Why You Should Watch 'The Bear'

What to know before the show's Season 3 drop on Thursday

The Bear, Hulu’s now-three season hit by show creator Christopher Storer, has a simple premise. As the show’s IMDB tersely describes it: A young chef from the fine dining world returns to Chicago to run his family's sandwich shop. I must admit that description inherently puts me to sleep. I don’t like cooking, Chicago, or most dramas really. But at the insistence of 100 Movies’ very own founding editor Sam Morales, I decided to leave my comfort zone of sci-fi, action, and fantasy to commit within my personally busy schedule to a television drama. “This had better be good,”¹ I said. 

Turns out, it was a phenomenal experience.

(Mild spoilers ahead!)

The Bear centers on the efforts of its lead character, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a prodigal son from the world of fine-dining industry, who is trying to revive the family restaurant when his late brother leaves it to his care after a tragedy. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), family friend and long-time employee frequently (and comically) butts heads with Carmy over the latter’s commitment to professionalism and restaurant best practices, “how it’s always been done.” Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), an enterprising new hire and herself a failed culinary entrepreneur, gravitates towards Carmy’s desire for culinary excellence and taking the restaurant in a bold new direction. Yet, at the same time she must overcome her own ambitions clashing with Carmy’s visions for the restaurant. These lead characters, together with a charmingly eclectic supporting ensemble, are forced into the crucible of the American culinary industry until they go from being a dysfunctional hodge-podge of misfit cooks and kitchen staff with poor communication skills, toxic vices, and individualistic tendencies, to becoming versions of themselves that the you, the viewer, can be proud of and that you can’t but help but want to emulate when the credits for the last episode of the season roll. 

I think so much drama today is drama for drama’s sake. Plot twists, intrigue, scandal, and shock are the junk food we’re force-fed to stay engaged with most shows. Often, no one is actually a good person, just an interesting person. And, sure, these interesting people move from conflict to conflict in more or less engrossing ways, but when the final season hits, you aren’t left with any stirring in your soul other than the voyeurism of watching the roadside collision’s aftermath. It's a diversion and a distraction. Yet, hardly anything in those kinds of shows actually calls out to your soul on a deeper level, the part of your very being that inspires you to morally improve, strive for excellence, and experience a full-flourishing human life. 

Enter The Bear. A show with a relentless faith in the capacity for human beings to see the spark of their own greatness and, recognizing it, embark on the breathless adventure of exploring the mystery of their own perfectibility. It’s a story about loving people who are hard to love until they confront what makes them so difficult to love, and then learn to love you back for not giving up on them. It’s about that universal need to belong to something of consequence, to fight for something worth fighting for, and living with purpose. It’s about not surrendering to the void of mediocrity or egoism run-amok, and all the sympathetic disguises that egoism wears. It’s about recognizing the demons that run deep in our family histories and not repeating the sins of our fathers and mothers. 

I can’t help but see so much of the Gospel sprinkled into this drama about a restaurant. Season Two’s episode, "Forks,” is a masterclass in what St. John Paul II called the “Law of Gift,” that sublime truth that “[m]an cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” A character who finds the mundane tasks of hosting “beneath him,” comes to discover the dignity and profound opportunities to love his neighbor latent within that non-cooking position. This finding of so much meaning and significance in the smallest acts of service to customers is enough to make St. Josemaría Escrivá jump from heaven just to say: “That’s the sanctification of work!” The way another character over the course of the show overcomes insecurities about her cooking would make St. Thérèse of Lisieux smile at the humility that comes with accepting constructive feedback. 

That’s not to say the show features a clean, linear moral arc. These characters are still human. As Aristotle’s Poetics proclaims, the best tragic figures are those who are essentially good, save for one “tragic flaw” that eventually dooms them and elicits the most sympathy in their fall from grace. The corruptibility of the characters of The Bear is where the REAL dramatic tension and highest-stakes of the show exist. Sure, we care about the oft-precarious fate of the restaurant. Sure, we wonder if the characters will ever get along in the kitchen. Sure, we want to know why Carmy’s brother left him at the restaurant at all. But when carefully built and hard-earned relationships between our characters fall apart in the face of old vices rearing their ugly heads again at the climax of season two, no greater stakes seem to matter beyond whether the people we’ve been cheering on for so many episodes will succumb to their flaws and fail to be “perfect as [their] heavenly father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). But that’s what makes the show so great: It’s not so cynical about human nature so as to let its characters become predictably vicious, but it’s ALSO not so angelic as to let them waltz into heaven without a fight. The Bear actively asks its characters to have eyes to see and ears to hear, lest they fall from grace, and asks its viewers the same thing. 

So in a nutshell, that’s why your answer to the question: “Are you watching The Bear, yet?” needs to be:

“Yes, Chef.”

1. Editor’s note: What was actually communicated over text was, “I love it when you make me consume good art”