Sweetbitter

"Sweetbitter" returns for a second season Sunday on Starz, powered, like its first, with unfailing wit, superbly conceived characters, and confidence in its own strength. That last thoroughly justified essential comes shining through every scene of this series.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Sweetbitter is an insultingly shallow riff on some of the usual sweltering-kitchen tropes.