THE BEAR’S NECESSITIES
The Bear: Season 3 Editor’s note: Mild spoilers for season 3 of The Bear.
A tip creative writing teachers like to dole out is to avoid ending a story with “and then I woke up.” Not just because it’s clumsy and invalidates much of what came before, but also because the logic of dreams is so loopy and private that it’s (usually) only interesting to the dreamer.
It’s also exactly the kind of rule ambitious creators love to break.
The Bear, Christopher Storer’s breakout hit about food — and grief and vocation, perfectionism and mentorship, service and trauma, and ego and guilt and repair — went one further: It opened with a dream.
Back in 2022, the pilot began with a surrealist sequence in which a tormented young chef named Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) approached and freed a caged bear on the State Street Bridge. I thought back then that it was bold (and maybe a little hokey) to establish a collective unconscious for your show before introducing any actual characters. Or plot.
But these writers weren’t coy. They plunged you right into the show’s messy, broken subtext. The third season, which follows the gang as they try to make the fancy new restaurant a going concern, doubles down on that impulse to throw the viewer into the deep end.
Tomorrow, the first episode, picks up in the immediate aftermath of friends and family night at the Bear (the restaurant, not the show). And it’s a formally inventive, thoroughly disorienting fever dream every bit as challenging and avantgarde as the dishes in Carmy’s notebook.
In hindsight, the show’s inaugural dive into dreams and dread two years ago doubled as a mission statement for how the show planned to braid Carmy’s talent and plight — in particular, his penchant for sublimating guilt and trauma into culinary brilliance — into a story about the more general torments (and temptations and thrills) of the restaurant industry.
It also threw down a kind of television gauntlet, more or less announcing the show’s intention to join the likes of semi-trippy classics such as Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks, Bojack Horseman, The Leftovers and The Sopranos.
But this is a show about how the workers at the Original Beef of Chicago, a hearty sandwich joint with no lofty aspirations, grow — within two sweaty, stressful, only semi-plausible seasons — into proud and ambitious cooks gunning for a Michelin star. The pilot and Tomorrow register that dizzying trajectory by using dreamwork in very different ways.
The show’s opening nightmare was about as subtle as an Italian beef sandwich. The titular bear is a big, loud, obvious metaphor. Sure, it stands for Mikey (Jon Bernthal), Carmy’s larger-than-life older brother, whose death by suicide on the bridge forced Carmy to take over the family business. And for Carmy’s panic and regret, which threaten to swallow him whole if he stops repressing for even a second and finally opens up that scary cage. The bear is a figure for the Berzattos’ dysfunction and for the dream he and Mikey shared of opening a place together. Hell and hope bound together.
The bear was always also, of course, the restaurant business: a feral industry
nominally dedicated to leisure and delight that talks a big game about service and celebration while abusing or underpaying its workers, torturing its geniuses, and driving everyone concerned to bankruptcy and despair.
That’s great stuff. A rich set of thorny contradictions, and The Bear excelled at laying them out. It clarified exactly why the staff resented Carmy; why Carmy resented his brother; why his sister, Sugar (Abby Elliott), resented him; and how poor Syd (Ayo Edebiri) — an ambitious but unseasoned chef inspired by Carmy’s talent — had to navigate all of that while figuring out how to lead (and run) a kitchen herself.
The symbolic tensions in Tomorrow (and the third season generally) are blurrier. Less schematic and less visceral.
Formally, Tomorrow, a non-linear montage, reproduces the mania with which
Carmy strives to review and fix all that went wrong during friends and family night (and his whole life). The list of errors he’s beating himself up for is long: It includes getting locked in the walk-in during service, thereby abandoning his staff; accidentally venting about his girlfriend, Claire (Molly Gordon), to Claire; and screaming at Richie (Ebon Moss-bachrach).
But his main error — as Carmy sees it, with endorsements from both Syd and Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) — was chasing a little happiness. Love cost him his focus.
The solutions Carmy comes up with over the course of the night — unilaterally, in his night-long frenzy to redeem himself — aren’t great. (Or are they?) They include rearranging the table layout (overriding Richie), inventing a slew of exciting new dishes we can’t quite make out (overriding Syd) and penning a list of “non-negotiable” principles
we can’t quite read. He has resolved to come up with a new menu every night. They’re going to get a Michelin star.
It’s all a little high-handed. A little avant-garde. A little rarefied and inaccessible (to the startled staff, but also to viewers). Carmy’s old abusive boss in New York (Joel Mchale) emerges as the psychic bêtenoire this season — one he’s in danger of emulating — and that’s a weakness.
Mchale’s character is no Mikey. His character gets no texture, and his narrative significance is somewhat diluted by all the other (real) chefs with whom Carmy studies. Those cameos can sometimes feel more gimmicky than organic to the story. (Hey, that’s Daniel Boulud!)
And none of it illuminates Carmy’s character the way the spectre of his dead brother did.