Not Your Average Bear

Whatever "hot girl" summer; it's hot TV summer!

I watch a fair amount of TV. I used to make excuses for it or downplay it because I thought it reflected poorly on me for some reason. That reason being that for a very long time I thought I had to present this version of myself that was kind of sanitized and uncomplicated; it’s the self that looks good on paper that you trick yourself into believing is attainable. I was sort of like a living version of a J.C. Penny catalog. Shedding that skin in general has been gradual, messy, still happening, and, of course, painful. It’s been looking closely at the creatives I love and their work that has helped me understand the vitality and necessity of allowing all your weird and untidy and unruly bits to go free. In regards to TV more specifically: I started owning my love for television when I remembered how TV was one of my sanctuaries as a kid and what a powerful influence it has always been for shaping my sense of humor and teaching me about comedy in general. I also remembered that I have two advanced degrees and can hold my intellectual water with the best of them. I have no problem binging a slightly hokey fantasy show like ¹Supernatural and then cracking open a book about feminist art. After all, it was Uncle Walt who said: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself./(I am large. I contain multitudes).” And it was Uncle Milty who said: “You can’t believe everything you hear, but it’s fun to repeat it anyway.”

My television viewing habits fall into a few categories. There are the Emotional Support shows like Emily in Paris, The Great British Baking Show, and Bridgerton. Those I use to swaddle; they are psychological and emotional balm, the television equivalent of a calorie-free hot fudge sundae. There are the shows with Heart and Smarts like Ted Lasso, Schitt’s Creek, Hacks. They make me think, laugh, often have killer music placement, and inject me with all the feels.  And then there are the shows that go into the VERY STRESSFUL BUT TOTALLY WORTH IT bucket, all caps because these shows are A LOT. In that column we have your Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire (actually everything by David Simon), Deadwood, and, just added, please welcome The Bear. I also watch plenty of guilty pleasure stuff that gets a Hot Mess Trash Bag designation—Love is Blind, Sex in the City, How I Met Your Mother. I stash those on the bottom shelf of the pantry behind the boxes of Kashi.

These are not discrete groups. The Venn diagram looks more like something created by a Spirograph wheel. But the area with the most overlap is probably in the VERY STRESSFUL BUT TOTALLY WORTH IT territory. Maybe because I stress easily, especially about emotional stakes. WHY CAN’T RIGGINS GET HIS DAMN ACT TOGETHER?! Even when I’ve seen the show many times and know how it turns out, I still watch with one hand covering my eyes.

Ironically, these are usually the same shows that give me a lot of pleasure. I was thinking about this recently as I’ve been rewatching the first two seasons of The Bear in can’t-sleep-like-it’s-Christmas Eve-anticipation of season three dropping this week (screams into pillow). I started to talk about it with a friend who shook his head, nope. He sighed and held up his hand as if to say, “Why would I choose to watch something harrowing when unscripted, real life with its terrible lighting and even more horrible daily plot twists is taxing enough?” Fair enough, your loss pal. I stand by it even with all the yelling (and there is quite a bit). The Bear is just not your average bear.

Image via Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/FX/Getty

If you don’t already know the show and The Bear has come across your radar, but you’re sick of everyone telling you to see it like they did with Ted Lasso (still you eventually did!), the briefest of gists: The show revolves around Carmy “the Bear” Berzatto (played by Jeremy Allen White and his soulful, piercing eyes the color of that blue meth in Breaking Bad. Dog have mercy on us all!), an elite chef in New York City at one of the world’s most prestigious, Michelin-starred restaurants who quits that life to return home to Chicago following the suicide of his brother, Mikey. Carmy steps in to try and salvage his family’s crumbling, divey Italian beef sandwich joint (The Original Beef of Chicagoland), run (badly, poorly, fairly illegally) by Mikey and a small, motley crew of chefs that seem better suited to working on the ship in Pirates of the Caribbean then they do here. There is the already noted yelling and even more screaming; there is punching, fighting, and brawling; a bunch of kids get accidently doused with Xanax at a birthday party catered by Carmy and his cousin (related by friendship), Richie, who works at the restaurant. And that doesn’t even bring us up to speed on dealing with the intergenerational trauma, coping with addiction, grappling with grief, and coming to terms with the familiar line-up in your emotional nuclear arsenal: guilt, regret, anxiety, failure, depression, and insecurity.

I admit, sometimes I’ve needed a bite stick to get me through a few episodes. But here’s where the show (created by filmmaker Christopher Storer) rescues itself from being just a story about a dysfunctional group of people trying to make it in the restaurant world. The emotional complexity of every character is rendered with surgical precision that both relate to and root for every single person.

Everyone in Carmy’s constellation is struggling while trying not to show it. Not at all relatable!  At first, each character seems desperate to avoid exposing themselves—their ignorance or fear of change or insecurity. But they’re eventually broken down and broken open in beautiful and powerful and incomplete ways. This is not a show that fits everything neatly into a lovely, pink, biscuits for the boss box like Ted Lasso. Instead, The Bear carves out these quiet moments for its characters, putting them in the eyes of their own respective hurricanes where it seems like nothing much is happening: Marcus, the chef intent on mastering pastry, tacks pictures of desserts from high-end baking books over his station; Sydney, the young, talented chef Carmy hires, opens up to him about her disastrously failed catering business while the two spend an afternoon making test dishes in his apartment. In reality these instances are the main dish. Everything else feels more like garnish.

 Against the backdrop of the chaotic, toxic atmosphere of The Original Beef shop, a more profound drama is playing out. It’s the human one that asks each character: Are you willing to do the work it takes to grow, to change? Are you brave enough to try and become more authentically yourself and live that way, too? Can you let others in to help you, to really see you? What will it take for you to believe in yourself?

The opening scene of the pilot is a dream sequence. The camera tracks behind Carmy walking on an empty bridge at night in Chicago. He approaches a white metal cage, which we see briefly as an overhead shot—gleaming white bars. Carmy is dressed for the kitchen—white tee-shirt, blue apron. He opens the door, crouching low. A black bear charges out of the cage, lunging. The camera cuts to Carmy’s point of view as he stumbles back and scrambles to get away. There’s a fast transition from a bright yellow light to Carmy startling awake on the counter in the back of the restaurant. The bear is the ferocity inside all of us that we try and keep caged. It’s the anger, pain, tragedy; it’s everything dark and nightmarish that threatens to devour us, that can potentially destroy others. The bear is also the generative energy we possess. It’s the love and creativity and pleasure and empathy and good we can do in the world and for one another. Carmy lets the bear loose. We’ll see which one remains uncaged.

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Lens Zen!

I snapped this on a backroad after a storm had gone through. As we glide into the belly of the summer beast, I thought it felt like a fitting representation of the season (Hot! Hot! Hot! predicts meteorologist Buster Poindexter) and of life in general with America’s Thunderdome election cycle making things muy caliente. But it also reminded me of the potential that’s left in the aftermath of something ending. And that’s always worth sticking around for.

Can I get a proper AC/DC riff to go with this image? If you know, you know. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

1. Did the last episode of that series make me cry? SHUT UP! YOU AHHHRRRRR!!!