If you were going to ask an AI to put together a script for a drama that felt extremely 2020s, it’d burble out one of two things: a murder mystery set among the gilded classes, or something about a chef whose life is falling apart.
We do like a chef drama, and you can understand the appeal: A gritty, hyper-intense kitchen in contrast with the luxury and calmness of the restaurant itself, the shots of gorgeous food, the rampant egos. But a quartet of dramas about chefs served up on the pass of 2022 have stepped things up a gear: the hernia-inducingly intense The Bear, mystery thriller The Menu, Stephen Graham's one-shot film Boiling Point, and Jez Butterworth and James Corden’s relationship palaver Mammals.
In The Menu Ralph Fiennes’ Julian Slowik is a grotesque over-exaggeration of the my-food-is-my-soul kind of chef, one who feels the loss of his zest for cooking as a betrayal of his muse so profound that he has to kill everyone who he thinks has dragged him down.
“Over the next few hours, you will ingest fat, salt, sugar, protein, bacteria, fungi, various plants and animals, and at times entire ecosystems,” he says, having snapped his brigade to attention like a cult leader. “But I have to beg of you one thing. It’s just one. Do not eat. Taste. Savour. Relish. Consider every morsel that you place inside your mouth. Be mindful. But do not eat. Our menu is too precious for that.”
In The Bear, chef Carmy ran away from home and ended up obsessing over detail at Noma and French Laundry before being dumped back at his late brother’s sandwich joint. Grief and self-respect and family duty and the terror of the health inspector all rumble around Carmy as he tries to turn things around. But there’s a middle ground here. He could loosen up. His staff could sharpen up.
Right at the start of 2022 there was Boiling Point, which is soon to have a BBC prequel series. The single-take slice of life in Stephen Graham's apparently successful restaurant was perhaps the most stressful 90 minutes of service you're ever likely to witness, a slowly simmering pressure cooker in which addiction, mental illness, intra-kitchen squabbling, professional rivalries, awful guests and severe nut allergies swirl together before exploding.
Professional chefs' assessments of exactly how accurate it was ranged from "a truly emotional and harrowing film that resonated for days" to "so unrealistic in so many ways". But that nerve-jangling single-take idea ramped up the pressure on a magnificently frantic Graham, and captured the intensity of what most of us reckon it's like behind the scenes in a kitchen teetering on the brink.
But Graham's slowly disintegrating chef Andy Jones wasn't admirable in his genius-chef mode. In trying to do it all, his focus split between too many important decisions he cannot take, he loses himself. Andy is a man out of control, a rapidly dissolving void rather than the authority figure your classic chef-owner cuts.
And Mammals gives James Corden’s Jamie the reins at a restaurant just as he discovers his wife’s had multiple affairs and they try to recover from losing their baby.
It looks for all the world that he’s going to be exactly the hard-arse shouty chef of yore. Taking taxis across London to track down exactly the right truffles for opening night, for instance, is big Mad Chef Energy. Corden told me he asked the chef whose kitchen they used for shooting in for advice on how to be at work. The chef told him that there was no upper limit to how rude he could be to his chefs. Anything goes. Be horrible. They can take it.
And yet it’s all undercut by the reveal that Jamie’s a hypocrite, and brought all his misery on himself. He even ruins his own big restaurant opening by taking the opportunity to slag off his wife. You found the truffles, Jamie! Enjoy it!
Writers have been drawn to narratives where you can get away with pie-eyed celebration of men who are so unbelievably good at one thing that their total uselessness in every single other area of their lives is forgivable. But the difficult man who misses his child’s birthday party but can slam out a great blancmange/murder suspect/sax solo isn’t the sympathetic creature he was.
Perhaps it’s having spent so much time in the company of self-selected geniuses over the last few years – Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg – but our collective empathy for the destructively brilliant and brilliantly destructive looks spent.
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Musicians always used to get that kind of latitude. Sure, biopics like Ray and Walk the Line looked at some of the shitty stuff their subjects did and how it hurt people. But, fundamentally, it let them off because they knew one end of a banger from the other. They were bruised, and felt things deeply, and let everything collapse around them as they pursued their muse.
A few other jobs got the same treatment. Detectives could get consumed by a case and forgiven for it, given they’re moved by the spirit of justice itself. Investigative journalists are a noble subset of this, as in A Private War, Spotlight or Zodiac. (Online men’s mag writers don’t get the same consideration, for some reason.)
The sea change in kitchen dramas feels like something profound. We don’t want to see difficult men being redeemed by their one superhuman ability anymore. During the Marce Pierre White-Gordon Ramsay supremacy of the noughties, the perfectionist chef was almost admirable.
While other frighteningly intense professions lost their sheen of invincibility for dickhead behaviour, it was still kind of OK for chefs. That was the thesis of a lot of episodes of Chef’s Table. He’s annoying, for sure. But have you tried his polenta chips?
The Menu turns the perfectionist chef into a psychopath. Mammals showed him up as a man of hidden shallows. The Bear puts him in the middle of a series of rolling crises, and makes you watch as he tries to keep his head above water.
In all four, there’s no sense that it’s really worth being an arsehole. And that, even if we learn nothing else, is a solid lesson to take from 2022.
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