“The Bear,” or, What’s On TV Tonight, Dad?
Something funny happened to our TV habits during the pandemic. Starting in early 2020, we started watching shows we’d missed because the boy was too young when they first aired. We made our way through multiple seasons of network, streaming, and public TV, as if an avalanche of content had been loosed on our household. Once we finished a series, we moved on to the next. It was a treasure trove of entertainment. We inhaled it like there was no tomorrow.
Of course, in March 2020, there was some validity to the idea of ‘no tomorrow.’ This was back when New Yorkers gathered around 7 pm to bang on pots and pans and clap for essential workers. My son and I would be on the front stoop of our building playing a ball game we’d invented when neighbors would emerge from their homes, saucepans in hand, and for a few moments, we’d all bond in appreciation for the work being done on our behalf.
Then we’d head in and watch TV, usually over dinner. We started with The Good Place, and once we tired of that, moved on to Parks & Recreation, which was the first show we watched in its entirety (seven seasons, 125 episodes). The show may have aired from 2009–2016, but we blew through it, watching two, sometimes three episodes a night, and it wormed its way into our hearts. I don’t remember the order in which the shows came after that. But we were off and binging. Not counting the shows mentioned:
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
The Office (US)
Superstore
Schitt’s Creek
Community
Party Down
Call the Midwife*
Poldark*
Derry Girls
All Creatures Great and Small (2021)
Kim’s Convenience
Severance
Anne with an E
Space Force
30 Rock
Ted Lasso
The Outlaws
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp
Only Murders in the Building
Reservation Dogs
*Note: we had been watching these already, but subsequent seasons fell during the pandemic, so they make the list.
My son and I also managed to get in the following (all on Disney+):
Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7
Star Wars: The Bad Batch
Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 2
Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett
Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi
WandaVision
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Loki
Hawkeye
Moon Knight
Ms. Marvel
[Some of you may be wondering, “Wait, are we still in the pandemic, and if not, does Ms. Marvel really count?” I’m not going to get into whether we are or not. You can read this article about endemic vs pandemic and decide for yourself. For now, I’m treating everything we’ve watched since March 2020 as ”pandemic viewing.”]
[Yes, we watch a lot of TV. My wife often bemoans the fact that we don’t sit around the table looking at one another, as other families do, although I have no proof of this. And yet: I think we’ve bonded over these shows more than through certain family-only moments in recent years. I don’t know what that says about us and I don’t want to ponder it. The fact is, I grew up watching TV. My mother, who was “at home” in the ’70s, stuck me, my little brother, and little sister in front of the TV starting at 4 pm, or whenever Sesame Street began. We watched that, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company, and Zoom, with dinner and a bath thrown in somewhere. Yes, they were PBS/CTW shows. You could argue that they were essential to our development. To which I say: And Parks & Rec wasn‘t?]
Some shows we liked more than others. Occasionally we’d try an episode or two, only to realize the show wasn’t for us, so we‘d move on (looking at you, Mr. Mayor). Sometimes a show wound up having too much adult content, so we switched it off. And sometimes a show came out of nowhere, surprising us so much that we stayed with it, despite some red flags.
As of this writing, two and a half years have passed since the pandemic began. The 10 year-old is now a 12 year-old. That’s a lot of progress, maturity-wise. The whole idea of “acceptable family viewing” has changed. Profanity has ceased to be an issue. Sexual innuendo is met with giggles and knowing laughter. Social justice issues have an open forum.
Which brings us to FX’s The Bear, the first season of which was released en masse on Hulu on June 23. It’s a textbook example of what we‘ve grown into. Certainly, there’s the playfulness, silly humor, and character-based humor you’d see on any network show. But there are themes I know we weren’t ready to confront two and half years ago: class warfare, addiction, suicide, and street violence. At the same time, The Bear is about something essentially human: the need to be a decent, upstanding person in the face of career change, financial woes, and family upheaval. That’s something anyone can relate to.
