP?
She’s a middle-aged woman who has not had to look for work in probably DECADES. She is not shown to be tech savy…and remember this flashback is probably into the early to mid-2010s? Of course she is going to take a printed copy of her resume to places looking for work. That was pretty common up until about the year 2000.
I love the ramping of tension with the character the whole episode. We have never seen Donna in a positive light in the show and she’s been presented as passive aggressive and manipulating and an addict…so that idea of “Did she call Sugar’s husband or not” hangs over everything. You’re waitng for the bomb to go off…and it didn’t… she DID call him…and once he’s there she just…“fades away” because she wasn’t needed anymore.
That’s fine. But unless it is a kid looking for a summer job, I have never heard of anyone simply stopping in every store and asking if they were hiring, rather than focussing their search in some manner. Lots of industrial businesses - and even many small retail, have “Help Wanted” signs displayed. And there were always such ads in the paper. She may not have been totally on the edge of tech, but she did use computers in her past work, and did something such that she got a computer alert to an interview.
Different people can view it differently, but to me, it looked like they wanted to portray her as someone wasting a lot of time and effort doing things as inefficiently as possible. Which lessened my care for her.
I grew up in the family business, I’m still working in the family business. Part of my reason for liking the show was specifically because I’m no stranger to walking into a room and finding a bunch of people screaming at each other. It’s part of life when everyone spends this much time together, especially when there’s resentment involved.
I think it’s worth giving them some artistic license on that one. They do still have a story to tell and having her dropping off those applications does a better job of showing what’s going on her life than emailing them from a laptop while laying in bed.
I think the point was to show how desperate—and thankful—Tina was when she gets hired at the Original Beef/the Bear when the opportunity comes up and why she would never leave the place despite the tension. As I recall, she’s also one the few that works the lunch shift and the dinner shift.
I think they wanted to portray her as someone from a certain social class/background who’s desperate to find a job, any job.
For some adults, a job search is very much like a kid looking for a summer ( or year round) job. Focusing your search in some manner isn’t necessarily obvious if the focus is " I don’t want to work in a warehouse or a factory" and for more people than you might expect, there isn’t any focus at all beyond whether they can get to the work location. And sure, lots of places have “help wanted” signs up - but way back when I was looking for that sort of job, lots of places would accept applications all the time, whether they were hiring or not and people absolutely did just walk in and fill out applications, regardless of whther there was a “help wanted” sign. The business might have just tossed those applications, I wouldn’t know but people filled them out and the businesses accepted them.
I have an acquaintance who needed to find a new job a year or so ago. I’m not exactly sure how he ended up where he did ( probbaly someone he knew already worked there) but I can guarantee you that his job search did not involve a computer in any way.
Yeah, I got one of my college jobs by applying to a place that had a very large ‘not hiring’ sign in the window at their administrative office. Only said sign was strictly for show - they were pretty much always hiring. This was a very large large public venue who always needed more ushers, ticket-takers, vendors and security guards because of high turnover from short-timers. The sign was just to discourage casuals from inundating them with hundreds of applications during a large event. Folks determined enough or in the know (because they knew someone who worked there) and showed up outside of an event were always given an application.
I readily acknowledge that I may not have been the target audience for this show from the start, and this 3d season sorta caused me to lose my interest - with the result that I may be almost looking out for things to object to.
The Tina episode was interesting, partly because, as said, it explains how she came to work at The Beef. And the scenes of her at the culinary school were interesting, in that she was clearly older than the other students and trying to fit in. I did like when she went to the karaoke bar with them and did what I thought was an awesome job performing a song.
You should check out the fourth season. It’s def a improvement over S3 in my opinion.
Just finished S3. I liked when Carmy confronted his nemesis and said, “I think about you too much.” And his nemesis says, “I don’t think of you.” Whether intended/necessary or not, I appreciated the explanation that what he did turned Carmy into a great chef.
Interesting that the chefs were playing themselves. They were such effective actors, I had wondered.
Hoping S4 is better (IMO).
I just watched that episode of Sunny earlier tonight, and I have to agree with you that it was a direct parody of The Bear. I think Charlie saw a few episodes, and decided he could do it, too.