The Bear May or May Not Be the Best Show on Television, But It's Certainly the MOST Show On Television

less is more guys

This show contains numerous spoilers for the second season of The Bear.

Look. I know how this is going to go over. We live in the era of vengeful stans, and few groups of such stans are as persistent as defenders of the FX show The Bear. Woe betide the man who criticizes that show on social media. It has hit many people “right in the feels,” and the kind of sentimentality it captures - often very movingly, sometimes transcendently, sometimes embarrassingly - is just the type of emotional loading that gets people on the internet eager to go to war. Well, listen: I quite enjoy the show. I really do. It has a lot of great qualities. It’s impeccably cast, the acting is generally excellent, Jeremy Allen White’s performance consistently brings a desperately-needed dose of restraint to the proceedings, and absolutely every frame bursts with the obvious passion that everyone involved brought to the show. I like it, honestly. The trouble is that I want to love it, but I can’t because the show is just too. damn. much.

Every time the creators of the show have a chance to go bigger or smaller, they choose bigger. Every time they face a decision about being more subdued or more overwrought, they veer directly towards the latter. This show never met a grand sweeping gesture it didn’t like and never met a quiet character moment it did. And the problem there is that narrative and emotional rhythm - the balancing of big with small, the slow and steady accumulation of dramatic stakes, forcing the audience to wait for the crescendo - exist in television for a reason. Without any pacing, without a sense of bigger or smaller to fit the moment, the outcome is numbing sensory overload. By the end of the last episode of this latest season, my brain was fried, and I had to talk through what had happened to discover my own feelings about it all - my feeling, in particular, that the season finale of the second series was easily the worst of the series so far and one of the rare moments when the show has dipped from flawed-but-fun to out-and-out bad.

Consider exactly how often the show goes for pure excess.

• The show can’t have one glaringly-obvious needle drop per episode that hits you like a beef sandwich to the face. It has to have three glaringly-obvious needle drops per episode that hit you like a beef sandwich to the face.

• Richie can’t just learn and grow as a result of being an unpaid intern at a fancy restaurant for a week; he has to have a complete, 180-degree personality transformation in that timespan. He becomes a completely different character in both his personal and professional life.

• It’s not enough that Marcus has a good time in Copenhagen and learns and develops his craft and deepens his commitment. He has to become the best dessert chef in the world and also an expert pair of extra hands on the other side of the restaurant as well.

• Also Marcus’s mother has to, has to, has to die during the climax of their season on the night they open the restaurant to friends and family.

• Fak is a goofball underachiever incompetent mechanic everyman except for when he’s an intuitive food genius and master maître d. (It’s almost like the actor playing him is also an executive producer on the show!)

• The acting in this show is generally at about an 11 out of 10; Jamie Lee Curtis is permanently at about a 12.5.

• We can’t have one distracting celebrity cameo in the season, we have to have a dozen so that we’re constantly pulled out of the show itself to admire just how much pull the creators have.

• Carmy and Claire can’t just meet cute (re-meet cute), they have to meet cute in a way that underlines his fundamental insecurity but also her impossible perfection as an endlessly-understanding down-to-earth sweet hot emergency room doctor who has endless patience for his foibles despite obviously being a very desirable woman who would have her pick of suitors, and by the way also Claire was always the secret love of Carmy’s life.

• You think Carmy is obsessive and odd? He’s not just reclusive and dedicated to his craft, no. He’s literally never been to a party.

• Carmy can’t just flame out on his restaurant and his budding romance, he needs to do so at the exact same time, on the most important night of his life, thanks to the same basic tragic weakness, while locked in a freezer. He can’t just say something that reveals his unhappiness to Claire, he has to do so by soliloquizing to Tina for no particular reason during said crisis.

• Everything has to be underlined, all the time. It’s not enough for us to all know the stakes in opening the restaurant, Cicero and Sugar have to have a redundant conversation where that fact is spelled out in case the people in the back didn’t hear it the first time. It’s not enough to show Sidney fixating on the ticket machine, contemplating the fact that she’s signed up for a career of constant intense stress. She has to then go outside and puke to make sure the audience really, really got it. After the Christmas episode that everyone raved about, Carmy later says something like “Oh yeah I hate cannoli, see food has this emotional connection to me because my family is really fucked up….” No! Don’t do that! Don’t just come right out and tell me what you dramatized in a previous episode! What’s the point of dramatizing anything at all, if the characters are just going to baldly state what you were trying to convey? In the final episode, Jamie Lee Curtis just comes right out and says “I love my kids but I’m a bad mom.” We know! The show invested a lot of time in demonstrating that! You don’t have to have a character just explicitly state all of the things you’ve been carefully building through action and dialogue.

• The piano in that season finale. My god. I think it must have run for like eight solid minutes of screentime. I’m serious, go back and watch that final episode; for an endless stretch during the climax - the climax of an entire episode of climax that was itself the climax of an entire season of climax - for an endless stretch during the climax, they play this same overwrought “this is an emotional moment here people” repetitive twelve bars of piano music. The show’s creators apparently didn’t trust their actors and their writing and narrative construction to do the emotional work of the show, so they ran some heavy-handed piano riff over… and over… and over again, to make sure that we all got it, like dropping a music cue into an episode of The Real World. The repetition is excruciating! Go watch!

