Been going through this the past few weeks slowly hitting them all back-to-back and honestly haven't caught up totally on the thread because I ignored it while the seasons were airing.
There are highlights of absolutely amazing in this, to me. Like the start of Season 3 was just amazing although I can see it being controversial. Almost no dialogue and jumping all over the place timeline wise. And there were a couple other examples in Season 2 and 3 that really stood out as "experimental" or being different.
Then you get to the "normal" episodes which pretty much involve everyone yelling at each other and saying fuck a lot. Those are good but to me fall into a trap of Carmy just being constantly fucked up and having panic attacks. As soon as it feels like he's growing as a character they fall right back into the same behavior and the show goes back to everyone screaming at each other. Sydney is a pretty bad character but honestly don't blame her too much sitting in the middle of all that.
When I was 16 I worked at a restaurant for about 8 years through high-school and some of college and still have a lot of friends and acquaintances in the service industry. Man, they fetishize this crap though. As if no one could possibly understand how hard and stressful and miserable and amazing being a Chef is and you just can't understand. It is worse than starving artists or actors the pretentiousness that I've heard. All I've ever seen are a bunch of chain-smoking deadbeats. But then you have people like Daniel Boloud or Graham Aschatz, Rick Bayless. Others that are out there vs. for whatever reason they worship the ground someone like Anthony Bourdain walks on.
Kind of rambling and complaining about it. Good show though, kind of glad we slept on it and were able to just binge it.
