This, he believes, is how people achieve greatness. It is also how people lose their minds. Sometimes they do both, but usually it is one or the other.

"The Bear" is about which of those things will happen to Carmy if he does not try to figure out what's driving him.

In Season 1, it seemed that Carmy's older brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) was his primary source of trauma. Beloved Mikey, who after becoming addicted to painkillers, died by suicide and left the family's barely functioning restaurant to Carmy.

Emerging as a hot young chef at play in the wider world, Carmy came back home to Chicago to fix the Beef. And not just fix it but, with the help of Sydney, turn it into the high-end restaurant Carmy always wanted to create with his brother, which might, in some way, bring his brother back to life.

Initially, no one thinks this was a good idea — not Richie, who has been running the Beef with F-bomb-dropping, gun-toting swagger. Not Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), who had been trying to save Mikey by pouring money into his failing business, and certainly not Sugar, who is healthy enough to be alarmed by her brother's confession that he has nightmares and wakes up screaming every night. She begs Carmy to go to Al-Anon to help him cope with Mikey's death, which he does.

But as it turns out, the ghost of Mikey is not the problem. Or at least not the only problem.

Midway through Season 2, creator Christopher Storer, writing with Joanna Calo, plated one of the most nerve-wracking and emotionally powerful hours of television ever recorded. Flashing back to a time when Mikey was still alive, we meet "Mom," Donna. Donna is funny, smart and a brilliant cook. She is also an alcoholic and she is making a big Christmas dinner — the Feast of Seven Fishes. By herself. Not because no one has offered to help but because she doesn't need their help; she just wants their love and appreciation, which, being an alcoholic, she is incapable of recognizing or receiving.

Anyone who has lived with an alcoholic caregiver knows what it's like. It's like a tornado has decided to make Christmas dinner. Splendid dishes appear from the whirlwind but so do lethal pieces of emotional wreckage — words that hit like bricks and rebar, that cut like bits of broken glass and barbed wire. The gathered family members can only shield their faces as best they can and hope the weather miraculously clears at some point.

Here, then, is ground zero. A family trained to look at a Level Five catastrophic event and see, you know, Christmas. Mikey's death didn't break the family; the family was already broken. And no one ever talks about it.

As Season 3 unfolds, that is made even more clear. We see glimpses of the different families that have shaped the main characters. Pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) lost his mother the night Carmy went into the freezer; at her funeral, we hear of the love and kindness that nurtured this gentle, talented man. Sydney moves into her own place, and her father says all the irritating dad things about having thin walls and then goes out to buy her a couch. We learn that Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) joined the crew at the Beef after losing her longtime job; she will do anything to help her sweet, if financially hazy, husband support their kid.

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