Pop Stuff: The Taste Test for ‘The Bear’ Goes Through ‘Middlemarch’

Season Three of The Bear, the television show that gained legions of admirers in its first season and a record number of Emmy nominations and wins (comedy series) for its second, had people all hot and bothered.
Reviewers, knotted up that the critical darling had taken a detour, called it “unbelievably frustrating,” “underwhelming” and “a mess.” Suggesting that the restaurant-centric show didn’t know what it wanted to be, one critic went with “omnivorous.” Fans were less kind. Yet the audience seems riveted enough to be relieved that Season Four is in the works and some reviewers have noted that it continues to be some of the best television ever made. As part of that latter group, I feel compelled to preach The Bear gospel to anyone interested in watching the boundaries of storytelling be tested, as shows from The Sopranos to The Wire to Fleabag have done. And my recurring thought after I hungrily consumed Season Three – a modernist, chaotic entrée served up by a fictional Chicago restaurant and its achingly true to life characters – is Middlemarch; George Eliot’s masterpiece of Victorian realism, frequently cited as one of the best novels ever written.

For those that aren’t caught up, The Bear, created by Christopher Storer, whose sister Courtney Storer is a professional chef and culinary producer on the show, follows Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White – now on billboards everywhere) as an award-winning New York chef who returns to his hometown of Chicago and attempts to transform his late brother Mikey’s failing sandwich shop, The Beef, into a Michelin star-worthy culinary miracle. Season One is a rollercoaster introduction to Carmy’s inherited The Beef family in the aftermath of what we learn was Mikey’s suicide. In attempting a facelift for the restaurant, Carmy encounters stiff resistance from the staff, not least Mikey’s erstwhile best friend and former business partner Richie (a superbly nervy Ebon Moss Bachrach). The stakes are magnified when Carmy learns Mikey was $300,000 in the hole to family friend and father figure Jimmy ‘Cicero’ Kalinowski aka Unc.

Carmy brings on Culinary Institute of America-trained chef, Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri in what would be a scene-stealing role if everyone wasn’t so damn good), as sous-chef to help reinvent the sandwich shop. Syd and Carmy’s deepening push-pull friendship and intensely calibrated working dynamic become a central tension of the show. Syd’s centeredness and quiet self-belief jostle up against the demons Carmy has amassed from a lifetime of dysfunctional family dynamics, the largely unsupported pursuit of his dreams in the face of them, and an adulthood crushed under a demanding industry and an abusive former executive chef in New York (Joel McHale as an icy David Fields).

The supporting characters introduced in Season One at The Beef blossom as it turns into The Bear in Season Two. Marcus Brooks (gentle giant Lionel Boyce) goes from baker to pastry chef under Carmy’s mentorship. Tina Marrero (Liza Colon-Zayas) grows from acerbic line-cook to potential sous-chef material, taking pleasure in crafting her own dishes. Carmy’s put-upon sister, Natalie ‘Sugar’ Berzatto (Abby Eliott), swaps the mantle of part-time accountant for reluctant co-owner. All the while, the Fak brothers (Neil – Matty Matheson, Teddy – Ricky Staffieri, and later Sammy – John Cena) keep the pipes unclogged, tables set, floors shined and provide much-needed comic relief from the high wire tension of the show.

Seasons One and Two make for prime appointment viewing, sustained by the how of the restaurant’s transformation and survival, and the propulsive character arcs underpinning it. As if that isn’t drama enough, prodigal son Carmy rekindles an old crush (Molly Gordon as E.R. doctor Claire Dunlap) with all the zeal and care of an arsonist. All this unfurls against a canvas of gorgeously plated dishes with sonic attention to every sizzle and footage spliced to evoke the frantic rhythms of a restaurant kitchen that would pass the Anthony Bourdain seal of authenticity. The second season ends in a nail-biter. It is opening night at The Bear and a line cook disappears, forks run out, Natalie’s pregnancy is mistakenly revealed to her overbearing mother Donna (a career-crowning Jamie Lee Curtis), Marcus misses several calls from his mother’s caretaker, and Carmy inadvertently locks himself in the fridge and wrecks his budding romance with Claire while trapped there. It would risk being a sloppy comedy of errors if the acting, writing and camera work were not deft enough to turn even absent forks into a point of absolute high drama.

Then, in Season Three, nothing much happens or, as many have bemoaned, it is a season of ‘all questions and no answers’, leaving some viewers cursing the show with that epithet equally tragic for television as for a meal; unsatisfying.

