Among the many other reasons
I love The Bear, the Emmy winner for Best Comedy last year and very
likely to repeat this year, is that it has crystalized why I could never really
appreciate or even enjoy the NBC version of The Office. I think I need to give little more clarification but don’t
worry I’ll get to the second season of The Bear.
During 2005-2014 millions
of Americans fell in love with The Office, fell in love with it again
during lock down and now it seems a reboot is finally going to happen. I was
never one of those people, though I made a far more concentrated effort than
most other times with certain shows I don’t get initially. I ended up watching
the first five seasons of it when it first entered syndication; I’d never
watched it when it was in its first airing and though I wasn’t yet a TV critic,
I still felt an obligation to try and see what so many other critics and people
did. By the time I got through the fifth season, I felt no real obligation to
watch the sixth or ever watch it again.
I couldn’t understand why I
never truly got into the show: all of the performers, from Steve Carell on down, were ones that I had liked in other
series before and have in fact liked in all their work other than The
Office going forward. This was also true of all the other guest actors who
passed through the show over the years: from Melora Hardin to Rashida Jones to
Elle Kemper, I have always loved their work immediately following The
Office. It might have been the
cringe humor of the show; this has been a deal-breaker for me with so many
other series such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I was fine with it during
Arrested Development and currently find it wonderful in Resident
Alien. So why didn’t I like it here?
Maybe it had to do with the
timing. When I was watching The Office the great recession of 2008 was
making its mark known across the world. I was relatively lucky in that neither
myself nor my family was personally affected by it and I would be unaware of
the long term consequences that have effected our political discourse to this
day. But it may have lead me to realize the cognitive dissonance that I saw
with so much that was going on in Dunder Mifflin when I watched the show
before. I could never get past the fact as to how either the Scranton Office
stayed opened nor how Michael Scott kept his job year after year. I realize
that millions of Americans loved how hysterically incompetent Michael was for
seven seasons, but I could never overlook the incompetent part.
Setting aside that every
single thing he said was an HR nightmare that somehow never happened, he was
terrible at doing the minimum when it came an office that was in the part of a shaky
company that, while I was watching, closed two branches and eventually was
taken over by another company, productive. Because unless I missed something in
the first five seasons, during those five seasons Dunder Mifflin seemed to
entirely be focused more on celebrating birthday parties, holiday parties and
recreational parties, along with office politics, then doing any work. I’m not
just talking about the clowning of Jim Halpert, who clearly hated his job. I
mean, I remember maybe five, six episodes total where the Scranton office was
actually involved in work.
Maybe that’s why so many
people loved The Office so much: I will concede I’d liked and indeed
related to many of the regular characters on the show; we’ve all had at least
half a dozen of them as our co-workers over the years. And maybe people liked
the idea of working at Dunder-Mifflin because it was the kind of workplace
setting that they’d be happiest in. But as someone who has watched and loved so
many workplace comedies over the years, The Office is the only one that
seemed not to mind if work never got done. That may be the ideal setting, but it’s
not remotely realistic.
And the realize I’m now
more than aware of that is because during the last couple of years television
has been blessed that some of the
funniest shows on television are workplace comedies where the work is in fact
as vital to the comedy as anything else that’s happening. This applies not just
The Bear but also the revival of Night Court and Abbott
Elementary. All of them are fundamentally darker in tone than The Office
was but that’s the main reason I relate to them far more as well as their
popularity with audiences and critics. Dunder Mifflin might be a fun place for
us to work in, but we all really work in places like the South Side of
Chicago and urban Philadelphia.
In a sense Carmy, the
character that Jeremy Allan White has already won every award in the book for
twice and is likely to complete the cycle with the Emmy this fall, is just as
unsuited to be a boss as Michael Scott was. But it is a different kind of incompetence.
Carmy is, as we all know, one of the greatest chefs who quit his job after he
got a Michelin Star and his brother committed suicide. He returned to Chicago
to run the sandwich shop that his brother, who had been suffering from drug
addiction and alcohol abuse, had essentially run into the ground. We knew the
moment he arrived and was determined to turn what was basically a decent
sandwich shop into a high class restaurant that this was going to be a doomed
enterprise.
Carmy spent the entire
first season of The Bear demonstrating how ill-suited he was to his job.
He treated all of his employees with something closer to disdain then respect,
he spent all this time pushing away anyone who could help him, he isolated his
Cousin Richie and all the pain he was going through by favoring Sydney, his
first hire who was in awe of his reputation and very quickly realized what a
shit human being he was. He did all of this by ignoring the financial realities
of his situation as well as the emotional trauma he was dealing with from his
brother’s death.
At the end of Season 1,
Carmy seemed to realize the depth of his emotional pain at an Al-Anon meeting,
finally realized that the cause he’d taken was a futile one, and with the money
that his cousin had hidden decided that the best thing to do was close down the
sandwich shop for good and build a new restaurant that would be called the Bear.
We actually walked away hopeful both for the show and for its protagonist. We
should have known better.
I’ve only watched the first
three episodes so far (I know, I know) but what is immediately clear is that
every single character on the show has experienced some emotional growth and an
ability to move forward but Carmy has not learned anything. In the first
episode Cousin Richie (the always brilliant Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has been going
through such horrible breakdowns says that Carmy is lucky because at least he
enjoys what he does. Carmy doesn’t blink before saying that he doesn’t. In the
third episode we see Carmy at an Al-Anon meeting and he acknowledges that this
is the case. He admits that his family did everything in his power to ruin
anything he might enjoy and while he says he doesn’t entirely blame them, it’s
clear he does. After eleven episodes, I realize how much this is the case.
