Feed the Beast (2016)

Feed the Beast manages to be both overheated and undercooked. Stock up on antacid.

While Beast runs these best buddies through the obvious scrappy start-up hurdles, it never tries to pretend that not opening the restaurant is a potential outcome. The threats facing Dion and Tommy are much broader and more colorful, but they take the show in tonal directions that compromise its integrity.

The performances are fine, but the poorly mixed tone, cliche strategies for complex characterization (grief, addiction, obsession), and zesty conflict (psycho mobsters, corrupt cops) make for a flavorless dish. [3 Jun 2016, p.102]

The series feels like it was made for a different era--like the old guy who still shows up at the club, even when everyone knows he needs to move on--and these days, there’s simply no time to stick around and wait for it to realize who and what it is.

Feed the Beast feels like a broadcast network crime underworld show circa 2002--it feels like same old, same old TV.

Where Bourdain and Melville go to painstaking lengths to describe the addictions, hardships, and unending effort that went into the toils at the center of their tales, Feed the Beast only expresses a basic admiration for the process and love for the end product, which makes [creator Clyde] Phillips's perspective feel more like that of a hungry customer than of a relentless artist in the kitchen.

The show’s biggest problem, though, is it’s hard to like either of its main characters.

The food looks pretty good. But that’s not enough to keep this drama from rising above basic cafeteria fare.

Just to keep our restaurant metaphors straight, this newcomer does a competent job of setting the table, but when the plates arrive, there’s nothing on them.

In its attempt to mash together several genres, AMC's new drama will frequently leave viewers unsatisfied, much like a fast food taco. However, when it hits the right mark, this series is engaging and entertaining.

The most frustrating part of Feed the Beast is that it feels like there's a promising show buried underneath all the superficial aping of other series.

The combo platter of drama, crime, family and lots of food porn doesn’t quite gel. Everything feels predictable, the downbeat tone spreads across the plate to infect performances and, ultimately, the audience.

While it drives the plot, the restaurant is a garnish for the more prominent, and equally unconvincing, parts of the story: Dion’s involvement with a gourmandising Polish mobster (Michael Gladis) and Tommy’s attempt to break out of his funk, be a competent single father and relate to his own dad (John Doman).

Dion’s character is written in such a clumsy and obvious way that Sturgess’s only option is to drench a lot of acting sauce on his scenes and then proceed to chew ’em all up. Schwimmer, on the other hand, seems to be drawing from an authentic well of nuance, even when the writing is doing him no favors at all.

Feed the Beast has one huge narrative flaw. The storylines center on the tension that arises keeping the fledgling restaurant going. But there is no tension.

Tommy and Dion want so much for their lives and for their dreams of Thirio, but making it happen is a messy and scattered process. The same is true of Feed the Beast.

Feed the Beast often traffics in clichés, including some of Tommy’s grief as he talks to his wife’s headstone, much of his drinking problem, and almost all of the somewhat silly mob material. The acting, too, is exceedingly amped, with Schwimmer and Sturgess overdoing it to the point of irritation.