Pressure Cooking: Why The Bear Works So Well
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Warning: minor spoilers for the entirety of The Bear, including season 2, are in this article. Reader discretion is advised.
The second season of The Bear is finally here (the entire season is available to stream and binge-watch on Hulu); our review will be up next week. For today, I just wanted to briefly celebrate the show and pinpoint why The Bear is such a standout program on television. In case you haven’t been caught up in last year’s hysteria, The Bear is an FX series created by Christopher Storer. It stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto: a superstar, award-winning chef that is forced to return to Chicago to take over his late brother’s sandwich restaurant (which is falling apart, toxic, and on the brink of bankruptcy). It is a high-octane, painfully anxious show in its first season, and it was the sleeper hit of 2022: those who started watching it couldn’t stop, and word-of-mouth turned this once overlooked show into the must-see show once many Golden Age of TV titans (Better Call Saul, Succession, Atlanta, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, et cetera) wrapped up for good. TV feels like it is in good hands just with The Bear alone.
The second season slows things down a bit after the dynamite first season, but that’s because The Bear has a few extra episodes (ten compared to last year’s eight) of greater length on average. I feel like the first season was made by Storer and company to make a long-running series but with a sufficient single-season attempt should the show not continue. Now that it is beloved and likely staying for the long haul, everyone can experiment a little bit more with what they have: instantly loveable characters that can be explored further in depth (Sydney is a great example of this, as we learn a bit more about her home life early in season 2), the scope of what is going on after that fleeting season finale last year (all isn’t quite as well as it appeared), and the cast and crew can best optimize their secret ingredient in this award-winning dish.
What’s that winning spice that makes The Bear work so well?
Timing.
There’s a reason why the incessant screaming and bickering in The Bear was somehow enticing to watch instead of being a massive headache. Everyone associated with the series knows how to detonate exactly when needed, and how much fuel is necessary to make the biggest explosions. You felt the pressure of The Beef (Carmy’s struggling restaurant) breathing down your neck because you can literally see the proverbial dominoes (a contradiction, I know) falling over before your very eyes. The pressure you experience feels like a roller coaster: you know Carmy and his kitchen staff will survive at least the first season of a long-running television series, and yet how can they possibly weather this storm? You feel yanked around from every direction, and it’s exhilarating. I’ve seen people compare The Bear to Succession, and there may be some minor similarities (particularly the sense of panic), but I otherwise think that there are many differences. Succession is mania on a much larger scale with players that can afford to lose (these kids of a billionaire are still filthy rich at the end of the day). The Bear deals with people where failure is not an option: they literally won’t survive if this seemingly-dying business bites the dust.
Consider that each expletive, insult, or voice of concern is a beat in The Bear: you’ve got a highly rhythmic train of dialogue right there. With voices overlapping, you get percussive drama within a confined kitchen environment. There are other clever garnishes tossed on top as well. Having worked in a kitchen for a month (I wasn’t qualified), I know quite a few of the terms used at the back of a restaurant, like stating you’re “behind” someone so they don’t bump into you (same with when you’re turning a “corner”), declaring “all day” when you have gone through all of the pending orders so cooks know everything on their docket, and “86ing” ingredients or dishes (to eliminate them from being served for the hour and/or rest of the day). The Bear uses kitchen lingo to add to the intensity of a scene, as they only pollute what you can hear a little bit more (they are used crucially in the series, especially in the penultimate episode of season 1, “Review”, where “behind” becomes a pending warning of what is to come the more it is repeated).
It’s not just how time is spent in The Bear that makes it special, it’s how timing is constructed itself. The first place to look is how well-edited the series is, with a nice dichotomy between vicious, speedy cuts, and long slow passages as well. Almost every show implements this sort of post-production waltz, but The Bear has fine-tuned it. Consider “Honeydew” from this latest season, where Marcus travels to Denmark to get better at pastries. When he first arrives, we are met with a flurry of cuts to showcase his new surroundings, and we feel inundated with images and sounds: it’s all too much, but this is what it feels like to land in a brand new environment. The next morning, bright and early at five A.M., we cut to an extreme close-up of the dish Marcus is trying his best to create whilst following instructions from the head chef, Luca. We linger on this dish a little bit as Marcus fumbles, and we feel the crushing weight of expectation versus reality. The resolve afterwards where Luca continues to work with Marcus instead of scolding him (which is what we expect, more or less) is the coup-de-grâce of this particular example, proving that The Bear isn’t just gunning for the same process and result every time. The endgame wasn’t Marcus messing up, even if it was just barely: The Bear wanted to arrive at the fulfilment Marcus desired even after his minor screw-up. In a series full of destruction and disaster, this is a terrific example of subversion.
