(Contains mild spoilers.)
There is a lot I love about FX’s The Bear, the new drama created by Christopher Storer.1 The dialogue, the camerawork, and the performances are all great, but there were a few things I wanted to note.
First, I loved how the show throws you into the scenario at the beginning. For the first five minutes or so, it’s relentlessly paced, and expects you to keep up. There’s a lot of information flung at the screen, but it is all comprehensible, firstly because of the clarity of the presentation, and secondly because we’re in 2022 and we’re all very media-literate. In fact, it works so well at getting you up to speed that when the show actually pauses and just gives you all of this information in dialogue, it feels redundant – we’ve already seen everything we needed to see.2 A lot of modern dramatic tv is very slackly paced, and it’s refreshing to see someone just getting on with it and using their time wisely.
Second, this is straight drama tv in a way we haven’t had much of. I mean something specific by that – this is not a plot-driven show, it’s a scenario-driven show. While (spoiler) the status quo changes drastically at the end of season 1, that change is not why we were watching. The setup is something you more commonly see in sitcoms.3 To put it in writing terms, it’s engine-driven rather than plot-driven. You have a status quo that the characters are uncomfortable with but don’t necessarily want to change, and the drama emerges from character conflicts within and outside of themselves, rather than a curiosity on part of the viewer about what happens next. I love this.
But also, unlike most drama shows that depend on an engine like this, it’s all low-stakes drama. Most drama shows like this are either crime shows or genre shows – there are life-or-death questions that are solved or complicated by extreme violence of some kind. In The Bear, on the other hand, apart from the death that created the status quo, every stake in the show is a mundane one. In fact, the one time we come close to a question of a possibly violent death, it feels like that would untenably distort the dramatic reality of the show (and, wisely, that death is avoided).
In some ways, this feels very old-school. Procedurals do this, where the central conflict of each episode has no personal stakes for the characters, which are all small and contained. And the procedural is one of the oldest sustained forms of tv, as is the sitcom, which is where The Bear seems to take most of its plot lessons from. What this does, then, is that it allows the drama to be sustained entirely through character dynamics and dialogue.
And, oh what dialogue it is. Stylistically, The Bear’s dialogue-writing is the opposite of the kind of ornate, rhythmically oriented dialogue I tend to like (e.g. Deadwood, or even The Sopranos). But what they do incredibly well is to use the dialogue to create contrast and nuance when combined with the acting. For comics writers, in fact, The Bear would be a great lesson in not letting your writing and your dialogue do anything that the pictures are already doing. The dialogue constantly works around the performances, filling in flavour, character and tension instead of information, only being direct when there’s no way for the acting to communicate something.
My favourite example of this is in the final episode, right after the possible death I mentioned above has been resolved. Richie, who has treated everyone around him as an antagonist throughout the show, and has just been confronted with the possibility of losing the shitty life he’s currently leading, finally comes out and says to Carmy (our nominal protagonist) that “You’re all I got, cuz.”4 And the camera then lets Carmy just react to this for five seconds, with a mixture of bewilderment and genuine emotion, before he responds, “Alright.” As is only appropriate in the context of a show about cooking – chef’s kiss.
The final point is a personal one. The beginning of episode 8 has a long monologue by Carmy where he finally, having turned himself into a physical and mental wreck, openly talks about his relationship with his brother at an Al-Anon meeting.
He talks about how cooking was something they shared, and how they had dreams together, and how confused and betrayed he felt about his brother’s alienation from him, about his use of drugs, and how bereft he was when his brother died without explanation.
But in combination with that, he talks about himself – about how he was a fuck-up growing up, socially and intellectually. That when his brother shut him out of his life, he then became a great chef out of spite. “Fuck you – watch this.”
And then he worked the hardest he ever had – genuinely struggled – but it had meaning for him all the way. He found a place for himself, and he became an expert at something he cared about. And he wanted the person he cared about the most to look at him and say, “Good job!”
And the more he didn’t hear that, the more he focused on the work, and the better he got. And he kept cutting people out of his life for the work. Because the work was difficult but meaningful, and it gave him a routine, a consistency – a sense of value he didn’t get from anywhere else.
That monologue hit me like nothing in the show. It’s probably not the best part of the series, but it was the one that spoke to me the most. I’ll expand on this in a separate essay, about how that spoke to the addict in me, but in short, I watched as someone laid out the last few years of my life to me.
After 28 years of being a fuck-up, of “why can’t you live up to your potential”, of “you’re wasting your life”, of struggling to explain, defend and justify what I wanted, around eight years ago, I finally got it figured out. I found something I cared deeply about, that could show people the value of how I thought, both artistically and monetarily, and I managed to create the space for myself to just get down and do it. And unlike writing, which was amorphous and made me feel a lot of stress and was difficult to justify, lettering centred me – it made me feel calm, it gave my life structure, and it was of demonstrable value.
But by the time anyone turned around to say, “Good job,” that was no longer meaningful for me, because all it made me feel was resentment – I was always this, why couldn’t you see it?
It was easy to fill my days with my job, which, for once, was tangibly valuable, and ignore everything else. And when the pandemic happened, and the world kind of went to shit, I found additional refuge in work, because not only I, but everyone around me was confused and adrift – and this was specific and quantifiable. And of course, like any addiction, it wrecked me physically and mentally, and I began excluding people, and just kept working, even as I could see the toll it was taking on me.5
Before and after I began my hiatus from work, I worked on this in therapy – why couldn’t I stop when I knew I needed to stop? And again, I’ll talk about the addiction part of this separately, but here’s what it comes down to – if something feels easy and of clear value, while everything else feels difficult and of indeterminate value, it gets more and more convenient to just do that thing to the exclusion of everything else, even those things you genuinely want for yourself. Like your health, or rest.
A lot of people have been talking about how The Bear is a stressful show, but I never found it to be so. For sure, it’s a show that represents a stressful environment, and the fatigue of continual decision-making, but I look at all of that, and Carmy in the middle of it, and I see someone who actually finds this easier than dealing with the rest of his life, the people in it, and the grief he’s desperately avoiding.
- Whose previous work includes Ramy and Eighth Grade, which explains a lot. ↩︎
- I’d go so far as to say that it was most likely a network note rather than a creative decision made by the writing team. ↩︎
- I suppose this is why many people are calling this a “comedy-drama”, which I don’t think it is. ↩︎
- This detail, by the way, of friends (or in this case, a friend of your brother’s) calling each other “cousin” is just one of those delightfully real things about the show. ↩︎
- And of course, social media makes it very easy to exclude people without realising that’s what you’re doing, because you can always fool yourself into believing they’re right there all along. ↩︎