In The Bear, Jeremy Allen White (of Shameless fame) is Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, a chef who’s left a cushy albeit punishing job at a top New York restaurant to run the grimy, health code violation of a Chicago sandwich shop his late brother Michael left him. We learn early on that the brothers became estranged before Michael’s suicide; as a result, Carmy feels he owes it to Michael and their sister (Abby Elliott) to get the place back on its feet, and, if possible, turn a profit. The shop’s peopled with the types you’d expect at a place called “The Original Beef of Chicagoland”: feisty line cooks, abrasive counter workers, shit-talking dishwashers. It’s also got its disruptors: Carmy’s cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a wonderfully grating, self-styled champion of the working man; Marcus (Lionel Boyce), a baker inspired to create the perfect donut; and Sydney “Syd” Adamu (Ayo Edebiri), a young sous chef who idolizes Carmy and is willing to intern for him, until he ‘gifts’ her the responsibility of running The Original Beef herself.
Upon arrival, Carmy institutes protocols, including having the staff call one another “chef,” and creates a pecking order — no more days of ‘one for all, all for one’— which instantly creates tension among those used to doing things a certain way. No one’s more put out by Carmy’s “technique” than Richie, who’s content to let things run their course. He’s tough as nails, but as the season wears on, Moss-Bachrach’s performance blooms into something tragically three-dimensional. Like Carmy, Richie is masking genuine hurt; in one of the season’s finest moments, he and Syd go head to head in an argument that stops just short of a fist fight; Richie’s had it with The Beef’s new direction (he thinks they’re snubbing their “OG” customers) and Syd’s had it with his apathy. The fact that he’s accidentally stabbed in the butt only adds to the intensity, which comes in the midst of a masterful one-take episode.
The Bear is loaded with lightning-fast, ear-splitting, profane language and characters, which befits its working class Chicago setting. It captures the stress of running a high-pressure counter business, which explodes into insanity when a decent review runs in a local rag. The sight of orders flowing in continuously, the staff hopelessly unable to fulfill them, sets the one-take episode ablaze. It’s one of the finest half-hours of television I’ve seen. You’re hyperventilating but also energized, amped up by a kind of high-octane TV we haven’t seen a while. It’s a symphony of expertly choreographed chaos shot in what appears to be an impossibly cramped space (recreated, apparently, from an actual Chicago beef place). Everything that transpires, from a burner fire to gallons of stock cascading onto the floor, feels like it’s happening in front of you. The immediacy of The Bear is its greatest asset.
Created by Christopher Storer, The Bear is one of those rare shows in which the acting, writing, and direction are all in sync. The show is undeniably entertaining, yet the sting of real life is palpable. Which is one thing that was missing from our early pandemic viewing. No one will accuse shows like Parks & Rec, Community, or The Good Place of feeling “real.” They’re clean, escapist entertainment, and that’s fine. There’s a place for that. Especially when your kid’s ten and the world is going to shit around you. But slowly, reality crept in, even in a show as innocuous as Superstore, which was very much a meditation on life in Middle America. By the time that show came to an end, COVID had been worked into its plot. Brooklyn Nine-Nine dedicated part of its final season to police misconduct and was forced to acknowledge the murder of George Floyd. How could it not?
It was good timing. As normalcy returned (sort of), the boy was able to take in more serious stuff. Yes, we’d been watching Call the Midwife, the long-running English drama that layers in plenty of real world issues, so perhaps he was primed. But you expect that from PBS, to some extent. Network TV’s another story, and Disney+ is all fantasy all the time. If anything, the pandemic made us hardier viewers, able to take in Prestige Television’s most prestigious in a way that encourages discussion. And isn’t that Art’s greatest gift? The ability to make us turn to one another, and ask, Why is this happening? Why are we like this? Why do we do these things to one another?
So, in a weird way, thanks, COVID, for opening up the conversation. I look forward to seeing where we go next, and how we all grow in the process.
