Where's the Beef?
How The Bear became unbearable TV in less than one season
“The kitchen at Per Se was a clean place but hard and heartless too. The hierarchy was a necessary one but the weight of it was crushing to those on the bottom. The brigade system ensures that food gets to the plate looking pretty; it also gives free range to rage-inclined pricks to indulge their worst impulses. The anger was like black mold in the air ducts, infecting everything. As I’ve opened my own kitchens, at times I’ve certainly been guilty of regurgitating the habits I learned at Per Se. But when I grow enraged, I also try to remember how it made me feel to be yelled at on the line. From Per Se, I try to extract the sense of urgency without the poison of anger.”
-Kwame Onwuachi, Notes from a Young Black Chef
I had been warned.
When The Bear came back for a third season I was still wrapping up another series, so several friends started watching it before me. Their early scouting reports were not great. Still, I had hope that the show would return to the restaurant-as-vessel-for-family-trauma concept I couldn’t stop gushing about in the first two seasons.
My enthusiasm was hushed from the first episode, an exercise in minimalism, as beautiful as it is bleak. The food porn is omnipresent, gorgeous yet austere like Mount Everest. Seeing what these perfect plates take to create is sobering and chilling.
This opening episode is also essentially one long montage. It has no plot and almost no dialogue. The main words you hear are “sorry” and “chef.”
Episode two has significantly more dialogue but it’s mostly variants of the word fuck. I didn’t have closed captioning on, but if I did I suspect it would have just read: “LOUD NOISES.”
Taken together, both of these episodes cover about 10 minutes of one morning.
How can an hour of television capture so many visuals but do so little to move the story forward?
The style is an easy starting point. The immersive cinematography and obsessive editing of seasons 1 and 2 somehow finds a new manic gear in season 3.
Yet the more dizzying close-ups of plates we see and traumatic flashbacks we’re bombarded with, the more the present-day timeline slows to a molasses-like crawl—like a Christopher Nolan movie on ketamine.
At this point I asked:
This slow pace and hyper-stylization cannot continue indefinitely, right?
For me, an autopsy on a declining television show is a form of therapy, as fun and necessary to write as the show was frustrating to watch. As I reflected back on the deep-dive I did on where and how The Crown lost its way, I saw a through-line that also helps explain the decline of The Bear.
One of the risks for a prestige show is the creators becoming so confident of their audience’s patience and adoration that they begin to take indulgent zig zags through increasingly tangential parts of their beloved TV world. Just when the creators feel they can do no wrong, they suddenly begin doing a lot of it. Instead of advancing the plot, characters, and themes that won them so many fans, they begin to embark on the television version of the unnecessary side-quest in an open-world video game.
In The Crown, this showed up as jarring pacing and focus issues in the latter two seasons. As I wrote,
“The way the series both slows down and zooms in as it approaches the modern day is noticeably disorienting. Despite there being plenty of juicy scandal to cover, Morgan seems to have lost his appetite for exploring it. Instead, he ends up taking Gladwell-esque detours to fill the runtime by covering:
Dodi Fayed’s dad’s life
Office politics at the BBC
The final hours of the Romanovs
Prince Philip’s love of carriage racing?”
In season 3 of The Bear, I felt this disorientation the entire time. I felt it during the single character backstory and side quest episodes, especially the one about Tina that’s as moving as it is expendable.
A good rule of thumb for whether or not a musical number or a fight scene needs to be in a movie is, if this were cut, would the story still make sense? Good songs, like good fights, advance the plot.
Storer and co have forgotten about this fundamental principle of storytelling. This season has entire episodes that do not even attempt to advance the story. While I’m all for character building, non-linear narratives, and laying on the subtext, I am also a mortal with limited time on this earth who must make sense of it through narrative. A hyper-stylized story cannot function when the style eclipses the story.
As Thomas Hamilton put it in his review of season 3 for Slate:
“The Bear has now had 28 episodes, or roughly 14 hours of run time, over which astonishingly little has actually happened. One restaurant has closed, and a new one has opened. People have yelled at each other, then made up, then yelled at each other more. Characters have been faced with important decisions and have failed to make them. A brother’s death has been rehashed via flashback more times than Thomas and Martha Wayne’s.”
