For months now I have been HOUNDED by friends, family, and strangers online to watch Hulu's "The Bear". And for months I have resisted the pleading recommendations by putting it off for another day. With the third season debuting just last week, my family in particular was very adamant on me watching it with them. Well, since I have recently fallen very sick and haven't been able to get out of the house as much, I finally swallowed my stubbornness and sat down to watch the Bear in full with my sister, and proceeded to binge the entire thing (well, at least up till halfway through the newest season at the time of writing) in the span of a week. And honestly? The show is alright!
To give a quick synopsis for those unfamiliar with The Bear, the show balances an ENORMOUS ensemble cast of people working at a local Chicago restaurant, The Beef. However, if I had to name specific "main characters", I would place Carmy, Sydney, and Richie as the characters that the show focuses on most. Carmy is a world renowned chef that comes home to take over his dead brother's restaurant and whip it into shape, Sydney starts out as a line cook at the Beef that steadily works up the ranks of the business to run it alongside Carmy, and Richie is Carmy's cousin that ran the restaurant alongside Carmy's brother, and he's stubbornly resisting the change in management. The first season revolves around Carmy's managing of the disorganized staff and restaurant into a efficient, neat kitchen, which leads into the second season's plot focused on completely revamping the restaurant into a new location, aptly named "The Bear". As of now I'm only halfway through the third season, but as far as I can tell, its focused around the stresses of actually running the new high-class restaurant and the pressure it places on each character.
If I'm being completely frank, I did not really like the first season. I'll place some blame on myself since I'm sure my begrudging willingness to finally watch the show likely didn't result in a particularly receptive watching experience, but I think I did have reasonable critiques of the show. In the first season, it immediately starts balancing several different characters and personal stories that demanded significant attention and emotional investment- and at that point, I don't think it had earned my attention and investment. Beyond a basic duty to watch the show, I didn't really find myself at the edge of my seat for any of the characters, instead resulting in frustration and a lack of empathy with the characters (especially Carmy and Richie, they're both assholes in a very non-entertaining way for me). Another issue is the sheer amount of characters they were throwing at me that I had to care about. It felt like there were three new characters introduced in every episode with their own backgrounds and character arcs and I think the show should've invested more time into making me care about the main characters before asking me to care about smaller side characters.
While it may sound like I'm being overly harsh on the show (I lowkey am), the second season felt like a correction on all of the issues I had with the first season's characters. Ironically, one of the parts that my sister hated the most is what I felt the show needed: and her name was Claire. While introducing a romantic interest for Carmy randomly sounds like a terrible idea that would only muddy the waters even more, it actually helped build Carmy as a much more human character in my opinion. Claire was the show's reason to get Carmy outside of the kitchen and into the real world, thrusting a character who commands so much power in the culinary world into a new environment where he's able to just be a normal (albeit flawed) guy. Forcing Carmy to spend so much time outside of the restaurant allows him to be more fleshed out as a character with romance, insecurities, and a sense of humor that wasn't as evident when he's at work, so I started to actually give a shit about him.
While Claire allows Carmy to be more human and exposes his more emotional side, Claire also frustrates Sydney as she is left to deal with the preparations of opening a new restaurant on her own since Carmy spends so much time with Claire. I thought this was an interesting subversion of their character roles, placing the usually obsessive Carmy to focus much less on his restaurant and allowing Sydney to develop into much more of a leading role, giving her more agency and power within the hierarchy of The Bear and propping her up to be a balance to Carmy's more controlling side.
The second half of season 2 is where I think The Bear really earned its reputation as a good show. The 6th episode in particular, "Fishes", is just a massive flashback that runs through a particularly traumatic family gathering at Christmas, contextualizing A LOT of trauma, tension, and unseen relationships for the first time in the show. Carmy's mom has a breakdown while cooking dinner, his brother is shown to be much angrier and chaotic than seen before, and the audience finally gets to see Richie's wife before they divorce. Besides being a fantastically written, well-paced buildup of family tensions with a climactic ending argument that I'm sure has been engraved in the viewer's minds, I think it gives the audience the background and reasoning to actually care and understand the characters that they've been watching for a season and a half. I finally understand why Carmy's having a panic attack twice every episode, I finally understand why the restaurant was in the state it was at the beginning of the show (Carmy's brother is an asswipe), and I finally have a reason to sympathize with Richie since now I know exactly what he lost (his life with his wife and daughter) to make him such an asshole with no life. Episode 6 is the big fix for any past issues I had with the show.
And if Episode 6 was the fix the show needed, Episode 7 "Forks" is the character study that made me actually care about the show. With Richie of all characters! As a sort of punishment/education trip mandated by Carmy, Richie is sent to an extremely high-class restaurant as a humble fork cleaner, which really pisses Richie off. However, the longer he spends at the upscale restaurant, the more he begins to enjoy and understand the mentality of the employees at the restaurant. Richie is exposed to extremely caring staff who care about nothing else than their customer's experiences, which seems to resonate with Richie after a week or two of working there. When his time at the high-end establishment comes to an end, Richie is deeply saddened, and so he strives to embody the same customer-first mentality when he returns to work at The Bear.
This episode worked on several fronts for me. Firstly, doing a full episode character study on a single perspective allows the show to be much more in-depth and well crafted when it comes to making me care about a character, since I'm not switching to a new one every two minutes. Secondly, centering this episode on Richie of all people allowed me to take a character I frankly hated and spend an entire experience alongside him, letting him grow and develop a kinder, empathetic perspective while letting the audience watch this metamorphosis happen rather than making him go through everything offscreen while we followed Carmy or Sydney around. Watching the show take a hated character and making him much kinder, considerate, and fleshed out was what finally got me invested in the show after so long, and I'm happy to say that the episode marked a real turnaround in how much I would enjoy every subsequent episode.
I'm going to end this blog post with that instead of delving into my thoughts on the season 2 finale or the third season because I watched all of those episodes on the same day I'm writing this, so I don't think my thoughts/opinions on them have been fully developed or cemented in my mind. Overall, while the Bear takes a while to get its gears turning, when it finally does kick off, it really works for me. Maybe I'll write another blog about it when I finish it!
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