TV’s Best New Show Is a Study of Masculinity in Crisis

If you’ve ever spent any time working in restaurants, you know the kind of recurring anxiety dream immediately conjures: packed tables, malfunctioning equipment, orders piling up so fast that the kitchen can’t process them, frayed nerves, incipient breakdown. The new FX/Hulu series from Christopher Storer (, ) is the antithesis of comfort TV; it opens on frenetic chaos and gets messier by the minute. “So much yelling,” I wrote in my notes, followed by “ much yelling.” A gun is fired in the first episode. A cookbook is brandished with the physical menace of a meat tenderizer. Storer, who directs five of eight episodes, builds intensity with quick cuts between characters that capture them peeling carrots, or browning giant slabs of beef. The effect is like living through a real kitchen