This is far from the only example as well. Consider last year’s “Review” being presented in one long take (in a series full of savage cutting and splicing), for starters. Consider how many fights are full of back-and-forth crosscuts or long pauses to take in what was just stated. When Carmy is at Al-Anon and sharing his inner thoughts and the world seemingly pauses around him. Some dishes are best served when cooked quickly and on the grill (with that heat crisping up everything), while some must be cooked slowly so they ingratiate the ingredients that have to stand out the most. The Bear knows exactly when to serve which dish. Case in point: season 2 is much slower than the first season, but it needed to be. Now that we can expand characters and their personal stories while the restaurant is in rebuild mode, it’s time to analyze what we have in front of us. If The Bear tried to microwave the first season again, it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.
To pull off this great timing, everyone on board needs to understand how it works. Jeremy Allen White was on Shameless which is also a comedy-drama genre bender full of discomfort, so he’s the perfect lead for this show, but that went without saying. Ayo Edebiri has a comedy background, including writing and stand-up: crafts that can only survive on precise timing. On that note, most of the stars have at least some sort of comedic background, including Abby Elliot of SNL fame and major guest stars like Joel McHale, John Mulaney, and Bob Odenkirk (and then you have Odd Future’s L-Boy (Lionel Boyce) who has experience in both music and music video direction. Not to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s clear that Storer knows who he has in his cast and how to best utilize them (let’s not forget the hiring of an actual chef with Matty Matheson and playwright Liza Colón-Zayas, but I don’t want to get too far off track here). I’ll conclude here by stating that not only is this cast great when it comes to breaking the tension with greatly timed jokes, but they understand the beats and breaths of scenes in the first place: both are necessary to make The Bear work.
The point is everyone knows how to build tension with verbal diarrhea, let moments linger when needed, serve scathing punctuation points at exactly the right moments, and back off so others can shine. Everyone is a comedian in this tragedy of a work environment, and they are each trying to serve their best routines all at the same time. It creates a sparkling chaos with fuses waiting to be lit all around us: at some point, there will be fireworks, and it’s a question of when. For most viewers that watch The Bear, this is extremely fitting. Many of us have had to deal with the rise in unemployment and costs of living, so spotting employees and managers in an everyday business that is feeling the heat just like us has us feeling seen. This is especially true in the second season when the shutting down of restaurants due to the pandemic is at least a minor plot point that hovers around our characters, particularly Sydney who is being pressured to take on a new job. We are given the cues to take breathers and experience dread throughout the series, and timing is a part of this blueprint. As Richie stares at the sign on the wall at the end of the episode “Forks”, he reads an important message that isn’t used lightly: “Every second counts.”
One final example of how well timing is used in The Bear is the first half of the second season: all five episodes are short blips that you can binge-watch in a couple of hours. Then you hit “Fishes”: the seventy-minute opus at the centre of the season (a Christmas prologue to the series that adds so much necessary context amongst the dysfunctional atmosphere). At first, I was a little bothered that the entire season was being dished out all in one release as opposed to being given the weekly treatment, but it makes perfect sense for marathon viewers to drive at full speed right into this pivotal episode. The Bear never felt confined to specific runtimes (recall how short “Review” is last year at twenty minutes, and how the season finale, “Braciole”, is close to an hour), and it truly shows in this second season (we have a few near-hour episodes after “Fishes”, so it’s not a one-off instance).
You learn right away how brilliant The Bear is with its uses of pacing and timing when you become a part of the fanbase that feels compelled to devour it all in one sitting. It works incredibly well as a marathon show. Should you not want to overindulge, it works just as nicely with bite-sized viewings of an episode or two at a time. You never feel forced to watch the series in either fashion (outside of the peer pressure of society, of course). The Bear is dynamic with its pacing and it leads to the electricity of the series: the kind that makes you feel like you must keep watching. Like the best dishes, it leaves you wanting to have more. Now that The Bear is for real, this second season — which dials everything back whilst raising the heat many degrees — is preparing the show to stick around for good. It’s a wise strategy for a show that could have been a summer fling of yesteryear that completely chokes while overstaying its welcome. Instead, The Bear is likely going to stick around as one of the elite series on television while most of the great shows of our time have just concluded. Again: The Bear was always about timing.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.