Sweetbitter

If Sweetbitter were longer, I suspect it would lose much of its charm, but six 30-minute episodes is a welcome antidote to the number of television dramas with bloated episode runtimes. Rather than overstay its welcome, it remains fun and breezy.

Sweetbitter has some sensory pleasures, a good cast and better wine (or so we're told). Otherwise occasionally pretentious and ultimately superficial.

While the setup for Sweetbitter is pretty rote, especially in the first episode, the series quickly picks up steam as it turns more into an odyssey of New York life for a young adult.

The characters may be types, but what they do as back waiters, servers, bartenders and sous chefs is convincing.

Tthis is an amuse bouche packaged as a full meal; a promise of a new coming-of-age adventure that, as seen on TV, feels all too ordinary.

The contrast between the steamy, fast-paced controlled chaos of the kitchen, and the air of serenity that pervades the dining room rings even truer. Sweetbitter does a good job of illustrating how challenging it is to toggle between those two environments all night, every night, while trying to maintain sanity. Where it struggles is in its character development.

As Season 1 only has handful of episodes, it’s fair to say that not enough happens on Sweetbitter to pique our interest for more.

Much more engaging and less tonally punishing than Feed the Beast, but in no way as lively and clever as Kitchen Confidential ... Sweetbitter is occasionally pleasant, but impossibly slight and stuck with a real dud of an over-teased central romance.

Tess rarely whets our appetite as a character intriguing enough to recommend this trial by fire. [30 Apr - 13 May 2018, p.13]

Sweetbitter certainly presents recognizable characters, situations and reactions that may have an appeal to young people who are living on their own for the first time in a big city, but it has precious little new to add to that familiar experience.

Sweetbitter could overcome the familiarity of its situations if they had a little more flavor to them, but Ms. Danler is stingy with the spice. ... The details of the trade may be presented accurately, but the emotions feel canned and the behavior rehearsed. There’s the same studied, cautious tastefulness that you often get from a Manhattan expense-account restaurant.

It’s shallow to the point of being narcissistic.