As in So Much in Life, For the Bear, It's All a Matter of Expectations
a fun show started to get treated like some sort of holy text and now people are finding it harder to enjoy the fun
No spoilers in this post, so don’t be shy.
Last year I wrote a piece about The Bear and its addiction to total dramatic maximalism at all times. Some people took that as more critical than I meant it, but I was doing it in a spirit of gentle fun, mostly. It’s true that I found, and find, the show to be well-made and entertaining but slight. I also think it puts its lips out to be kissed far too much, if you follow me. Obviously, a lot of other people think it operates at a different level than that and expect more from it. And, as in the way of such things, my lower expectations have left the show overall less transporting for me than for them, but I also appear to be having an easier time with a third season that’s generating more and more negative reviews and some fan blowback.
I think The Bear is fine and dandy. I thought the first two seasons were fine and dandy. I think this third season is fine and dandy. But somewhere during the coverage of season two a lot of people decided that the show was more than fine and dandy and declared it one of the best TV shows of all time and so on. And, you know, taste is subjective! But I think what happened next was inevitable from that point on: the show couldn’t bear (no pun intended) the weight of that hype, and now that the third season has come out, there’s been a ton of fretting and unhappiness that’s a direct result of that prior praise. I admit that the third season spends a lot of time spinning its wheels, and it absolutely feels like the tacked-on installment that it literally is. (It’s been said that the show’s creator Chris Storer had initially planned on three seasons but was asked by FX to do four and acquiesced.) I myself had lower expectations and so I’m just grooving with the usual strong acting and Chicago atmospherics. Of course, being in my position isn’t perfect either, because I never got to enjoy the high of feeling like I was watching a once-in-a-lifetime show. Ultimately though I think The Bear is indeed a gourmet cheeseburger, as everybody talks about today, but its hype cycle convinced people it was Michelin-star foie gras, to its current detriment.
To be clear, I’m not giving advice here. I’m certainly not telling you to “turn off your brain” or not engage critically, or any such thing. Critical engagement is the core of respect. I’m not even suggesting that you lower your standards; our communal critical standards are already low enough, thank you. I’m just saying that this meandering season hasn’t been so bad for me because I didn’t have very high expectations for the show in the first place. And I also think that this boom-and-bust hype cycle has become baked into the structures of modern television, the nature of TV.