My Beef with the Bear (Season 3)
Bottle Episodes and Montages Do Not a Season Make (Spoilers Ahead)
In the final episode of The Bear Season 3, a group of celebrity chefs gather to commemorate the closing of a legendary Chicago fine dining restaurant. Over the course of the dinner, we get snippets of the chefs reflecting on their back-of-house experiences paired with various reaction shots of Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), and Luca (Will Poulter) sprinkled throughout.
The edits tell us what these characters are thinking through cuts to various instances of kitchen drama we’ve seen before (about seven hundred times, in Carmy’s case), the subtext of these images being: “Whoa, how stressful!” And when they show up on the screen out of nowhere, between black slides of scratchy intersecting white lines – like a visual manifestation of guitar amp feedback – they do produce anxiety. The really unnatural thing about this specific sequence though is not the disruptive edits, but the celebrity chefs speaking to one another in the cadence of actors at a Hollywood Reporter roundtable.
There is something audacious about featuring real life celebrity chefs in the show. Christopher Storer and co have always had an aspirational Safdie Brothers aesthetic, emblematic of a desire to authentically represent the modern restaurant industry by both capturing the pace of it and incorporating real life figures and restaurants into its televisual universe.
The whip pans, knife wounds, death metal tracks and ticking clock frames in episode one established that frantic pacing right off the bat while other story elements paid homage to the restaurant industry itself: Matty Matheson’s recurring role as The Bear’s handyman, a cameo from Chicago restaurateur Donnie Madia, a fine dining montage in season two,1 or the name-drops on Carmy’s resume, like The French Laundry, Ever, and Noma (where one episode actually takes place).
Sometimes these elements melted into the show like truffle oil. Other times they overwhelmed the dish by calling too much attention to themselves (also like truffle oil). I think it’s safe to say these meandering montages and character monologues made season three mostly unpalatable. If I were really channeling my internal Anton Ego (my favorite Pixar character and personal hero), I’d go so far as to say they spoil it.
You can tell from the other elements of the show that still work, like the dramatic storytelling. That’s why in the final episode it’s a breath of fresh air when the awkward PR interview quality of the celebrity chef conversations is interrupted by Carmy rising to confront his toxic former kitchen mentor, Chef David – the one who haunts Carmy in all those rapid fire flashbacks.2
When Carmy works his way up to unleashing years of simmering rage on him, Chef David rebutts: “You need to unclutch your pearls… You wanted to be great. You wanted to be excellent. So you got rid of all the bullshit and you concentrated and you got focused and you got great. You got excellent. It worked. You’re here. Look at all this.” The interaction seems to heal something in Carmy while at the same time affirming his uncompromising attitude in a sisyphean quest for a Michelin Star. It’s good anti-hero drama.
It leaves one wondering, perversely, if the encounter will encourage Carmy to become even more intolerable in his own kitchen. It also begs a secondary question: whether or not his reaction to the encounter will affect Sydney’s decision to stay at The Bear or venture off on her own? It’s enough to keep one invested through season four, even after the “To Be Continued” titles reveal the true reason behind all the repetitive montages and bottle episodes: they had a whole season to kill! Perhaps the show’s creators are struggling with the burden success has allotted them too.
One moment the scene reads like a half-hearted attempt at a No Reservations segment, the next it’s interrupted with a dramatic confrontation that evokes both the promise and peril of success in the fine dining world.
It’s hard to look back on the previous nine episodes and not see that burden playing out in slow motion. In many ways it's the same menu as the last two seasons: Richie and Carmy engage in more yelling matches, Carmy regresses back into art monster mode, Sydney continues contemplating her commitment to The Bear, and Uncle Jimmy tells Carmy another story in an effort to indirectly convey wisdom (in that classic tv-writer way).
Meanwhile Tina’s flashback episode brings little to no news about her character or the main story. Ditto for Sugar’s bottle episode with Jamie Lee Curtis (although it was sort of a highlight of the season, largely thanks to Curtis’s performance).
Season two skirted this lagging quality by orienting every episode in relation to the season’s climactic event: opening night. Each character got their own story in the buildup (a rehearsal for the big show, if you will) then, on the Friends and Family night, we watched them flower or internally combust in energetic long takes that rivaled the insane climax of the first season.
The episode that best captures what season two is about is the one in which Richie finds a sense of purpose through embracing fine dining’s culture of “Unreasonable Hospitality.” As he tells the kitchen staff on The Bear’s opening night, “There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be than right here right now with you guys.” It’s a powerful line that gets all of its substance from the great storytelling in the seventh episode.
Ultimately the show becomes about pushing oneself to meet the moment. Persevering to achieve incredibly high standards. This theme refracts through every other character arc in the season: Sydney reading Coach K’s memoir, Marcus perfecting his patissier techniques, Tina rising to the task of sous chef, and Ebraheim reckoning with his inability to do so.
So what drives season three? If I had to make a case for what it’s attempting to examine, I’d say something like: “the endurance required to sustain a restaurant beyond opening night.” But whether it’s this notion of endurance, or some other, that the creators used to justify the plot developments (or lack thereof) in season three, the real problem lies in the chaos that results from its attempts at cinéma vérité.
These choices raise questions that a successful melding of documentary style with fictional narrative would not have raised. For me, they included:
“What came first, the celebrity chef remark or Sydney’s reaction to it?”
“How much did Will Poulter read about Alinea to improvise that conversation with Grant Achatz, or did he just watch his Chef’s Table episode?”
“Would Thomas Keller really need to teach a chef at THE FRENCH LAUNDRY how to truss a chicken, or is that not the kind of thing one learns on YouTube before applying?”
“Why is Will Poulter pretending to share his own chef experiences as if they were real experiences like the chef’s at the table?”
At least these shortfalls help one appreciate how excellent the actors are compared to the celebrity chef testimonials – Olivia Colman and Ebon Moss-Bachrach especially. Unfortunately they also diminish the performances of those directly interacting with the celebrity chefs.
Again, there are a lot of great impulses in all of this that maintain its “prestige” TV allure: the push for novel episode structures and shooting styles, the incorporation of deep research to ground its storytelling in the reality of its milieu, the sincere attention to the lives of all the secondary characters, the hand-picked indie music tracks.
These are the ingredients that compose the special sauce of The Bear. It has never been a flawless show, but its cringier qualities – Carmy’s flirtations with Claire, the Ted Lasso-esque sentimentalizing of personal growth – are also part of its charm.
Unfortunately, the show seemed to enter a downward spiral of its own making this season. I don’t think it necessarily means season four will be a disaster. The risks it took in season three, simply didn’t pay off. But one of the benefits to barely developing the story and packing episodes with atmospheric montages and flashbacks is that there is still plenty of room to course correct.
The language of the review Carmy reads just before the credits roll summarizes my feelings rather well: confusing, innovative, inconsistent, overdone, disappointed, stale, craving.
Essentially a montage of Chicago Eater’s restaurant guide.
By the way, does Joel McHale get an episode fee for each of those appearances? If not, he should call his agent.