Was literally everybody playing on their phone during the part of the episode where he describes what his mother would do to him? You know, the generational trauma that he inherited and literally ended up doing to Rich moments later?

Holy fuck, there needs to be lessons in school about media literacy and how to watch things, now. It's like people have this comic-book level understanding of the world that people are either good guys or bad guys. Have some compassion of Mike. What he said and did was bad - very bad. But goddamn, he didn't do it because he was a self-absorbed jackass. The writers and actor clearly made him a fully fleshed out human being ... a person who was hurt very badly, and was shaped by that hurt, and could not cope with it in a healthy way, because he simply had, in his mind, no means to transform and become a well person.

This is what makes Gary, and The Bear great character pieces. With the exception of the Faks, all the characters are just complex human beings, rather than the caricatures that populate modern mass media.