I Love to Hate The Bear on Hulu

I also hate to love it.  I just finished watching the fourth season of The Bear.  It was better than the third season, but not as good as the first two.

Whether you love the show or hate it, for much of the show, I promise you will despise it.  I felt like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory.  In a scene I’ll never forget, he was debating whether to watch the first episode of The Flash (I believe that’s the show).  He couldn’t decide if he really should watch it because, as an obsessive-compulsive person, if he started it, he knew he’d be self-obligated to watch every episode they ever made, whether the show sucked or not.  That would take years.  I understand that feeling, not because I’m obsessive, but because I know that I will have to know the end of the story.

I enjoyed much of the first two seasons.  Nothing like screaming and yelling in the high-stress business of fine dining.  Add in the food-porn scenes where you get to salivate over what Carmy makes in the kitchen, it’s worth it.  Carmy is perhaps the greatest fictional chef the world has ever beheld.  The Bear restaurant is a little like a Chef Ramsey kitchen with a genius chef trying to whip a gaggle of blue-collar sub builders and spaghetti stirrers into fine-dining chefs.  Of course, he has the help of Syd, the amazing young chef who grew up idolizing Carmy and then is blessed with the chance to work with him, even if it is in the terribly dysfunctional Berzatto-family kitchen.

In the third season, the self-indulgent director apparently had enough with the restaurant’s disfunction and focused on the inner minds of the crazy characters.  It was torture to watch, and though I still can’t remember one scene I didn’t successfully repress (my self-defense mechanism), I couldn’t stop watching.  I hated the director.  As a writer, I’m always studying directors and other writers.  Whether it’s to be inspired by their story-telling abilities and their black-belt style of slinging words together, or whether it’s just to learn from their mistakes. 

In this case, I appreciate this director’s mistakes.  In these sad times for the entertainment industry, most young people can’t write a letter without the help of AI, let alone a script.  Maybe the script is the writers’ way of trying to satisfy an audience that has been inundated with reboots, remakes and copycats.  The Bear is different, and there is no doubt about it.  It might be the only show that can sufficiently entertain half the country while also be used to prolong the punishment of terrorists in black sites after waterboarding no longer does the trick.  Binge watch The Bear, whale dung are the most feared six words in the human language.

In the third season, the director apparently decided he is James Freakin’ Joyce with a camera.  The endless prattle of nonsense almost necessitated a drug-induced euphoria just to appreciate it.  So, I suffered through sobriety but never ended an episode without the desire to drink.

In the fourth season, the director eased up on his or her thesis that working in fine dining is on par with being in a psychedelic rock band whose music is nothing more than a jam-based interpretation of their lives as drug-fueled slaves to their own fame.  The battle for food greatness is always at the mercy of profit margins and the need to keep the money men happy and off their backs.  Needing to pay off the debt and still maintaining profitability only adds tension to the already stressed kitchen.

This whole show is initiated by the suicide of Mikey Berzatto, played in flashbacks by the great Jon Bernthal.  He was amazing as the The Punisher and as Rick Grimes’ buddy on The Walking Dead, who was killed off way too early.  Mikey leaves the restaurant to his brother Carmy.  The well-trained prodigy chef and prodigal son Carmy Berzatto thus comes home and is tasked with turning his low-budget family restaurant into a fine-dining establishment.  The video game machines are removed from the lunchroom, and an expensive wine bar is added.  This transitional part of the story is fascinating.  Especially how Carmy’s vision inspires everyone around him to step up and become better at their jobs and ultimately, even better as people.  Their quest for pride at work leads them to become better people outside of work.  Cousin Richie comes to mind.

However, Carmy isn’t the kind of leader that could make this happen just anywhere.  He’s almost autistic in his focus on food details.  It’s his voracious drive for perfection that inspires those around him.  Not his personality.  He is introverted and haunted by the extreme disfunction of his family life and the resulting death of his beloved brother.  Unable to forgive himself for skipping his brother’s funeral, he can’t even begin to forgive his mother.

She’s played by the crazy Jaime Lee Curtis as a violent alcoholic and a monster when she’s drunk.  She is definitely part of the reason Carmy went away and focused on learning to be a great chef rather than staying home to work in the family restaurant.  Leaving all those he loved was the cost of escaping his unstable mother.  Her shrill voice and unending outbursts make his ability to focus impossible.