What does any of this have to do with George Eliot in particular, or the Victorian novel in general? Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, the penultimate novel of Mary Ann Evans, who used the pen name George Eliot at a time when women writers struggled to be taken seriously, was published in eight installments between 1871 and 1872. It was serialized entertainment before television. Set in the fictional namesake town, Middlemarch takes a deep dive into English Midlands society, exposing every detail, and in doing so, covers issues of the time; marriage, political reform, morality, religion and ‘the woman question’ as it was called, before parity was a thing. A quarter of the way into Middlemarch’s 900-odd pages, the reader has scant idea where it is going but knows the inner workings of its characters and is so intimate with the world as to give Star Wars a complex. Eliot is so deliberate on points of character, interiority, unhurried structure and complex world-building that the first major outward event – protagonist Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to the older Reverend Casaubon, occurs only several chapters in. The couple promptly disappears from the book’s pages while we take an even lengthier sojourn getting to know the townsfolk. Returning to the Casaubons only in the midst of their honeymoon, we learn there might be a crack in the marriage.

Entire novels have begun and ended in as much space and even so, at this point, we have only an inkling of the central conflict(s) of Middlemarch, or where its plot might be headed. The pages sing because of Eliot’s finely drawn characters and her collapsing of the psychic distance between them and the reader. Almost two centuries later, I’m reeled in because the novel reflects its characters’ machinations and inner turmoil so artfully that I’m right there with them. Character draws us in, less so the plotting and beats that receive outsize emphasis especially in film and television. Yet even in plot-heavy narratives it’s the Tony Sopranos, Tom Ripleys and Amy Dunnes who remain unforgettable.

As if it were pulling a page from Eliot, Season Three of The Bear makes building character a major concern. The opening credits inform us we are embarking on ‘part’ and not ‘season’ three, as in the third act of a larger whole that seeks to complicate the psyche, not a season that completes itself. The Bear’s Season Three plot, such as it is, rests largely on the fact that the restaurant must survive the odds; a budget shortfall, an all-important upcoming Tribune review and various stressors triggered by Carmy’s stringent list of non-negotiables including, as with many starred restaurants, a daily-changing menu. At the end of Season Three, we are no closer to resolving these questions, but what we do know the shape of, is the people who will drive the answers.

Carmy and Syd face their most mammoth challenges in Season Three. Carmy must appease critics, cheque books and institutions without resorting to abuse rampant in an industry with punishing deadlines and exacting standards. This means breaking cycles of abuse and control that have tormented him in the kitchen and at home. Syd must square off her own ambition as she confronts partnering with someone who has not learned how to partner. Carmy settles on his non-negotiables without consulting Syd, he readily expects her to put out emotional fires between front and back of house, and he repeatedly changes the menu without her input. Even bringing Syd on as co-owner is something he tells her is happening; it’s not a negotiation or an offer, but a foregone conclusion. Unsurprisingly, Syd stalls on signing the partnership agreement well before the departing chef de cuisine at Ever (a three-star Chicago restaurant where Carmy once trained and which is now closing) offers her carte blanche at his new venture.

The roadblocks to these tests of character are psychic, rather than external. Will Carmy recognize his toxicity in the workplace? Will Syd place loyalty to someone who buttressed her over career advancement in a new place that values her on her own terms? The internal landscape over which such struggles play out, the dragon fight in the cave of the mind, is a terrain George Eliot knew and mastered. It is the landscape of thought battling thought that the novel, the blank page where thoughts can be written, is fashioned to address. The Bear makes a go of it on screen. Instead of resorting to piling on obstacles that might ring false, the show takes risks to display interiority. Season Three’s first episode is a montage of largely dialogue-free clips of the trauma-laced memories that Carmy is a prisoner to. In a much later episode we see Syd, the epitome of composure in the kitchen, reign fury on carboard boxes in a waste container. It is one of many snippets that elucidate her mounting unspoken frustration. The Bear is content to sacrifice conventional tools of plot and dialogue to make us proximate to the interior lives of its characters.

In exposing the thoughts, not just the actions, of several characters, The Bear transcends the point of view of fly-on-the-wall observer most frequently signified by the camera. The Bear’s chosen POV is akin to the omniscient narrator so common in Eliot’s time and so out of favor in contemporary storytelling. This is an all-knowing storyteller that not only jumps from kitchen to Syd’s new apartment, to Richie putting his daughter to bed, to Marcus clearing out his mother’s apartment, but one that has deep insight into the memories that plague Carmy as he plates food, as well as the reluctance Syd feels over signing a contract as she stares at her computer screen. This intelligence feels the barely perceptible lifting of Marcus’ grief as he notices spring buds peek out of urban hedgerows and sees Natalie’s nightmare memories of her mother’s rage whilst she faces down pregnancy-induced insomnia. This is not mere flashback or amplification, it is a conscious and consistent point of view that centers interiority across character as only omniscience can. 

