Imagine one day you stop by your favorite neighborhood sandwich shop, the one you’ve been going to for years, and it’s abruptly closed for renovations. Things have been a little different of late—the place has run a little more smoothly, been a little busier, maybe even a tad cleaner—but nothing to suggest this kind of dramatic change was in the works. A little while later, it reopens, but the place you used to swing by every week is now an upscale restaurant you can afford to eat at a few times a year, at most, and that’s if you can manage to score a table at all. The food might be better—or at least, everyone seems to think it is—but something that was once a comforting fixture has been replaced with a rarified luxury.
Now imagine the same thing happening to your favorite art form: television. The thing you used to turn to every week—same Bat-time, same Bat-channel—has become an irregular occurrence, released on a slew of different platforms in an ever-shifting array of formats, with shorter seasons and longer waits between them. The characters whose lives moved alongside yours, aging at the same rate, even celebrating holidays at the same time you did, now turn up in fitful but intense bursts, like old friends you haven’t seen in years, and while it’s always a pleasure to catch up, you can’t help but feel like you’ve missed something crucial, the feeling of connection that comes from simply being around.
The Bear sits at the nexus of these two phenomena: a show about a Chicago beef joint turned high-end eatery that filters a story about the everyday happenings of working-class strivers through an art-house lens. In the FX series’ third season, Jeremy Allen White’s Carmen Berzatto has finally realized his plan to transform his family’s old-school sandwich place into a destination restaurant where the boundaries of cuisine are pushed further every day. The atmosphere is no less chaotic than it was when Chef Carmy took over in Season 1, a rising star of the culinary world abruptly handed the keys to a greasy, crumbling institution, but now the driving force isn’t just cranking out enough sandwiches to keep the lights on. It’s making art, creating cutting-edge dishes whose reputation stretches far beyond River North. And just like the Bear, Carmy’s fashionably minimalist replacement for the Original Beef of Chicagoland, The Bear is no longer the place it was when we first arrived. As Carmy struggles to train a staff used to slinging sandwiches at top speed in the finer points of haute cuisine, the show is going through struggles of its own, its ambitions stretching beyond its ability to fulfill them. The further The Bear stretches, the more its characters’ dilemmas seem to parallel its own, until the season starts to feel like an extended exploration of why the show doesn’t quite work as well as it used to.
At the beginning of The Bear’s third season, Carmy scribbles down a catalog of “non-negotiables,” a list of immutable principles by which his restaurant will be run. And although many of them are specific to the show’s milieu—“Shirts perfectly pressed” and especially “Break down all boxes before putting them in dumpster”—his bullet-pointed list contains several items that you might expect to see on a writers’ room whiteboard: “Push 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 up its format with each new episode, and just as Carmy’s mandate pushes innovation at the expense of a strong core identity, so the show now seems to value novelty over coherence, deviating from the baseline so frequently that it’s no longer clear exactly what it wants to be.
The Bear is a back-of-house show, far more concerned with the process of creation than with its eventual product. When Carmy proclaims his goal is to get the restaurant a Michelin star “so that they can see what we’re made of,” it falls to his second-in-command, Sydney, to ask, “Who is ‘they’?” For all the effort Carmy puts into demanding that every dish is perfect, every floral arrangement in the dining room placed just so, he seems almost totally disconnected from the experience of the people who are actually eating his food. He brushes off any requests to change his menu according to their tastes, going so far as to ask whether a diner’s aversion to mushrooms stems from a food allergy (accommodated, reluctantly) or mere preference (no dice). He’s too engrossed in his art to take note of something as mundane as whether his customers are actually having a good time, let alone the practicality of spending $11,000 on a specific kind of butter simply because it’s “the best.” His list of nonnegotiables may include an atmosphere of “vibrant collaboration,” but the more the pressure mounts, the more fixated he is on making sure that everything is done the right way, which is to say, his.
As Carmy strives for excellence at any cost, the Bear sinks further into a financial hole. The only part of the business that’s actually turning a profit is its humble takeout window, where a single beleaguered worker still serves the old-school beef sandwiches that made the spot famous. Its patrons aren’t the ones Carmy is driving his staff into the ground to impress—not the kind of people who can comfortably lay out $175 plus tip for the Bear’s fixed menu, assuming they could even get in the door—but they’re devoted 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 Bear’s third season dishes out some red meat, too, mostly in the form of extended comic interludes built around the bumbling Fak family. But while the bit where the burly loudmouth Neil takes a spin at serving, only to pour a delicate broth in front of two hungry diners and then promptly return the filled bowls to the kitchen, is a gag worthy of the Marx Brothers, the Faks’ clowning grows increasingly strained over the course of the season, especially as it becomes clear that it’s only there to buy time for the show’s somber indulgences. If an episode like “Napkins,” a delicate standout that fills in the backstory of the Bear’s sous chef Tina, is delivered like an elegantly plated entrée, the season’s slapstick digressions are like raw steaks thrown 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 at moments, a great one. But it’s also a show increasingly besotted with its own ambitions, and profoundly at risk of losing sight of what makes for great TV. 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 10 episodes, has fashioned a story about a self-styled visionary whose closed-minded dedication to his own singular vision risks destroying the very thing he’s strived so hard to make, so consumed with the image of himself as an artist that he’s lost touch with why people go out to eat in the first place. Sure, they want something new and exciting, to have their palates expanded and their preconceptions challenged. But they also just want a meal, something that leaves them fuller and happier than they were when they came in. In Season 3’s finale, the legendary chef Thomas Keller explains to a young Carmy that the purpose of making food is nourishment, nurturing not just the people who consume it but the ones who make it and provide the ingredients for it, a chain of care that stretches all the way back to the soil. Fans in tune with The Bear’s finer qualities like to scoff at the 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 elevated and challenging cuisine, but not if it leaves you unfulfilled. Sometimes you just want a sandwich.