Back to the fourth season.  Uncle Jimmy puts a clock on his willingness to continue to let them lease the restaurant if they don’t pay back the debt.  Syd is being pursued by another guy who wants her to be the chef at his restaurant, and Carmy is going through a mid-life crisis that involves potentially making peace with his mother.  But those thoughts fail to form without glimpses of his family horrors from the past.

Instead of focusing on life in the restaurant, the season is a series of long conversations and soul-searching.  Many of the conversations are emotion-driven talk fests bubbling with rage and self-doubt that are barely ever kept at bay.  Enlightening as they are, the watcher is often begging to be shot in the brain.  I wanted to shut it off almost as much as I did in the third season, but I persisted.  Who can take their eyes off a trainwreck? – Not me but suffering through the episodes was just as bad as being stuck in the traffic from where I’d have to watch the bodies get carted away from the crashed train.  Yes, it had me praying for death more than once, and no, this is not a show that can be binge watched without the mercy of a hectic day of life and work in between the episodic harrowing sessions of extreme voluntary suffering.

Nonetheless, it is a show worth watching.  The directors are so stinking full of themselves, they’ve actually declared themselves entitled to demand my attention in a world of their own creation where I am not allowed to say no.  For the mere fact that they are so arrogant, I had no choice but to give it to them.  Like the rock stars who are slaves to their heroin habits, I am a slave to the creators of this show.  Maybe only to find out if their arrogance will prove justified in the end.

On Rotton Tomatoes, the audience still scores it at 76%, while the critics are stuck at 93%.  It’s as if the critics have a gun to their heads.  Sure, they admit the third season was bad, but they rave about this show as if it is the greatest thing on TV ever.  Granted, TV has turned to crap in sympathy with the movie industry, but still.  Since when has over-indulgence become a virtue?  Since when is torturing the audience synonymous with entertaining it?  Watching this show is a self-flogging act of repentance for our collective pretending to enjoy the rest of the garbage coming out of Hollywood at a time in entertainment history when creativity and original thinking are cancelled quicker than it takes the American flag to burn.

Then again, would I recommend it? – Probably.  But not without the warning that it may cause suicidal thoughts, aggressive anxiety, unwanted flop sweat, a desire to eat a bullet, a desire to eat everything in your fridge, vomiting, body shakes and in rare instances, spontaneous combustion.  Perhaps the critics are funded by the same malicious pharmaceutical companies that pay doctors to give everyone happy pills every time they feel sad, anxious, angry or unsatisfied.  Get addicted and become our slave.  Like Sheldon Cooper, I am a prisoner to the never-quite-satisfied hope that something amazing might at some point happen.  That promise has not yet been fulfilled in full, which means I will be forced to suffer another season.  Ugg.

Now, I will admit, the guy who plays Carmy and the girl who plays Syd are amazing.  Their contemplative facial expressions are incredible, especially hers.  Then there’s Carmy’s ability to look like there’s nothing going on in his mind, even though everyone knows there is.  They’re fantastic actors.  Sadly, I can’t wait until this show ends, so these actors can move onto something that isn’t so creative and original.  Yes, irony.

Bottomline, the storytelling is over the top.  Maybe because I don’t live in a big city like Chicago, I’m not as emotionally driven as these folks.  But they’re blue-collar people.  They should therefore be more stable than your average city resident who needs a therapist just to function in life.  In the age of woke, the guardrails of life are tightening every day, enabling psychologists in big cities to bank coin like hedge-fund managers while sanity is slowly but surely being outlawed.  Sure, many of the conversations are the kinds of self-confessionals one might expect to hear in a shrink’s office, but dang.  People in big cities might find these characters more relatable, but for someone like me, who lives in the country outside the guardrails of woke, this is like watching an unnarrated National Geographic Special on wild city folks trapped on the nature preserve of Chicago. 

Watch it at your own sanity’s risk.  But then again, with the way insanity is so easily normalized on this show, this might just be the therapy you need.  If your life isn’t this crazy, maybe you’re doing just fine.