Jeremy Allen White Explains Why 'The Bear' Episode 7 Was Rewritten To Be One Take - And Why It Works

[Editor's Note: This story contains spoilers for Episodes 7 and 8 - the Season 1 finale - of FX's "The Bear" on Hulu.]

Too much Italian beef can be bad for your heart, just like Episode 7 of FX's "The Bear" on Hulu. The frenetic 20-minute episode was filmed in one shot (the cast made it four or five takes, we're told) on the FX production soundstage (only the show's pilot was filmed in a real restaurant), covering the front and back of the fictional - and tight on space - Original Beef of Chicagoland.

The episode, titled “Review,” opens with a stellar diary review of a dish that was never meant to be eaten, let alone rated. The optimism in the kitchen soon gives way to the horrifying reality that staff don't have the time, the manpower or even the meat to meet the overwhelming number of orders pouring in through a take-out pre-order system. mistakenly left open. The increase in demand from the heavy overhaul made it a bad day to implement entirely new technology. Eventually, two chefs (they all call each other "chef; it's a sign of respect) quit, one gets stabbed by another, and main character Carmine Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) eats a donut off the floor.

Along the way, rate this writer for claustrophobia, anxiety — all things. Series creator Christopher Storer probably felt no less stressed while making the one-take episode than we did while viewing it. The staff of "The Bear" (and the script staff of future family restaurant, The Bear) hadn't planned to do episode 7 in one go "until maybe two or three weeks before it doesn't get scheduled," series chief White told IndieWire.

(Here we have to point out that, like in the fairy tale Goldilocks, there are technically multiple bears in "The Bear". There's Carmine, her brother Michael (Jon Bernthal) who is committed suicide and left struggling gourmet chef Carmy the Windy City sandwich, and their sister Sugar (Abby Elliott) - The Berzattos. Then there's the reopening of the restaurant we'll be served if we get a season 2, when The Original Beef of Chicagoland would be reopened as The Bear (your own easy Chicago Bears joke here if you need more.)

"The Bear"

FX

So Storer ("Ramy") and executive producer Joanna Calo ("BoJack Horseman") "pretty much" rewrote the entire "Review" script, White said. Not that that's a bad thing.

"We were able to start at the beginning, which I think helped," White explained. “They still managed to keep all the important story points in place for [Episode 7], but they wrote it as a blueprint for us to shoot it in one shot. It was very important, of course, that it start with the words."

And that's exactly how the casting started with the revamped rehearsals: with just the words.

"We read it out loud a few times, sitting around for a bit, making sure everything sounded right. Trying to time it out a bit, just for the words, without...