As with Middlemarch, where each of a large cast of characters is finely wrought despite the centrality of Dorothea (and subsequently Tertius Lydgate, the newcomer doctor to the town), The Bear doesn’t ask its cast to merely play second fiddle to Carmy (or Syd). The show takes its supporting characters more seriously than I have seen in most of contemporary television. Each of their problems feels specific to their particular situations, each has a nuanced backstory, and each line of dialogue could belong only to the person speaking it. Take Richie, a tightly wound child trapped in an adult’s body who excels when he can be in charge of a high-pressure domain and is free to exercise his charm – as when he manages the front of house. We see how the qualities that he brings to his new role are rooted in the traits that caused his marriage to crater. The show makes room for moments with his daughter and ex-wife that display character growth. These moments might not impel the plot with hyper focus on a now cardinal rule of story – narrative progression – but they build a more satisfying whole. They make us believe.

Each person on the show is built with the same uncanny attention to detail. Even the Fak brothers’ comic sparring is rooted in backstory that The Bear’s writers’ room has considered exhaustively. When Neil Fak tells his brother Teddy that he might not make the cut of his top ten best friends because of that one time Teddy trapped him in a carboard box when he was six years old, we buy into this moment beyond the laugh. We are catapulted into their childhoods and imagine that there are things beyond the surface levity that the show will reveal in time.

Another Eliot-esque move that The Bear wonderfully realizes is the sideways spiral into a single character or event. It has become almost mandatory for prestige television to have an episode that sits apart by going deep into a less explored subject. Atlanta made this a hallmark over seasons. Breaking Bad spun out a separate storyline into another hit show, Better Call Saul. This staging is more than a flex in The Bear, which uses it, as Eliot does, to make time increasingly elastic. The effect, particularly in Season Three, is one of building depth and perspective to a painting rather than adding a lush but distinct footnote to a text. Episodes that individually center Tina then Natalie, “Napkins”(Ayo Edebiri’s lauded directorial debut) and “Ice Chips” respectively, manipulate time and structure to kaleidoscopic effect.

Middlemarch’s facility for building depth, by expanding narrative structure and time,is something we first notice in a masterstroke with Tertius Lydgate. The doctor is new to town and exists for many chapters amid unfurling events only as perceived by others, until Eliot telescopes us out and away. We are well into the novel when her omniscient narrator begins a new chapter by drawing us into Lydgate’s history; giving a hint of what has brought him here, stressing his hopes as a newcomer and the importance of the blank slate the town offers him. We see this repeated with less central characters as Eliot intentionally slows and complicates the narrative by whirling out into sub-stories that build the larger whole; the town as character itself.  

The Bear’s sub-strands of story across time ‘construct’ the restaurant too. For two-and-a-half seasons we only seen the line cook Tina from the point of Carmy’s return. “Napkins”(episode six of Season Three) time machines us many years earlier, to the weeks before she was hired at The Beef. Tina’s world shatters when she is laid off from an administrative job that she held for most of her career. Her doorman husband is waiting on a promotion he is not going to get, her landlord has just hiked her rent and the couple can’t afford to uproot their recalcitrant son, who they warmly agree is “an asshole.” We journey with Tina across a job market where showing up with a paper resume is a death knell. Gentrification and modernization collide in “Napkins” and even after Tina has caught up on gen-Z lingo and LinkedIn software, opportunities make themselves scarce. In the midst of a rough day, Tina stops to refuel at The Beef and Richie, behind the counter in his older, brasher incarnation, hands her a sandwich on the house. As she unwraps it between frustrated tears, Mikey, the proprietor (a world-weary Jon Bernthal), notices her in the cafe. The episode expands the entire show by showing the high stakes of working-class lives that support a restaurant, the urban landscape of Chicago and, crucially, Mikey, the brother whose loss will return Carmy to Chicago. In the shared vulnerable moment when Mikey offers Tina a job, we see the entire world of The Bear from the outside and get behind the lever on which it rests – Mikey’s death.

Just as “Napkins” expands time and space giving us breadth of experience, “Ice Chips” compresses it, giving us depth of psyche. It is a depth that serves a meaningful counterpoint to Richie’s struggle with being a part-time parent by having us behold Natalie on the cusp being a new one. Most of “Ice Chips” unfurls over the tight space between contractions in a hospital room. Natalie, against all fibers of her being, has called her mother after labour pains come on early and she tries in vain to reach anyone else. It is a universal pain point that we can feel the most or least safe, sometimes both at the same time, with our mothers; a struggle for boundaries borne from the fact of once living inside them. Natalie desperately wants to cordon her pregnancy from her mother’s explosiveness, but life won’t be so neat. The moment of truth here is not so much Natalie’s recognition that in this moment her mother may indeed know some things best and that she must hand her a win, but that she learns that Donna is not oblivious of her own toxicity. It’s heartbreaking. This moment, as with the moment in Middlemarch where Dorothea, on honeymoon, realizes that the marriage which she carefully entered into so it might expand her, is actually crushing her, is so deeply felt as to root the entire fiction. It is a magnifying that substantiates the whole.

