The Bear

The Bear is without a doubt going to be my favourite show of this year and will probably make its way up my favourites of all time assuming they wrap it up nicely, and yet the pitch had me anything but excited. I’m not massively into cooking shows, I enjoy the odd season of Masterchef or the French Top Chef but even then I eventually get bored, cooking isn’t that interesting for me to watch and cooking for show with heavy dramatisation and epic music on top only keeps me interested for so long. The Bear changed that though, because it shows cooking under a very different light, it doesn’t dramatise as much as it just shows the art off in all its messy and mistake filled ways.

The opening scene for the show had me invested before I even realised what was happening. It starts with Carmen (or Carmy for friends and family) working at The Beef which is a complete and utter mess, the apparent chaos of the kitchen, the yelling orders across, the customer engagement, the lost knives, the dropped pans, the spilt sauce is all filmed continuously for several minutes without music nor commentary. It’s immediately exhausting but it also tells one message: the people in the scene love it. It is meant to be exhausting, it’s something that’s frequently acknowledged by the characters that the work is draining them dry and that the stress is killing them but it is always followed up with an earnest love for the work and the art.

I’m not a difficult crier, it really doesn’t take much to get a tear out of me but usually it’s a consequence of sadness; The Bear had be well up several times because of the beauty of what it shows. I believe that ironically reality TV cooking shows are afraid of boring viewers with cooking, hence the music and dramatic cuts. The Bear isn’t afraid of that, it embraces it and lets it breathe, there are episodes with 10 minute segments of someone staging at a bakery and it’s thrilling, the joy of learning and the respect for the creation process are amazing to see. Another scene will have a chef walk through the process of taking the bones out of a turkey and it’s one of the rare cases where my vegetarian ass didn’t think “poor animal” because there was such a love and respect for the product. The best and boldest example though is one episode that just runs through a full shift of a restaurant in what seems like a singular shot. The episode is 30 minutes so I’m sure there’s some clever cuts here and there but it’s filmed so perfectly that it feels like you inhaled at the start and only exhaled 30 minutes later. I don’t think I’ll ever love cooking myself, I don’t quite have the patience for it but The Bear has given me a newfound perspective and respect for all the chefs out there and the art as a whole.

The show isn’t just about cooking though, between onions getting cut and meat being seared, there’s also characters in there and what characters they are. The story is not based on anything real and yet almost every dialogue feels so natural, it’s sometimes hard to remember that this isn’t even attempting to be a documentary (not even a fake one like The Office). The writing of the characters themselves also follows the same philosophy as the cooking side of things. They are all nuanced with flaws and qualities, nobody is smoothed to be perfect but nobody is outright bad either. Similarly to the cooking, the characters are also allowed to breathe with almost every character getting a dedicated episode allowing for a lot of additional depth, background and growth.

It’s not all perfect though, it never is, there is the odd character decision I simply don’t understand, the occasional dialogue that feels more scripted than it should be and even one character I can’t quite get behind as I think they are lacking a bit of nuance for them to be believable and at least somewhat likeable, but it’s so minor and the show’s positives are so strong, it’s hard to hold it against it. It pains me that I’ll have to wait at least a year for the fourth season but it’s also been a long time since a show has left me with such a level of anticipation. The Bear is a show that is worth the try regardless of your opinion on cooking shows, drama or slice of life genres. It doesn’t take a season to get good like oh so many other shows, it just gets into it and you’ll know.