• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, June 1, 2016

“Feed the Beast” is a drama series about two guys who dream of opening a restaurant. But for some reason, this was deemed by somebody to be not quite enough to form the totality of a scripted TV show.

So a number of other ingredients were stirred in. These include a gangster whose specialty is extracting teeth, a cop who is obsessed with collaring this gangster, a child who is so traumatized by his mother’s sudden death that he won’t speak, a grown man’s troubled relationship with his hard-ass father, a cocaine addiction here, and an alcohol problem there.

The ingredients don’t quite take to each other, however, so you’re left with a dish consisting of many parts that just doesn’t taste very good. But fear not, the comparisons to cooking end here because, quite frankly, I am not imaginative enough to come up with enough food analogies to last all the way to the end of this blog post.

“Feed the Beast,” premiering Sunday night (June 5) on AMC, seems to represent an attempt to craft a TV drama series that will appeal to the many millions of people (supposedly) who love to eat in restaurants and then share pictures and impressions about their experiences, either with those they’re dining with, or with those they are connected with on social media.

It is hoped by the writers and producers of “Feed the Beast” that these people will thrill to the sights and sounds of the show’s many scenes in which the protagonists -- played by David Schwimmer and Jim Sturgess -- talk excitedly about the dishes they would serve in their own restaurant and the wines they would pair with them.

In this show, Schwimmer plays Tommy Moran, an expert on wines who has come upon hard times following the destruction by fire of the last restaurant he worked in -- and worse, the sudden death of his wife in a hit-and-run incident in which she was hit by a car while their young son watched. He’s the boy who won’t speak. That’s the Schwimmer character in the picture above visiting her grave.

Sturgess plays Tommy’s best friend, Dion Patras, who is apparently a genius of a chef, but also a coke addict. He worked with Tommy and Tommy’s late wife in the restaurant that burned down -- a fire Dion caused. As a result, he owes thousands of dollars to a Polish organized crime kingpin -- the aforementioned tooth-extraction enthusiast who proudly goes by the nickname, the Tooth Fairy.

Yada yada yada … Dion has a coke problem and can’t stay out of trouble. And he is forever trying to elude the tooth-pulling mobster. Dion doesn’t succeed at this, however, and when the Tooth Fairy catches up with him, he doesn’t yank a tooth, but instead breaks one of Dion’s pinkies.

Then, later, the obsessed cop grabs Dion and breaks his other pinky. At least, that’s what it looked like to me, although I couldn’t be sure because later in the show I couldn’t tell if Dion was wearing two splints or one.

Whatever the number of broken fingers, they can’t slow Dion down when he’s twirling about the kitchen in scenes that are supposed to excite the senses with the apparent greatness of his creations. “You hear that sizzle sound?” Dion asks the mute but eager boy, T.J., as Dion begins to sear a rack of lamb in a frying pan. “It’s the pan talking to me. Remember, a good chef always listens to his pans.”

Food for thought? I guess so, if you’re the type who thrills to this sort of thing. Apparently, there are a lot of people who do. You see them in restaurants taking photos of their food and posting them on social media before they’ve even take a bite.

Somehow, Dion and Tommy plan to open a huge, fancy restaurant in what appears to be an uninhabitable empty warehouse (where Tommy and his mute son live, despite its condition) that looks as if it’s nowhere near an access road or transit hub of any kind. Not only is the location remote, but it’s in a remote section of the Bronx.

Also remote: This restaurant’s chances of ever making a dime, at least in the real world. On television, though, I guess anything is possible.

“Feed the Beast” premieres Sunday night at 10 Eastern on AMC. It moves into its regular time period, Tuesdays at 10 p.m., two days later (on June 7).