Fran Magazine: Issue #69
Kieran Magazine on The Bear S2
Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a twice-weekly pop culture blog by Fran Hoepfner. This week’s issue features a contributing writer (not Fran), but I will return Sunday with the usual dispatch. Subscriptions — free & paid alike — allow me to publish great work by smart friends. Thank you for reading!
A Note from Fran
Once every eighteen months, I am punished for two of my greatest traits — being from “the Chicagoland area” and having worked in food service — by an endless stream of “omg are you watching The Bear?” and “did you see S2 of The Bear yet?” or “would love to know your thoughts on The Bear.” As Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch readers know, I have not yet watched the second season of The Bear; I am still in the weeds with my The Other Two rewatch with Phil and also googling major accredited universities to see who will let me write a dissertation on The Idol. I liked Season One of The Bear. I wrote about Season One of The Bear. That showrunner and creator Christopher Storer is from Park Ridge the way I am “from” Park Ridge along with notable legends like, uh, Harrison Ford and Hillary Clinton will never cease to be funny and fitting. I will get around to the second season of The Bear when it is winter in New York and I am missing the unforgiving winters of Chicago.
For the time being, however, I’m lucky to have an essay by friend and critic Kieran McLean whose work I’ve followed with curiosity and excitement for some time. I hope you enjoy his thoughts as much as I do!
The Unbearable Sincerity of The Bear
In The Bear’s first season finale, head chef Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) almost burns down his restaurant. He lights a cigarette on his brazier, watches it go up in flames, and stands entranced as he imagines fire freeing him from the kitchen that’s ruining his life. His employees Gary (Corey Hendrix) and Tina (Liza Colón-Zias) quickly step in to put it out and his restaurant manager Richie (Eben Bacharach-Moss) perturbedly asks him, “Dude, you alright?” Carmy absently responds, “Yeah,” then sits on a bench and contemplates giving up.
Carmy’s willingness to let his restaurant, The Beef, burn down perfectly captured how restaurant work can break you down so thoroughly you sometimes pray to be released from it. Critics praised The Bear’s depictions of “the harsh realities of restaurant culture” and writer-chef Genevieve Yam described the show’s verisimilitude as being “so accurate that it was triggering.” And realistically, The Beef’s underwater finances would’ve released Carmy if the fire didn’t. Its building would’ve become condos and its chefs would’ve moved on to other restaurants. But American TV has to feed American optimism. So instead Carmy finds hundreds of thousands of dollars from his dead brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) in tomato tins in the first season finale’s last few minutes. The episode ends with golden light bathing The Beef’s employees’ faces during a family-style dinner and a flashback to Carmy looking at Mikey like he’s a guardian angel.
The Bear splits into two shows when this deus ex machina occurs. The first is a finely-tuned kitchen drama that shines in its attention to detail. The Bear creator Christopher Storer hired chefs Courtney Storer (also his sister) and Matty Matheson to “correct [lead actor Jeremy Allen White],” and “call cut if one of his gestures felt forced, out of place or inauthentic.” This resulted in details like Carmy drinking out of quart containers behind the restaurant, falling asleep in front of his stove after work, and having the restaurant slip like a knife into his dreams. Season one’s penultimate episode “The Review,” in which the kitchen gets overloaded and service derails in a spectacular trainwreck, was a masterpiece of disaster. When The Bear lets its story emerge through restaurant realities like online orders overwhelming staff or damaged condensers derailing business finances, it’s as good a kitchen drama as Mad Men was an advertising agency one.
The second show within The Bear is a schmaltzy family drama that bears more resemblance to “This Is Us” than “Kitchen Confidential.” It features tedious speeches, melodramatic declarations, and sentimental music cues that tell us exactly how we’re supposed to feel. Storer reintroduces his characters in the second season premiere to the jangly 1988 piano song “The Show Goes On” by Bruce Hornsby & The Range like they’re old friends. Then the monologues start. “Do you ever think about... purpose?” Richie asks Carmy plaintively in the season two premiere. Carmen’s sister Natalie (Abby Elliott) monologues about how she’s only working at the restaurant to “try to force everything to stay the same'' because she’s pregnant in the second episode. Carmy divulges his need to “remind [himself]... that there is no other shoe, which is incredibly difficult because there is always another shoe” at a group therapy session in the third. These moments are painfully expository. Whereas sous-chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) revealed her character in The Bear’s first season by bearing Richie’s bigotry til she stabbed him, characters now declare their feelings rather than behave them. Storer renders subtext text so clearly I felt like I was reading his character notes.
