Imagine that one day you stop by your favorite sandwich shop, the one you’ve been frequenting for years, and it abruptly closes for renovations. Things have changed a little lately—the place is a little better, a little busier, maybe even a little cleaner—but there’s no sign that such a radical change is underway. A little later, it reopens, but the place you once stopped by every week is now a high-end restaurant where you can afford to eat a few times a year, at most, and that’s if you can get a table. The food may be better—or at least everyone seems to think so—but what was once a comfort food has been replaced by a rarefied luxury.
Now imagine the same thing happening to your favorite art form: television. The thing you used to watch every week—same time, same channel—has become an irregular occurrence, broadcast across a multitude of different platforms in an ever-changing array of formats, with shorter seasons and longer gaps in between. Characters whose lives have evolved alongside yours, aging at the same rate, even celebrating the holidays at the same time, now reappear intermittently but intensely, like old friends you haven’t seen in years, and while it’s always a pleasure to see them again, you can’t help but feel like you’ve missed something crucial, the sense of connection that comes from simply being there.
The bear sits at the intersection of those two phenomena: a series about a Chicago beef joint turned upscale restaurant that filters a story about the day-to-day goings-on of working people through the prism of art house. In the FX series’ third season, Carmen Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, has finally realized her plan to transform her family’s old-school sandwich joint into a destination restaurant where the boundaries of cuisine are pushed every day. The atmosphere is no less chaotic than it was when Chef Carmy took the helm in Season 1, a rising star of the culinary world suddenly handed the keys to a greasy, crumbling institution, but now the driving force is no longer just about making enough sandwiches to keep the lights on. It’s about making art, creating cutting-edge dishes that have a reputation that extends far beyond the River North. And just like the bear, Carmy’s trendy minimalist replacement for the original Chicagoland beef, The bear is no longer the place it was when we arrived. As Carmy struggles to train a staff accustomed to whipping up sandwiches at breakneck speed in the intricacies of haute cuisine, the show itself struggles, its ambitions outpacing its ability to achieve them. The bear As the series stretches on, its characters’ dilemmas seem increasingly parallel to its own, until the season begins to feel like an extended exploration of why the show isn’t working as well as it used to.
At the beginning of The bearIn season three of , Carmy makes a list of “non-negotiables,” a list of immutable principles by which her restaurant will be run. And while many of them are specific to the show’s milieu—“Perfectly pressed shirts” and especially “Break down all boxes before throwing them in the trash”—her bulleted list contains several items one might expect to see on a writers’ room whiteboard: “Pushing the boundaries”; “Details matter”; “Less is more.” Just as Carmy declares that the bear will never repeat a dish, The bear seems increasingly determined to change its format with each new episode, and just as Carmy’s tenure pushes innovation at the expense of a strong core identity, the show now seems to value novelty over consistency, deviating from the baseline so frequently that it’s no longer clear exactly what it wants to be.
The bear is a behind-the-scenes cooking show, far more concerned with the creative process than the final product. When Carmy proclaims that his goal is to get the restaurant a Michelin star “so they can see what we’re made of,” it falls to his right-hand woman, Sydney, to ask, “Who are ‘they’?” Despite Carmy’s efforts to demand that every dish be perfect, that every flower arrangement in the dining room be placed exactly as it should be, he seems almost completely disconnected from the experience of the people who actually eat his food. He brushes off any requests to modify his menu to suit their tastes, going so far as to ask whether a diner’s aversion to mushrooms is due to a food allergy (accepted, reluctantly) or a mere preference (without hesitation). He’s too absorbed in his craft to take note of something as mundane as whether his customers are having a good time, let alone the practicalities of spending $11,000 on a specific type of butter simply because it’s “the best.” His list of non-negotiables may include an atmosphere of “dynamic collaboration,” but the more pressure mounts, the more determined he becomes to make sure everything is done the right way—his way.
As Carmy strives for excellence at all costs, the Bear sinks deeper into a financial hole. The only part of the business that actually turns a profit is its humble takeout window, where a single beleaguered employee still serves the old-school beef sandwiches that made the place famous. Its customers aren’t the kind Carmy pushes his staff to break the bank to impress—not the kind of people who can comfortably shell out $175 plus tip for the Bear’s set menu, assuming they can even get in the door—but they’re dedicated enough to keep lining up for the food they love, even if they have to eat it at a picnic table in the parking lot. The bearThe show’s third season also provides plenty of fodder, mostly in the form of long comic interludes built around the bumbling Fak family. But while the moment when the burly, loudmouth Neil starts serving, then pours a delicate broth in front of two hungry guests and quickly carries the filled bowls back to the kitchen, is a Marx Brothers-esque gag, the Faks’ antics become increasingly tense as the season goes on, especially as it becomes clear that they’re only there to buy time for the show’s dark indulgences. If an episode like “Napkins,” a delicate and remarkable episode that completes the story of Tina, the bear’s sous chef, is delivered as an elegantly dressed entrée, the season’s slapstick digressions are like raw steaks tossed from the back of a moving truck, grudging concessions to an audience the show still needs but no longer respects.
The bear is still a good show, and sometimes a great show. But it’s also a show that’s increasingly obsessed with its own ambitions and at serious risk of losing sight of what makes a good show. The best thing you can say is that it’s aware of that risk. Creator Christopher Storer, who wrote or directed nine of the season’s ten episodes, has crafted a story about a self-proclaimed visionary whose single-minded devotion to his own singular vision threatens to destroy what he’s worked so hard to create, so consumed by his image as an artist that he’s lost touch with why people go to restaurants in the first place. Sure, they want something new and exciting, to have their palates expanded and their preconceived notions challenged. But they also simply want a meal, something that leaves them fuller and happier than they were when they arrived. In the Season 3 finale, legendary chef Thomas Keller explains to a young Carmy that the purpose of preparing food is to nourish—to nourish not only the people who eat it, but also those who prepare it and provide the ingredients to make it, a chain of care that goes all the way back to the soil. Fans in tune with The bearThe more refined qualities of Syd-Carmy like to poke fun at Syd-Carmy shippers who demand simpler pleasures, and while giving in to that particular demand would be disastrous, they’re not wrong to feel the need for something simply satisfying. There’s a place for refined, stimulating cuisine, but not if it leaves you unsatisfied. Sometimes you just want a sandwich.