Growing impatient halfway through the season, I peeked ahead at the synopsis for Episode 9. It read: “Carmy considers apologizing.” That’s when I lost it.
It takes nine episodes of television for Carmy to even think about saying “I’m sorry”? I’m sorry, but I have places to be and things to do. I cannot keep indulging this show if it refuses to return the favor.
My complaint here isn’t just that the core question of seasons 1 and 2: can Carmy overcome his childhood trauma and run a successful restaurant, ends up being unanswered, it’s that the creators display no interest or urgency in resolving it. Did they not read the Thomas Keller-inspired placards they conspicuously put on the kitchen walls that say “Every Second Counts?”
Watching this show feels like waiting in a never-ending line for a sandwich that was promised at lunch but still isn’t ready by closing time. Instead of just giving you your sandwich, the show keeps freezing time and doing self indulgent laps around the inner-most psychology of everyone present, prying all of the edible crumbs out of their backstories like they were filthy couch cushions. Yet you learn remarkably little from all of these digressions.
The very things that made this show compelling enough for me to write 3700 words praising it, end up languishing in the broken walk-in refrigerator of this airless season. I nearly didn’t finish watching it, which my friend Sam said would make for a very meta statement on its value, but I needed to know how it ended.
By the time Alexis and I arrived at the final episode we were exhausted. The conclusion is self indulgent, even for this shows standards, packed with too many celebrity chefs monologuing about how great and meaningful restaurant life is. This curious, star-studded epilogue comes across as a victory lap that this show has not earned. Had the intervening nine episodes resolved or at-least addressed the many plates the show began spinning at the end of season 2, I might have felt more tender and introspective about all this. Instead, all I felt was impatient.
The inebriated party at the end of the episode is perhaps the most fun I had all season. Watching Olivia Coleman make drunk snacks out of frozen pizza and waffles was a treat, but these kind of payoffs needed to happen earlier, before my interest was buried beneath lake-effect snowdrifts of melancholy montages and moody music.
Clearly this season is trying to have a conversation about the costs of greatness, but the conversation is too slow, too obvious, too meandering, and too self-obsessed to be coherent.
To recap, in the season of television following the dizzying and terrifying climax of season 2’s opening night meltdown we did not:
See Carmy talk to, much less apologize to his girlfriend for being a total dick
Learn if Sidney will accept her new job offer and bail on Carmy for being a total dick
Find out if Carmy being a total dick was justified by getting The Bear the good review it needs to stay afloat
Instead, we did:
Learn nearly down to the second how Tina got her job at the (now-shuttered) Original Beef
See a long sequence of Marcus watching a documentary about magic that legitimately had me wondering if I’d clicked on the wrong content on Hulu
Gain an anatomical understanding of how and why to remove the wishbone of a chicken before roasting it from Thomas Keller while being reminded that restaurants are ultimately about nurturing people
Defenders of the show will object that all of this is building suspense for the fourth season, to which I will counter that suspense is a very delicate give and take with the viewer that depends on the grace and generosity you’ve shown them up until the moment you hang them off of a cliff. A viewer’s patience is a finite resource that must be earned and replenished.
The meta-irony of all of this is that the premise of this show: a fancy chef with a fucked up past taking over a beloved sandwich shop and turning it into a polarizing fine-dining establishment, is basically what Storer and co have done with The Bear. They’ve taken a wholesome and beloved thing and twisted it into a pretentious, polarizing, and confusing entity more concerned with style and appearances than nourishment. Now I’m saddened to be the first to note that this is nearly the same conclusion I arrived at about The Crown, when I wrote that:
“By the end of its six season run, this show managed to become all of the things people rightfully criticize about the real life British monarchy: a bunch of expensive, self-indulgent theatrics futilely trying to justify their existence in a world that has so clearly moved past all this posh nonsense.”
I can’t help but wonder what it says about me—or the state of television—that my cantankerous complaints are starting to harmonize. But the reality remains the same.
I’m hungry and I’m done waiting for tweezered microgreens.
Is it really too much to ask for a sandwich?