Part of the reason that
White has received so many awards for The Bear is in part the reason
that so many people feel that the series doesn’t really fit as a comedy. Carmy
spends so much of his time miserable, driving everybody, never being pleasant
and being such a terrible person to everybody around him that many may see his
character closer to the Walter Whites and Marty Byrdes we’ve seen over the
years. Carmy is a great chef, that much is clear, but he doesn’t enjoy cooking,
is always focused on the next Sisyphean task and always make it harder than it
already is. He’s the other side of a
horrible boss that Michael Scott is – the unrelenting perfectionist, refusing
to take no for an answer, pushing whatever impossible obstacle there is further
down the road rather than trying to solve it, never letting anyone in. The
closest we’ve seen him to something resembling a friendship is his relationship
with Sydney, who he has promised is a partner in this restaurant. But it’s
clear that he will never see Sydney as anything but an inferior, someone who’s
job is to say ‘Yes, Chef’ and who he can change plans on a whim for but who
never gets the same latitude. Carmy is still a toxic personality, and the only
reason he is tolerated is because he is such a good chef by so many of his
staff and because almost everybody else who works for him is family.
One questions after the
revolt that led to the end of Season 1 why so many people on The Bear still
follow Carmy. That’s the other reason this is such a brilliant series. Unlike The
Office, which took place in a magical world where the financial crisis hit
everywhere but Scranton, The Bear makes no bones about how dire
the financial situation is for anyone in the post-lockdown era. When Sydney
(Ayo Edebiri) celebrates her mother’s birthday with her father (I didn’t
recognize Robert Townsend) and tells her about the plan to open the new
restaurant, he tries to ground her in reality by telling her as gently as he
can how many restaurants in Chicago are closing down. Sydney tries to brush him
off, but at the opening of Sundae, she has clearly done a deep dive as to how
many beloved Chicago restaurants have closed over the years. During that
episode, Carmy says that they need to cleanse their palates and says he’ll meet
her for breakfast. When an old friend calls him (they clearly had a romantic
history before) he looks at his list and decides to help her with a task. He
then completely blows Sydney’s office on a text.
Sydney then goes from
restaurant to restaurant and gets a very clear picture not only of how hard it
is to keep a restaurant working (many real Chicago chefs are featured) but that
sometimes you have to trust your partner. At the end of the episode she gets a
call back from Carmy, who calls her to tell that the wall in their restaurant
has been torn down. When Sydney says she should have been made party to the
decision, Carmy is as dismissive to her as he is basically anybody. At the end
of the episode Sydney goes to work in a kitchen on a recipe she’s been starting
on and we also saw her sign up for a sous chef job.
At this point Carmy, Sydney
and his sister (Abby Elliot) have set up the utterly impossible goal of opening
their restaurant in what is now three months’ time. I know enough about Season
2 to know how this will work out, but I also know enough that whether or not
the new restaurant is a success is not going to make Carmy happy, even
momentarily. I’ve read enough articles about the second season to know that
many, if not most of the characters do accomplish some kind of emotional growth
that will move them forward. What I think the critical question of The Bear will
be is if Carmy can ever find some kind of emotional peace or will he be the
same fundamentally broken person he was at the start of the show. Given
everything I’ve seen so far, I have to say I’m not optimistic heading into
Season 3.
What I do know is that The
Bear is a masterpiece on every level. I will grant you that the show
doesn’t enter the level of comedy that we see in other great comedies like Abbott
Elementary and Hacks, the chief rivals for most of the Emmys The
Bear will be up against this year. But I made the argument in one of my
articles about awards show that the term comedy has been evolving along with
everything else in Peak TV. It’s the rest of the world that still seems to
think we should be follow the laugh track model.
There’s an argument that The
Bear is the spiritual heir to workplace comedies like Roseanne and The
Connors, both of which deal with as much darkness of living on the edge of
the world as they are about the fun in it. (Indeed based on what I’ve heard of
the landmark episode ‘Fishes’ I’m beginning to think that we will see that
Carmy’s family was at its core had the same kind of attitude the Connors had –
only on crack.)
And like the recently
departed classics Atlanta and Barry, The Bear pushes the limits
on what comedy is by showing the level of pain and horrors in the world we live
in. Bill Hader made it clear that the title character was a victim of PTSD and
mental illness and that filtered down to every character on the series. There
clearly isn’t nearly the level of violence involved, but I don’t think I’ll get
any argument that the trauma at every level of Carmy’s family has been bearing
on every single member of it and they still haven’t fully recovered from it.
Similarly as Donald Glover showed how messed up the world of black America was
in so many ways through a surreal kind of comedy, The Bear looks at the
working poor in the post-Covid economy in a more realistic, but often just as
bizarre kind of comedy.
Perhaps that’s the reason I
don’t think the reboot of The Office will work. Among all the other
obstacles it faces, we’ve been through to much as a society to suspend our
disbelief enough to belief any kind of workplace like Dunder-Mifflin can exist
these days. That’s one of the reasons I
think The Bear resonates with so many Americans, even at a subconscious
level. We might have hoped for a boss as fun as Michael Scott, but we’ve all
worked under a Carmy at some point. These days the working world probably needs
more of them in order to survive, even if there’s no such thing as a
party-planning committee. And in a way it’s nice to know that your boss is as
messed as up as you are, if not so more. It doesn’t make him a good boss, but
it makes them a human being which every character on The Bear is.
My Score: 5 STARS.
P.S. I know Season 3
drops this month. I’ll try to get to that one much quicker than I did Season 2.
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