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‘The Bear’ unravels a dark blend of comedy and crisis

October 28, 2024
FX’s award-winning series walks a tightrope between humour and intense emotional trauma, presenting a raw depiction of mental health in the culinary world

[This story contains spoilers for all three seasons of The Bear]

At awards time, FX television’s “The Bear” finds itself slotted into the comedy category, but that begs the question: how do we watch the series, which slices and dices events inside a professional restaurant kitchen, as a comedy? The answer is that it’s not easy.

Granted, there are funny moments in each episode of a show that offer a convincing – but frequently disturbing – view of a restaurant kitchen: “The Original Beef of Chicagoland.” Superficially, just looking at Matty Matheson as Neil Fak makes me laugh, but at the same time the chaos and tension in the kitchen, which ramps up in each season – are much deeper, and they stirred up memories of the anxiety that I felt many years ago when I was a novice cook in a restaurant kitchen for a few years.

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I don’t know if that contrast was in showrunner Christopher Storer’s design or not, but it is one of The Bear’s greatest qualities: it injects a touch of humour into the very serious subject matter of mental health as it presents the traumatic and painful stories of protagonist Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, his family and staff as he takes over the Beef.

More than the physically demanding work of cooking, I found the kitchen emotionally draining. Let me first say that the Kitchener restaurant I worked at was certainly not a toxic workplace: it was the exact opposite in that I was a rookie cook who was treated in a collegial, instructive way by my colleagues – friends really – while learning to work on the line. But, boy, did I find it stressful.

The Bear

According to Andrew Coppolino: ‘Watching The Bear is emotionally exhausting.’

We didn’t have to cut the green masking tape with scissors to label a one-litre of chopped onions as Carmy demands, but while watching his kitchen struggle to learn to cook in a new rigid brigade system, I recalled the stress I felt as a green garde manger. That anxiety, however, was entirely my own doing. I had no nightmares about work and no trouble breathing, as we witness with Carmy. I never had a chef berating me – “Why are you so fucking slow?” – and breathing down my neck like chef David Fields (Joel McHale) hectors Carmy: the verbal abuse is indelibly seared into Carmy’s psyche and follows him throughout the series. It follows us too: the intensity is such that we feel it as we watch. It’s one (unfortunate) reason why many people call The Bear one of the best, if not the best, fictional representations of the restaurant kitchen.

But nothing is humorous about those stressful images. Watching The Bear is emotionally exhausting. It’s like a psychodrama. I remember how anxious I was when it was time to go to work in the morning, after burning my hand or having a shitty service at my station the night before. In the penultimate episode of the first season, when Carmy angrily takes over expo – “We’re firing 76 beefs and 34 chickens…!” and Marcus is fussing over his donuts instead of helping – I feel the stress, but there’s nothing funny about feeling overwhelmed. When our restaurant was looking like it was going to be really busy (by “really” I mean only 75 to 80 people), I felt mild panic. I’d drop my mise work and check the reservations book for numbers to try to prepare myself.

I came to dread the sound of the phone because it might mean another four-top; the cranking grind of dupes being printed – it stresses Sydney in season three – caused me angst during service, and my heart would sink if, at 8:45 p.m., a table of six walk-ins came through the door. Did I have enough mise? Could I handle the late parade of dishes to cook when I was already exhausted?

The Bear

Matty Matheson is a Canadian chef, restaurateur, and now actor and producer. He portrays the handyman Neil Fak on The Bear.

The relief in The Bear is not always comic, however. In season two, Marcus heads to Copenhagen for a stagiaire where Carmy had done the same thing, returning not only a better pastry chef but having gained a better understanding of himself. I frankly struggled with pastry: I recall an especially labour-intensive lemon-curd tart with a pâte sablée for which we washed two dozen or so lemons and then scraped their zests with sugar cubes to infuse flavour. That was my station, but unlike Marcus I never reached a comfort level where I didn’t feel anxiety each time I had to bake another one – agonizing over getting the curd’s consistency perfect. Marcus’s trajectory and evolution over the course of the series – including absorbing his mother’s death – is to me absolutely wonderful and represents one of the show’s brightest, most affirming, plot lines. It’s not humorous, but it is very human.