Storer seems to suggest his depiction of kitchen work is compatible with a feel-good family drama because people can self-actualize in kitchens like they can in families. But in reality, restaurants are businesses with commercial imperatives. Even if Carmy was his cooks’ friend he’d still be the man taking home the surplus value of their labor. The Bear’s vision in which Carmy empowers each staff member to be the best that they can be is as fictional as capitalism’s promise of endless growth. Storer elegantly displays kitchens’ technical reality while eliding their corporate one: for the boss to win, at least some, if not all, of the employees have to lose. This dissonance makes for an unreal, American, and at times unnervingly Christian second season.
The Bear’s evangelical turn is best exemplified in Richie’s redemption arc over season two. In the second season premiere, Richie speechifies to Carmy about whether or not he has purpose as The Beef transitions to fine dining establishment The Bear. He stands over Polaroids of himself and the Berzattos as children and tearfully tells Carmy his fear he’s not good at anything. “I’m afraid one day I’m gonna wake up and you guys are just gonna drop this ass,” he says. Carmy reassures Richie he won’t drop him, but the question lingers: what does Richie have to offer a nice restaurant?
The second season’s first five episodes reveal: not much. Richie bungles cleaning and repairs, tries to steal power from The Bear’s neighbors, and picks fights with Natalie, now The Bear’s project manager. He seems fated to disappear with The Beef’s moldy drywall and burnt pans. But then redemption strikes. In the second season’s seventh episode, titled “Forks,” Carmy sends Richie to a restaurant run like a cult, and Richie becomes a different person over the course of a week. His 30-year-old boss Garrett (Andrew Lopez) makes him shine forks like he’s undergoing military hazing, asks him to “cool it on the swearing,” and tells Richie “he loves [the restaurant] so much” before recounting its history like a patriot would their nation-state’s. “Do you see [the customers’] faces when they walk in here? How stoked they are to see us and how stoked we have to be to serve them?” he asks Richie in a voice so earnest it made me physically cringe. Garrett worships his restaurant with a convert’s dogma and lets it abuse him accordingly. During a staff meeting, the restaurant’s maître d' patronizingly tells them, “We’re not children, it’s okay to make mistakes,” before excoriating staff for smudging a plate. A chef later steps out and yells at them for the smudge having cost the kitchen 47 seconds, shouting, “If you cost us that kind of time, you sure as shit better own up to it, because we sure as shit are going to pay for it” He then yells “Fuck you, Garrett!” and “Get back to work!” to which Garrett impassively responds “Yes, chef” before following orders.
I kept waiting for the shoe to drop in “Forks”: for Richie to learn how the restaurant broke someone, or for a staff member to cope with its abuse with drug use, or for its waiters to at least hyper-realistically talk shit about that chef over cigarettes in the alley. But that never happens. Each staff member Richie interacts with seems to find unbelievable, life-fulfilling purpose in their work there. I was uneasily reminded of Shein influencers’ recent trip to a fake fast fashion factory where bosses expelled all dark realities to the shadows. If Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022) showcased the absurd comedy of dictatorial kitchens, “Forks” felt like an advertisement for them. At the end of Richie’s training period, Garrett tells him he used to be an alcoholic a few years prior and the restaurant gives him purpose by letting him perform “acts of service.” It clicked for me then that Storer treats Richie’s fragile euphoria at his potential for transformation as a sustainable way of life rather than an altered state which would eventually end. In real life, Richie and Garrett would inevitably have to reconcile their dogmatic faith in work with the doubt that restaurants’ toil would inject it with. But in Storer’s brochure-worthy kitchens, every day provides another opportunity to reaffirm your faith. You can make a high school teacher’s year by giving them a free meal, honor your chef by delivering food to the scheduled millisecond, and find God in a perfectly-cleaned fork.