Realist worldbuilding, the architecture of that whole, is one more facet of 19th century English literature that Middlemarch does too well by modern standards, where setting is so often required to cede place to immediacy. Today, Eliot’s astounding pages detailing dynamics of intersecting power around the town’s mayoralty might land in the slush pile or on the cutting room floor. But The Bear shows how reveling in exposing the world persists in enriching story.

“Next,” the second episode of Season Three, centers on a morning in the life of the restaurant. As businesses across the city open their doors, Carmy is already involved in the microtask of tweezing peas in a pod – a great visual metaphor – as his employees roll in. The ensuing bedlam as budgets are argued over, menus debated and flamed-out tube lights replaced, signifies order in the chaos that makes the place run. The semi-colon at the end of this episode when Marcus tells Carmy to go for the star, “Take us there, Bear,” is contrastingly quiet in its intimacy and loaded in the permission it gives Carmy to press forward with his “non-negotiables” despite the group’s push back. It is a singular point of plot in an episode brimming with setting. The following episode, “Doors,” is the opera to the overture of “Next.” Set to selections of classical music, punctuated by the restaurant’s opening call ‘Doors!’ are flashes of tempestuous and harmonious days; a setting masterclass. As we experience highs and lows of daily drama at The Bear, tension is amplified and stakes enhanced, without twists and turns of plot.

The “Doors” pre-opening credits sequence, which shows the restaurant staff filing into church to attend Marcus’ mother’s funeral service, beautifully foreshadows the last episode of Season Three. “Forever” is set around the last meal the restaurant Ever will serve before it closes – the ‘funeral dinner.’ The closing episode affords another look into the world, expanding on the inner scope of The Bear with insight into the industry around it. Dialogue does the work here as we peek into restaurateurs’ shorthand for talking cuisine. Is there a more perfect moment than, “So, the truffle explosion, now is that injected or is that set,” to typify the seriousness and lightness with which the show approaches itself and the viewer?

There is, and it comes later in the same episode when we witness the stakes of a restaurant’s opening or closing from the chef’s side of the table. David Fields, Carmy’s abusive former employer has flown in from New York for the Ever dinner. It is Carmy’s chance to reckon with him. In their barbs – “I think about you to too much,” says Carmy, “I don’t think about you,” replies David – lies the final release Carmy needs to go all in with his dream. David’s ruthlessness is a trigger in all senses, “Un-clutch your pearls, dude…You were an okay chef when you started with me and you left an excellent chef, so you’re welcome.” The devastating exchange is softened by a gentler one, notably outside Ever, in the relative calm of the city, with its founder, Chef Terry (Olivia Colman, a master of her craft as Andrea Terry), who confesses to Carmy that she’s closing because she wants to ‘live’ before advising him, “You have no idea what you’re doing and therefore you’re invincible.” In juxtaposing these giants in Carmy’s life, the show leans into an expansive flavor pairing. In tasting the tensions inherent in the highest echelons of the restaurant industry, we can sense the opposition of ambition and contentment, restlessness and rest that applies to all our lives.

Middlemarch’s longevity has everything to do with its wrestling with larger ideas too, imbuing its ‘setting’ with the full weight of ‘world’.

When I watched this season of The Bear the first time around, I’ll admit I looked up reviews a few episodes in and felt satisfied that estimable critics and avid watchers wondered where this was going, too. But after an end to summer where I dipped back into Middlemarch, I realized it was my consumptive, harried mind that had needed a reframe. When I went back to The Bear for seconds, an even more satisfying, taste-each-bite watch, I saw a show in which, to co-opt the words of the maxim signposted over its kitchen, Every Second Counts – just not in the way that prevailing storytelling has redirected us. The Bear approaches story in the timbre of a great Victorian novel, something we’ve lost patience for in a relentless what-happens-next chase. Season Three of the show circles us back to the origin story of the motto presiding over the kitchen and with it brings the realization that every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue in the show has its place, one that embraces time and rewards attention. Every Second Counts is not a command or prompt but a mantra that would have met Eliot’s willingness, her requirement, to linger for the sake of story.

I’m already bemoaning the end of The Bear’s run, but there is the hope that it’ll be adapted into a novel.

Soleil Nathwani is a New York-based Culture Writer and Film Critic. A former Film Executive and Hedge Fund COO, Soleil hails from London and Mumbai. She is working on her debut novel and is online @soleilnathwani