With its fourth season recently released and a fifth one on the way, FX’s The Bear has established itself as one of the buzziest TV shows around, making superstars out of Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Ayo Edebiri. But while it remains a highly anticipated series every summer, its reception has cooled somewhat since its anxiety-inducing first season, as the show has shifted into a gentler, more contemplative gear.
While there’s plenty of compelling stuff going on with Carmy, Sydney, and The Bear‘s big extended family, there’s one issue that has persisted since the very beginning of the series, and it has a lot to do with the medium of television itself. The show has always explored the sacrifices that come with pursuing greatness, but viewers still don’t really have a sense of why the two chefs at its center are so great in the first place, despite frequently being told as much by other characters.
What’s So Great About Carmy and Sydney, Anyway?
The Bear has spent plenty of time examining what drives Carmy (White) and Sydney (Edebiri), and, by extension, other people obsessively dedicated to their craft. However, the show has struggled more with depicting what this drive actually leads to. Carmy threw himself into his work in order to escape his tumultuous home life and the trauma of losing his brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal), becoming one of the top chefs in America almost by accident. For Sydney, cooking is a way to connect with the mother she lost at a young age, and comes from a deep place of love for feeding people.
But as far as what it is that makes them so good at their craft, the show is more apt to tell viewers about it than to show them. Characters talk openly about how brilliant Carmy and Sydney are and how amazing the food at The Bear is, but for the viewer, there isn’t really much to feel invested in their brilliance beyond the words of other characters and the somewhat generically “fancy” looking food that they make. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to Carmy. He’s supposed to be one of the best chefs in the world, but viewers really don’t get to experience much of this beyond his obsessiveness.
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An interesting analogue, and one that it’s far easier to feel emotionally invested in, is dessert chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce). Viewers who have watched the show from the beginning have followed Marcus’s journey from baking Italian beef rolls at The Beef to becoming one of the most exciting up-and-coming chefs in the business, with side trips to Copenhagen and deep studies of the greats. Because the series invested time in showing the audience Marcus’s growth and his ability to blossom with Carmy’s support, his greatness feels far more lived-in.
It comes down to the old writing adage of “show, don’t tell.” It’s much more impactful when any piece of storytelling finds ways to show its audience what a character is like or what they’re thinking and feeling, rather than just coming out and telling them. When it comes to Carmy and Sydney’s greatness, the series has largely been stuck in the “telling” mode.
The Challenges of the Medium
A big part of this comes down to a challenge that’s baked into the series as a piece of television: it’s extremely difficult to convey the experience of great food when the audience doesn’t get to eat it themselves. Television is an audio-visual medium, and while the dishes at The Bear look very nice, they don’t look substantially different from what a viewer might expect from any other fine dining dish. Without being able to taste or smell it, there’s no way to truly understand why it’s any better than any other. Obviously, there’s only so much the team of dedicated artisans behind The Bear can do about that, at least until Smell-o-Vision becomes a thing again.
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Some of this also comes down to the fact that it’s difficult to truly depict greatness, regardless of the medium. It’s the same difficulty that plenty of biopics have struggled with, as characters stare in awe at the genius at the center of the story while the audience looks on from the outside, wondering what all the fuss is about. But biopics at least have the added benefit of characters that are usually already culturally accepted as important, which is something The Bear doesn’t have. Add this to the fact that the series’ chosen setting is the culinary world, a world that relies heavily on the non-TV-friendly senses of taste and smell, and telling viewers about the characters’ greatness may feel like the only option.
It’s clear that the series was created with great care and a commitment to accuracy, aided by having real chefs like Courtney Storer and Matty Matheson involved behind the scenes. The surfaces of The Bear are all as gleaming and precise as the restaurant at its center. But after four seasons, it’s hard not to wish that more of that attention to detail could have been involved in finding ways to let the audience in on just what makes its two main characters so great at what they do in the first place, beyond everything they had to do to get there.
The Bear
3.5
/5
- Release Date
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June 23, 2022
- Network
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Hulu
- Showrunner
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Christopher Storer
- Directors
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Ramy Youssef
- Writers
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Catherine Schetina, Alex Russell, Karen Joseph Adcock, Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, Stacy Osei-Kuffour