The final episode in season two – the family holiday, “Festa dei Sette Pesci,” at Donna’s house – is a tense climax of chaos, anguish, turmoil, anger and overwhelming trauma. It ends as close as anything to tragedy when the tormented Donna drunkenly crashes her car into the interior of the house (the calm counterpoint episode to this will be “Ice Chips” when she’s bedside during Sugar’s labour at the hospital). For all viewers, I’m sure, the holiday episode is exhausting, emotionally draining and nearly unwatchable, though it is a truly remarkable representation of the anguish and harm of familial mental illness. If this is comedy, it is very, very dark indeed.

All viewers, even if they haven’t worked in a kitchen, can feel the stress, the quivering anxiety and the simmering rage.

I detect a sort of manic rhythm to The Bear, even in its music as it mirrors mood: it alternates between soothing and pastoral to electronic and pulsating – like the blood thumping in your head when you’re anxious about dinner service. In flashbacks in season three, I was captivated watching as Carmy learns – peacefully – from Boulud and Keller while doing stages in their kitchens: you realize that Jeremy Allen White is acting, terrifically, but two of the planet’s greatest cooks are really just being themselves, granted in front of the camera. The scene is a counterpoint to the brutal verbal attacks by Fields which crushes Carmy’s mental health, the abuse resonating and throbbing as he returns home to his family’s down-at-heels sandwich joint struggling with his personal demons after the horrific treatment – all of which reaches its climax with nothing less than the suicide of his brother Michael. Again, there’s no comedy here.

The Bear

L-Boy (Lionel Boyce) and Jeremy Allen White of The Bear.

Fittingly, I’m finishing writing these observations about The Bear on United Nation’s “World Mental Health Day.” The humour in the show’s first season withers during the subsequent seasons with mental health and psychic trauma wrenched to the forefront. The darkness, though, isn’t relentless: humorous moments do soothe and release tension, but they succeed really in only putting the anxiety and psychic pain back into stark relief.

This isn’t new in art: 400 hundred years ago, Shakespeare understood mental health issues as “madness.” As a playwright, he recognized the importance of pacing and cadence that a story requires and artfully dropped strategic set pieces of comic relief into the worst moments of human tragedy that were unfolding on stage: the humorous grave-digger scene follows Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet, the nameless but prescient fool teases Lear as his madness grows, and the drunken porter scene of MacBeth craftily intersects the brutality of Duncan’s murder and its subsequent discovery.

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Similarly, in The Bear, the Fak brothers’ rapid badinage and stichomythic back-and-forth quibbling provides welcome comic relief. When Tina struggles with understanding Carmy’s orders and commands – and to address everyone as “Chef” – as the Beef evolves to fine dining, she responds with a disrespectful, but humorous, “Yes, Jeff!” And yet, by season three, the quip has been embraced and becomes a refrain that points to camaraderie and kitchen solidarity.

The Bear startled me and provoked me to recollections of my kitchen experience. The “comedy” of the series is a small part of what is an authentic though fictional representation and painful exploration of mental health issues in the culinary industry. Everyone can see that. I clearly wasn’t cut out for cooking and abandoned it as a career, but the characters on The Bear are surviving. In the season three finale, there is a poignant moment as a tear runs down Carmy’s cheek during his face-to-face encounter when he pursues Fields, the brutal “mentor” who now self-righteously claims responsibility for Carmy’s success. That is brutal too.

The Bear

Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri have both won Emmy Awards for their performances.

Part of the show’s brilliance is in that encounter: all viewers, even if they haven’t worked in a kitchen, can feel the stress, the quivering anxiety and the simmering rage that Carmy feels. There’s a moment when I thought he was going to punch Fields, but he doesn’t. Had he clenched that fist, I feel, it would represent the moment when Carmy stooped beneath even his awful mentor’s hateful verbal attacks and plunged uncontrollably into raw, animalistic and physical violence – like a raging bear. I could sense Fields was just waiting for the fist that would justify his cowardly bullying.

I don’t know if there is any redemption for Carmy in that moment because I don’t know if there will be a season four and how Carmy might evolve: will he remain the driven, raging chef of the cut green masking tape, or the calmer, nurturing chef like Keller and Boulud? Has the moment with Fields in the hallway at the Ever “funeral dinner” been cathartic, or will the realization that he’s wasted much of his life following Fields’ traumatic path continue to haunt him?

The Bear as a series has been slotted into the comedy-drama category, perhaps merely for award purposes, sure, but when you recognize what mental health is, and see it so painfully at work and so raw in a restaurant kitchen, I doubt anyone laughs. Maybe, maybe just an uneasy giggle.

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