That piano line had me searching frantically for other people’s reaction to the show, to see if that had really happened or if I had suffered some sort of stroke. I didn’t really find anything; I guess the show just entrances people that much. Which leads, I suspect, to the aforementioned defensiveness about this show, among critics as well as fans. It seems like no critics want to be the asshole and point out that maybe the show would be a little better if they just took their foot off the gas for a bit. I like the Ringer podcast The Watch and hosts Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, but there’s this weird feeling when listening to their episodes about season two, as if they’re afraid they’ll break the spell if they say a single negative thing. They keep walking up to criticism and then veering off before they commit to it, trying so hard to stay resolutely, rigorously positive at all times. But that’s not an obligation of positive criticism, to refuse to point out the missteps and the bad decisions, and the odd thing is that both hosts are otherwise very willing to highlight the downsides of shows they generally like. But The Bear tends to bring out this sense in critics that its success is somehow fragile, despite it being a huge critical and commercial success. I don’t get it.

Ryan and Greenwald suggest that, for example, Richie can have a complete personality transplant in a few days because the show is fundamentally a fantasy; it shouldn’t be held to the standards of realism. Well, OK, fine. There’s still matters of degree though, right? If you’re just going to sweep aside every criticism by saying “It’s a fantasy, so it doesn’t matter,” then why stop at implausible character evolution? Why not have Cicero run for president? Why not have Richie play shortstop for the Cubbies? Why not have Carmy go to space? Why not? It’s one thing to say that you’re creating a show that resides in a generally realistic world but which is going to steer into intensity and narrative excess and melodrama. There’s a long history of that sort of thing and I like it. But it’s another to just sort of leave basic narrative sense aside and thoroughly depart from realism when you choose to because that’s easier or more fun. (Like, say, by having your characters poison a bunch of kids with Xanax with absolutely no consequences.) At one point Ryan and Greenwald mention Mad Men, which strikes me as just an absolutely brutal comparison for The Bear. That older show had a whole set of flaws - I feel like the only person alive who found the series finale embarrassingly bad - but it also knew the value of restraint. When Bert Cooper appeared as an apparition to Don in the last season, it hit hard in part because the show was usually a buttoned-down office drama. The Bear could stand to learn from that example.

To be clear, I think critics and audiences are defensive about the show because it’s good and it’s moved them emotionally, which is great. But I also think the show has a clear overarching flaw that could be patched up fairly easily while preserving what makes the show so much fun. And I find it a little weird how quiet the conversation has been about that flaw.

If there’s one moment that crystallizes everything I found aggravating in a show that has so many likable elements, it would be the end of the Christmas episode, which people have such worshipful attitudes towards. There’s a lot to like in the episode, and I think it was a sound decision to stretch a half-hourish show to an hour for that episode. Everyone was playing everything very, very big, but of course they were; it’s the Bear. My beef (if you’ll forgive me) lies in the very ending. John Bernthal and Bob Odenkirk have their big confrontation at the dinner table, Bernthal gets to play a big dramatic moment, it’s an emotional climax, fine. Then there’s about 90 seconds for the audience to catch their breath. Then Jamie Lee Curtis comes in and has her big dramatic moment, and that’s a big emotional climax too. Then there’s about 90 seconds for the audience to catch their breath. Then Jamie Lee Curtis drives her car into the house, and that’s a big emotional climax! It’s just way too much. I don’t know if it makes sense to use the “hat on a hat” concept with drama, but that’s what it felt like to me, just adding more when what was already there was more than sufficient. It didn’t leave me feeling stimulated. It left me feeling like my synapses were blown out and I couldn’t feel anything anymore.

And this, I think, is the point I’m trying to make here: everything can’t be climax. Every moment can’t be a very special moment. Every conversation can’t be freighted with incredible emotional meaning. (Watch the show and count how many conversations between two characters have the structure “We care about each other deeply, but we don’t see eye-to-eye right now, but with this one loaded talk between us, we’re going to find common ground again and rediscover how much we really care for one another.” There’s so many.) Every plot development can’t be series-altering. I am 100% on board with the concept of a show that throws restraint to the wind and proudly traffics in emotion and sentiment. Bring it on. But it’s a mistake to assume that doing so necessarily entails jettisoning subtlety altogether. Sometimes in drama less really is more. What if that Christmas episode had just ended with Jon Bernthal’s big moment, given that he’s the spirit that lingers over the series? Would that not have been more meaningful, more effective, more affecting? I think so. I think there’s plenty of this room for this show to wear its heart on its sleeve, to be its big-hearted, symbolism-heavy self, and to pull back a notch or three too, and in doing so become something rarer and more meaningful.

I’m looking forward to season three. But creators of The Bear, I’m begging you - do a little less.