‘The Bear’ Season 2 Debuts To Record Streaming Audience On Hulu

The Bear‘s second season places us in a frigid Chicago winter, where our beloved, stressed chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and his crew are hard at work turning their now-shuttered sandwich joint “The Beef” into “The Bear,” an upscale dining destination.The second season of Hulu’s surprise hit from Christopher Storer (Eighth Grade, Ramy) proves that without change, even the most timeless meals can go off.

Sophia Scorziello editor Being a television personality is a lot different than playing a television character. For someone like cooking TV personality Matty Matheson, the latter can be terrifying. “Acting scares the shit out of me,” said Matheson, actor and executive producer on FX’s acclaimed restaurant dramedy series “The Bear.” On the show, Matheson plays Neil Fak, better known simply as Fak, the childhood friend of Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Carmy’s cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Fak is sensitive and sweet and sometimes spacey, but does his best in both seasons to keep first the Beef and then the Bear running as a handyman and server.

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Season 2 of FX’s The Bear.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. In “The Bear,” whose second season returned to Hulu last week, no prop is more significant than each chef’s respective knife. For a series known for showcasing the very real highs and exceptionally difficult lows inside the restaurant industry, getting the tool that every chef needs just right was imperative. Take Carmy’s $2,000-plus Japanese steel knife, for example, that subtly hints for the first time at the tortured chef’s history working in fine dining restaurants, which he so bashfully tries to hide. “We wanted him to have one thing that wasn’t pedestrian because he had already gone to New York, he had already gotten that James Beard Award,” the show’s prop master Laura Roeper tells Variety. “It’s from the Japanese Knives of Beverly Hills. They’re super famous, people know them.”

Emily Longeretta Just as it did in its first season, “The Bear” Season 2 created a powerful soundtrack, thanks to executive producers Josh Senior and Christopher Storer, who also oversee the series’ music. From Otis Redding and Pearl Jam, to R.E.M. and Taylor Swift, the duo were able to tell a story of itself through the needle drops — something that is just as important to them as the writing itself. When the writers room began, the group made a playlist and started sharing ideas with others on the team and even some of the actors, with Senior noting that Ayo Edebiri “is super helpful” in the entire process. “It’s the most fun thing we get to do on the show, in my opinion. It’s a blast,” says Senior. “Sometimes we take all the songs out and see if we miss them. Other times, we use the songs to syncopate the scenes and cut them really fast. It’s an integral part of the process. We don’t score the show after it’s cut.”

There’s nothing like friendship.

Selome Hailu Though production on Season 2 of “The Bear” was well underway before Ramy Youssef traveled to Copenhagen to direct the fourth episode, series creator Chris Storer was slow to bring him fully behind the curtain. “He didn’t let me watch anything they had shot [in the first three episodes]. He was like, ‘No, no. You can see it when you come back, but just make this what you think it should be,'” Youssef remembers. Youssef is the first and only person to serve as a director on “The Bear” besides Storer and his co-showrunner Joanna Calo. When a tight production timeline made it impossible for Storer or Calo to direct in Copenhagen on top of nine Chicago-set episodes, Youssef was Storer’s first choice. Storer has been a director and executive producer on Youssef’s Hulu series “Ramy” since its 2019 debut, and had bounced ideas for “The Bear” off of him since “way back when it was a movie idea.”

Apple TV+ has unveiled a sneak peek of the highly anticipated third season of “The Morning Show,” featuring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.

The Morning Show is back!

Charna Flam AppleTV+ announced “The Morning Show” returns for its third season on Sept. 13, and provided a peek at the series’ newcomers, Jon Hamm and Nicole Beharie. The 10-episode season will debut with its first two episodes and will be followed by one new episode every Wednesday through November 8.

has an official return date!Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon are back for the anticipated third season of the Apple TV+ series, which premieres Wednesday, Sept. 13 with the first two episodes, it was revealed Thursday.

EXCLUSIVE: Danny McBride is setting a shining example with The Righteous Gemstones on HBO.

EXCLUSIVE: As his series creation The Bear turned in record Season Two ratings for Hulu, Christopher Storer is set to direct at Paramount Pictures The Winter of Frankie Machine, an adaptation of the 2006 Don Winslow novel. The film will be produced by Shane Salerno and The Story Factory, and Storer will use the Brian Koppelman & David Levien draft those writers did when Martin Scorsese was going to direct Robert De Niro in the lead role.

FX's has returned with season 2, continuing its story about a chef forced to take over his family's Chicago-area sandwich shop. Created by Christopher Storer, the acclaimed dramedy stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmen «Carmy» Berzatto, the culinary star who returns home after his brother's untimely death while he works through his personal and professional drama at The Original Beef. Season 1 saw Carmy bringing on sous chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) while also clashing with longtime staffers, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), Neil (Matty Matheson) and Marcus (Lionel Boyce), as he made dramatic changes to the establishment.

, FX's acclaimed dramedy about a fine-dining chef who takes over his late brother's failing Chicago sandwich shop, has returned with a stellar — and even more delicious — season 2. Adding to all the excitement and drama in the new episodes are a number of previously unannounced guest stars, from Jamie Lee Curtis to John Mulaney to Oliva Colman, who all make unexpected — but very notable — appearances throughout. Created by Christopher Storer, stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, the put-upon chef who returned home in the wake of his brother, Michael's (Jon Bernthal), suicide.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Fans spent a lot of the time out of the kitchen and in front of the TV over the weekend, saying “Yes, chef,” to the second season of FX’s “The Bear.” On Tuesday, FX and Hulu announced “The Bear” Season 2 had seen a 70% increase in total hours streamed in the first four days following its June 22 launch — when compared to the FX comedy’s first season stats over that same post-premiere time period. While FX and Hulu did not reveal the actual streaming figures behind that data point, the Disney-owned brands did confirm “The Bear’s” second season debut was the most-watched premiere of any FX series on Hulu.

Sophia Scorziello editor Chris Zucchero, owner of Chicago’s beloved Italian sandwich shop Mr. Beef, is on the “L” trying to get a word in on the phone. He just wrapped up a long two days of catering parties for FX’s “The Bear” Season 2, providing hot Italian beef sandwiches with sweet peppers and spicy giardiniera for Hollywood’s finest. “The Bear” creator Christopher Storer — who Zucchero has been friends with since kindergarten — based “The Bear” on the classic establishment and shot about 90% of the pilot in Mr. Beef. Storer even cast Zucchero in the pilot as the guy in the parking lot who deals meat to Jeremy Allen White’s character Carmy.

Warning: This story contains spoilers about the plot of The Bear season 2.

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Season 2 of FX’s The Bear.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor While “The Bear” captures the grittiness and intensity of working in a restaurant kitchen, it doesn’t shy away from showcasing the dreamy stares of Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. “They both have insane eyes,” Ayo Edebiri, who plays Sydney on the hit FX series, told me Wednesday at a tastemaker screening of Searchlight Pictures’ upcoming comedy “Theater Camp.” “Ebon once told me, ‘I could turn them on.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you can’t.’ And he was like, ‘I know how to face the light in a certain way that will turn them on’. I was like, ‘You literally sound insane,’ but then he turned them on in front of me. It was the craziest thing I had ever witnessed.”