There’s a line about class that I think about a lot: “There are those who are where they are because they are doing what they are doing, and there are those who are doing what they are doing because they are where they are.” That difference between living wherever your employment takes you and having where you live dictate your employment is one of the most precarious divides in American life. Many on one side work their entire lives to get themselves or their children across the divide, while many of those who have made it fear nothing more than backsliding into failure.
The Bear, now in its third season on the confusingly-named FX on Hulu, is about a lot of things, but one of the most intense in an already blood pressure-raising show is the precariousness of that class divide. “I think it’s probably better for you to experience what it’s like to be poor, they say that leads to empathy,” one character tells his boss, who has just lost a fortune in the stock market. In what has to be the most common line of dialogue in The Bear, that character is promptly told to “go f*** yourself.”
In the first two seasons of the show, the lead, Carmen Berzatto, tries to negotiate his place in that class and labor divide. As an elite chef, he escaped his native Chicago, his alcoholic mother, and the family cult-favorite sandwich shop, only to be ripped back by his brother’s suicide and a mountain of loan-sharked debt. In Season One, Carmen (who is also called “Bear,” but also there’s a bear stalking him in his dreams, and also his restaurant is called The Bear — there’s a lot of bears in The Bear) is trying to get a handle on that chaos one cigarette, panic attack, and Al-Anon meeting at a time. In the second, he tries to get back on a path to greatness by turning the sandwich shop into one of the fancy restaurants he worked in before his brother killed himself.
In the recent third season, which is labeled as “Part III” and ends with “To be continued,” the goal is less clear. Solvency and getting plates to tables are constant worries, but don’t provide as much of a narrative arc. Many of the episodes in this season involve reflections on or flashbacks to previous episodes. That was probably unavoidable given that Season Two included perhaps the best episode of television I’ve ever seen, the Christmas stand alone “Fishes.” Everything in that season comes to a head with Carmen destroying his closest relationships while he’s trapped in a walk-in refrigerator on opening night.
Class anxiety, panic attacks, debt, suicides — for anyone who has not seen it, know this show is a comedy. Like HBO’s Succession, which ended last year, The Bear bends genres. Is it a comedy with dramatic elements, or a drama with comedic elements? For both shows, the line is somewhat arbitrary, but I think the decision to award almost all of last year’s Emmys for drama to Succession and almost all of the awards for comedy to The Bear is the right way to divvy them up.
The humor in Season Three is less even, however. I laughed hard in places, but there are entire episodes where I did not. To the show’s credit, some of those episodes are very good. More death and funerals — apparently even restaurants can have funerals — do not help. Worse is the therapy-speak. “Trauma” is repeatedly and unnecessarily invoked. Of course all of these characters have “trauma” — we’ve been watching them deal with it and create more of it for three seasons now. We do not need to be told that that trauma might inspire culinary genius.
That’s especially so because the show also repeatedly uses the much funnier concept of “haunting.” This starts as a gag within the Fak family, played by, among others, Matty Matheson in a more restrained version of his YouTube personality and John Cena in a goofy but winning guest appearance. At one point, the restaurant workers talk about this invented, working-class Chicagoland version of the evil eye over cigarettes and cigars in the universal and class-transcendent language of bullsh***ing.
“Dude! How long did you get haunted for?”
“For like quite a while. Till like eighth grade. He broke my arm.”
“He broke your arm?”
“He wasn’t there, but I think he caused it.”
“What?”
“Yeah, we were at Richie’s grandma’s house when all of a sudden my arm just broke.
“It just broke randomly?”
“Double bend.”
“That’s haunted. That’s the most haunted.”
One of them objects that Sammy (John Cena) is, in fact, still alive, and asks how he could be haunting them. “It’s not ghosts, it’s serious,” one of the Faks replies.
It is both serious and not, as “haunting” here is a metaphor for all of the pain from unaddressed grievances and bad karma accrued in lieu of apology and forgiveness, but also includes Cena pranking his brother over stolen SD cards.
These portions of the show that have nothing to do with Carmen’s Sisyphean attempt to reinvent the menu every night are frequently the funniest and most enjoyable in this season. The actual restaurant portions of the show lean more into food porn and celebrity chef cameos than I liked. It surely would be possible to make a dramatized version of Chef’s Table that I would enjoy, but that is not what I signed up for with The Bear. Nonetheless, Thomas Keller (the French Laundry, three stars), Rene Redzepi (Noma, three stars), and Daniel Boulud (Daniel, two stars) are among the real-life chefs who are given dialogue and even fictional biographical connections to the characters.
This feels particularly excessive in a bizarre roundtable discussion in the finale wherein less-famous chefs trade (real?) confidential kitchen anecdotes with their fictional counterparts. Foodies might enjoy all this name-dropping and the shots of Carmen repeatedly plating A5 wagyu with cauliflower puree quenelles, but I found myself relieved and more entertained whenever the show cut back to the guys cracking jokes, smoking darts, and slinging hot Italian beef.
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Nonetheless, this is still perhaps the best show going. Both the regular cast and guests (Olivia Colman, Jon Bernthal, Josh Hartnett, Joel McHale, and especially Jamie Lee Curtis) are phenomenal. I would happily play the alt-rock-heavy soundtrack of Weezer, the Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkins, etc., on a long drive. It’s shot beautifully, and the structure of individual episodes, if not the season as a whole, is frequently great. I particularly liked the flashback episode about Tina’s (Liza Colon-Zayas) origin, which begins with a frenzied search for work after getting laid off, reaches catharsis over a free cup of coffee and a sandwich, and ends as a character study of what work is like for Americans who get “skipped” by “that dream s***.”
The season-ending cliff-hanger, about a make-or-break restaurant review in the Chicago Tribune, sets the show up well for a more interesting Season Four. But my hope is that the show’s creator, Christopher Storer, realizes that he has made an essential show about class and place and family in America, and not just another glimpse into the elite but ultimately less interesting world of high-end restaurants.
Andrew Bernard is a correspondent for the Jewish News Syndicate.