What makes The Bear 🐻 (Not The Dragon 🐉) such an irresistible and beautiful piece of TV?
As the ubiquitous kitchen-wall slogan has it, every second counts in The Bear (Disney+). And every scene matters. Immersed in the messy business of discarding the old and welcoming the new, the two seasons of the brilliant restaurant procedural tell a straightforward story about the complicated business of change. But it’s how creator Christopher Storer and his team go about telling that story that makes it so distinctive.
All it begins, chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) has returned home to Chicago to take over the failing family business, The Original Beef of Chicagoland, a small sandwich shop nestled in the shadows of the River North neighbourhood’s high-rises. He’s there because his charismatic but deeply troubled older brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), took his own life, leaving his family to deal with the consequences.
Mikey appears in several sequences – which are marked as flashbacks only by his presence – but it’s his absence that drives much of what happens outside them. He’s like a ghost haunting the series. Perfectionist Carmy is still measuring his own worth against the big brother he’s lost. Down-to-earth sister Natalie, aka “Sugar” (Abby Elliott), has been keeping her distance from The Beef because of its painful connections to the past. And abrasive cousin Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) continues to work there in front-of-house not only because of his limited options but also out of a sense of duty to Mikey.
It’s a family nightmare with Carmy at the centre of things. His way of dealing with the past is to build a different future. His goal is to turn The Beef into The Bear, named after a moniker given to him in childhood and modelled on the fine-dining restaurants where he’d worked before coming back to Chicago. Showing fatherly interest as well as providing financial support and sage advice is Jimmy (Oliver Platt), who’d been best friend to the Berzatto siblings’ late father.
Inheriting some of the old staff – prickly Latina Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) and taciturn Somalian refugee Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) in the kitchen, as well as Fak and “Sweeps”, a handymen duo (played by real-life chef Matty Matheson and Corey Hendrix) – Carmy also takes on ambitious young African-American chefs Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Marcus (Lionel Boyce). But not everyone approves of his plan.
Richie tells Sydney that “the neighbourhood is held together by a shared history and love and respect”, and that changing The Beef represents a betrayal of that. And one of the key motifs of the series is the intertwining of The Beef’s melting pot and Chicago’s daily life. Every episode offers masterful montages of streets with their hustle and bustle, buildings, storefronts, monuments, the “L” train and its tracks and tunnels, the kitchen staff, and the dishes they’re preparing.
Ebra’s worried about the changes because he doesn’t want the land of promise he’s found in America to become something different. For him, the small things matter, and he doesn’t want to wear the “uniform” that would be required because it reminds him of the war-torn Somalia he’d fled. Like almost everyone else in the series, he is prey to the dark anxieties lurking at the edge of his consciousness.
The Bear brings all of its characters to vibrant life, the tightness of the bond between the culinary dreamers in the kitchen embodied in the way they always respectfully address each other as “chef”, even when they’re at loggerheads. Richie, Fak and Sweeps mightn’t earn that particular acknowledgement, but each in his own way connects to the sense of family that has evolved in the eatery, even if the shared love often looks and sounds more like loathing, especially when Richie is making his presence felt.
However, as it dares to venture into places where few TV series are willing to go, the source of the series’ dramatic urgency is its bold style. Most notably, the hand-held camera moves that take us inside the world of the kitchen do much more than lend the series a decorative immediacy.
When they follow the chefs’ manoeuvring around the kitchen’s tight spaces, the soundtrack constantly punctuated by calls of “corner” and “behind” as the characters alert each other to their whereabouts, it’s as if the camera has joined itself to the chaotic choreography. The results might lack the grace of a polished musical, but the communal flow is a joy to watch, a glorious dance born – like the series itself – of the everyday, prone to the kind of missteps that never happened to Fred and Gene but that are common occurrences for the rest of us.
Then there are the extended takes that allow what’s happening in front of the camera to unfold in a naturalistic way. Monologues that last as long as seven minutes without a cut in which the camera brings us face to face with a character’s humanity. As in the medium close-up of Carmy’s attempt to give voice to his inner life at an Al-Anon meeting early in season two. “I felt I could speak through the food,” he explains regarding the difficulties he has communicating.
Or conversations in which the specific words spoken matter less than the interactions between the characters in the frame. Like the one towards the end of season two in which Carmy and Sydney reassure each other that the future is firmly in place as they go about the business of mending a table.
The strategy is taken further in the stunning episode seven in season one, a series highlight. Accompanied by Sufjan Stevens’ (This Is) Chicago on the soundtrack, it begins with a brief montage of the characters making their way to work.
Then everything that follows is claustrophobically locked inside a single take. As Ebra reads a review of The Beef out loud – “Can the Windy City evolve without losing its true essence?” it asks – the camera darts here and there around the kitchen, trapping us inside the increasing chaos as it peeks past obstacles and closes in on escalating tempers.
By way of contrast are scenes in which the camera lingers on what’s happening in front of it, insisting on an appreciation of the beauty of the moment rather than rushing us on to what happens next. Like Tina’s pleasure at the applause she gets after her rendition of Freddy Fender’s Before the Next Teardrop Falls in a karaoke bar. Or the closing shot of the episode in which Marcus travels to Copenhagen’s lauded Noma to train with a dessert maestro (Will Poulter), and glows with satisfaction as he finally tastes his own successful creation.
Or the scene where Claire (Molly Gordon), who went to school with Carmy, re-enters his life like a breath of fresh air in a chance encounter in a grocery store. Prompting a recall of the incident in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet(1996) where the would-be lovers first glimpse each other through a fish tank, Carmy catches sight of her through a misty refrigerator door. It proves to be not by chance that she’s working as a doctor in the ER department of a Chicago hospital.
There’s also the telling look on Richie’s face after Sydney has calmed a brawl by the front door of The Beef by offering food to the combatants. Possessed by a peculiar American madness, he’d rushed to retrieve a gun from his locker when the fighting began, returning only to discover that she’d wielded a far more powerful weapon.
Her soothing way in the face of the threat also has its roots deep in American cinema, in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), when Henry Fonda’s folksy Abe pacifies a lynch mob in front of an Illinois jail.
The Bear’s embrace of the lives of its characters and its affection for all of them stems from a winning romanticism. But it’s the adventurousness of its storytelling that makes it downright irresistible. To appropriate the vernacular of the show when an experimental dish dazzles, it’s something.
Lifeline 13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au.