Richie adopts this restaurant’s creed of work-as-life like an apostle and carries it back with him to The Bear. In the following episode, he reveals he “only wears suits now,” and apologizes to Natalie with stunning self-awareness. “I think for a long time I didn’t really know where I fit, and I would shove myself into places and things where I definitely did not fit... I’m sorry if I took anything out on you and if I treated you like shit,” he tells her. He later angrily tells the restaurant handyman, Fak, not to say “Jewish lightning”–a phrase Richie himself was saying only a few weeks prior–and unreasonably rejects a waitressing candidate as being unhireable because she didn’t pass his secret test of turning a napkin during her job interview. Rather than show how Richie’s secret tests and newfound impossibly exacting standards would likely cause his employees to quit on him and the front of house to combust, Storer treats Richie’s transformation as evidence of professional integrity, excellence, and devotion. He earns Natalie’s admiration with the napkin test and steps up to conduct the kitchen’s expo station with symphonic grace in the second season finale. Storer portrays him as a man redeemed through work the same way Christians hope to be redeemed through prayer.
In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace predicted writers would turn to sincerity in response to television absorbing the ironic critique of it in the 80s. “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’... who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction,” Foster Wallace wrote. Christian Lorentzen wrote in the Fall 2019 issue of The Sewanee Review that “[Foster Wallce’s] sincere turn did arrive, though not exactly as [he] predicted. [Writers] didn’t do away with cynicism so much as set it up as an ogre to be defeated... if sincerity had to be buttressed by surrealism, superheroes, ahistorical improvisations, and artificial innocence, how sincere was it really?” Lorentzen asked.
The Bear’s second season’s sincerity relies on this ahistorical improvisation and artificial innocence. It features abusive restaurants that don’t break their staff, hot lines where drug use is ancillary rather than interwoven with production, and kitchens that transform every employee’s life for the better rather than breaking down their bodies with brutal and persistent logic. The Bear’s shift to treating restaurants as redemptive sites of self-actualization renders its workplaces distinctly unreal. They’re Potemkin kitchens whose gloss disguises the chthonic muck that made up the first season’s fecund narrative ground. Storer’s restaurants practically baptize their employees to ascribe meaning to their suffering. Tina’s rewarded for her years of service by being promoted to sous-chef and line cook Ebra’s (Edwin Lee Gibson) perfectly placed in the drive-through window after he flunks out of culinary school. Everyone has a place in his kitchen family. This puts The Bear at odds with how commercial kitchens actually work. Real ones are often tightly-run assembly lines where low performers are discarded as casually as broken parts. The finest ones often create great food at their employees’ physical and psychological expense.
Top chefs are artists like painters, sculptors, and architects. They need patrons, time, and resources to practice their craft. Much like the Renaissance artists who sought Medici patronage, the best chefs have to find someone willing to invest in them to make their dreams into realities. Onsite gardens and sous-chefs devoted solely to fermentation aren’t cheap. In return for tolerating or enabling kitchens’ dirty money, labor abuse, and cultures of sexual harassment, these chefs get the materials they need to strive for culinary greatness like Michelangelo got his marble to sculpt David. Michelin-starred restaurants lend themselves well to pursuit of excellence but they’re rarely warm or empowering places.
The Bear’s second season felt fictional because Storer tried to have his cake and eat it too. He created two restaurants, The Bear and Richie’s unnamed Michelin-starred training ground that turned out world-class food while also bettering all their employees’ lives. It made for a jarring dissonance that frequently pulled me out of the show. The only moments when that dissonance abated were when I watched the cooks actually cook: when Marcus (Lionel Boyce) plated a dessert with tweezers like a surgeon or when Sydney cracked potato chips over an omelette. Storer captures a deeper truth about creative work when he depicts its processes instead of declaiming its purpose. Restaurant work isn’t inherently more redemptive than ditch digging or data entry. As with any creative pursuit, it’s ultimately what you make that matters.
Kieran McLean is a critic living in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), New Zealand. He can be found on Twitter and Substack and can be reached by email at kieranmclean95@gmail.com.
Very well said. I really enjoyed this show but I cannot stand how contrived some of the beats feel and I totally agree, the saccharine dialogue does not gel at all with the gritty/realness it was seemingly pitched with.
This is such a thoughtful essay, I sat on a plane yesterday and read the dining magazine section in it's entirety and this is what was missing!