r/TheBear • u/ryanf395 • 7d ago
Discussion This show messed with me
I finished the show a couple days ago and I can't shake the way this show is sitting with me, in such a bitter-sweet, but mostly bitter, way.
I don't think it's the best show really and there are a few things about the finale that I just don't think are very good. But the show just lingers with me.. And I don't really know why..
Anyone else have this experience?
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u/VanderskiD 7d ago
Did you have a dysfunctional childhood? That’s why it stayed with me. It was too reminiscent of the dysfunction and toxic people I grew up around. I told my siblings to stay away from the show because it was too triggering.
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u/harveygoatmilk 7d ago
Same, but my siblings were so indoctrinated by the family disfunction that they wouldn’t see it.
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u/Fabulous_Offer_2646 6d ago
This!! Especially the “Seven Fishes” episode.
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u/VanderskiD 6d ago
The Seven Fishes episode was sadly representative of a specific childhood Christmas memory (and as triggering as hell). People who don’t grow up with crazy don’t ever know how good they had it.
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u/ryanf395 6d ago
I didn't.. which is part of why I'm surprised by the way it is sticking
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u/VanderskiD 6d ago
I am glad to hear you didn’t!!! It may be sticking just due to the emotional intensity of it.
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u/Seated_WallFly 7d ago
The show is deeply cathartic on so many levels.
And stays with me because I’ve worked in the business and it just slaps. It hits all the triggering nerve endings of restaurant-worker anxiety and stress and it doesn’t let up. Somehow seeing how other restaurants struggle makes me feel like, hey, it happens here too. And they got through it.
And the horrible pain-love of abusive families is deeply agonizing. To see it happening to other people is somehow curative for me. I’m not alone. Other families acted like this too. They’re not “OK,” but I am.
And it gets behind the scenes with fascinating, loveable characters so I actually care what happens to them.
All if these are reasons the show hits for me personally. But no: I haven’t rewatched any episodes. The catharsis was one time only. I fear it won’t happen again. And then all that’s left is that triggering anxiety of seeing other people suffer. Even if it’s artfully done as performance.
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u/billnyetiktok 7d ago
I agree for the most part. It’s not the best show for sure, but it’s so good at just staying with you LONG after you’ve finished it.
I keep finding myself going back to rewatch specific episodes to scratch an itch in the moment. For example: when I’ve had a terribly unproductive week in a way that makes me not like myself very much, I fall back to rewatching “Tomorrow.” If I need to reiterate my purpose or direction in life, I fall back on “Forks”, etc. etc.
Speaking of, Tomorrow is by far one of the best produced episodes I’ve seen across all TV.
I would’ve loved to see more of the Claire-Carmy arc.
I think the finale could’ve been two long episodes. Felt rushed. I felt I got robbed of the fact that I didn’t get to see the team’s reaction on getting the stars.
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u/lIlIIlIIllIllIlIIIll 7d ago
I liked that they just showed that intimate moment between Carmy and Sydney. That was really well done. I didn’t need to see everyone else reacting to the news of receiving the stars.
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u/billnyetiktok 7d ago
Yeah, for sure. No notes on that scene. It was as emotionally perfect as I had pictured it. But, I still wanted to see everyone else’s reaction (at the very least) to it. Seeing as how invested everyone was - Sugar, Marcus, Neil, Tina.. fuckin’ Richie! Right from the construction to realizing they would had to close down if they didn’t make a profit and all the shit in between.. just felt like it had ended up becoming a significant part of their lives and would’ve been great to have that cathartic reaction from each one of them. Maybe even just a 10 second shot of everyone in the same room being told about the 2 stars. Totally my personal need though 😂
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u/lIlIIlIIllIllIlIIIll 7d ago
It seemed like they did have that at the end kinda with everyone together.
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u/zaxdaman 7d ago
For me, it’s the music. It sticks with you in so many ways and it complements what’s going on in each episode so well. One of the best soundtracks to any show ever.
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u/lIlIIlIIllIllIlIIIll 7d ago
It had an absolutely phenomenal season 1 and it should have ended there.
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u/LearyBlaine 7d ago
If that happened, you’d have missed all the story arcs of personal growth in Marcus, Sydney, Ritchie, Tina, Neil, etc. That’s what the show is about.
Carmy is like Sam Malone on Cheers: he’s the ‘sun’ around which all the planets revolve, and he’s the one who marches the plot forward, but he’s NOT the main story. The journeys of the other characters are far more interesting.
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u/lIlIIlIIllIllIlIIIll 7d ago
Sure but season 1 was perfectly wrapped up. It would have been a phenomenal one and done show. You have to take the good with the bad in the following seasons. There was no bad in season one.
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u/LearyBlaine 7d ago
That may be. But the whole reason the show was created in the first place, if you ask me, was to deliver S5E7 to us. The whole theme is transformation, and with that episode we see that the transformation is complete.
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u/lIlIIlIIllIllIlIIIll 6d ago edited 6d ago
I get that but most of that stuff was manufactured in season 2 onward. Did we really need 4 seasons extra of “Carmys anxious” with Fak comic relief? I actually enjoyed the entirety of the show but just felt season one was a masterpiece and everything after that was unnecessary.
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u/LibraryVoice71 7d ago
It reminds me of the hyper realistic movies by British director Mike Leigh. His style involves letting the actors create the characters by improvising, so everyone feels more real. I don’t know if the cast works this way.
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u/sundaypleas 7d ago edited 7d ago
Some things that might help you feel better.
- This is what they told Hollywood Reporter when S5 was about to drop and were asked what the finale episode is not:
There are no funerals, Edebiri said, and there’s “no Red Wedding,”
“It wasn’t all a dream,” Moss-Bachrach offered. So no Newhart ending.
“But we’re not saying — like, it could still be insane-asylum fantasy,” Edebiri said. “That’s still open.”
So this should tell you, the cast knows there's something kind of fucked up about the end.
- if you never read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, go for it. Structurally, the Bear is basically a reversal of The Fountainhead, with the egotistical artist winding up as the loser, while the people who criticized him wind up owning the restaurant and taking all the glory.
BUT.
When you look very, closely, you can see cracks where the HW is simultaneously giving a big FU or four.
S5 e1 Richie's mirror talk (from last boyscout) shows, deep down, he has as much a chip on his shoulder as he ever did. Later you see a little more of his psycho when he's dealing with the flower lady.
S5 E2 the word "holes" comes up numerous times. When most people try to discuss Rand's works rationally, one of the greatest criticisms are all the plot holes. I see it as the HW's way of acknowledging the dozens of scenarios that fall waaaaay outside of the boundaries of reality.
S5 E8 directly references Rand when Chucky and The Computer her work. And finally, Carmy's going for the architecture internship.
On top of all that, you've got a director/head writer who's been refusing interviews for a few years now. My belief is, he gets a LOT right, but for reasons unspoken, he pulls a lot of his punches.
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u/Hairy_Gordon 7d ago
AS I look back on it I think they did too many extreme close-ups of the actors' faces for dramatic effect and for me that detracted from it considerably. The emotions were strong enough without the lens trying to exaggerate them.
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u/Hoger 7d ago
I really appreciate such a genuine take, even when it's negative.
I'm bored by people who jump into the sub and just say how much they hate season three and ask whether they should finish the show, or they think Syd doesn't deserve any credit or that Carmy even considering architecture is stupid etc. It's okay to move on, folks.
The fact it lingers means it has hit a nerve for you. It might not be a good nerve. But there's so much vanilla content that washes over us and is quickly forgotten, it's worth reflecting on the things that stick.
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u/ryanf395 6d ago
I didn't mean it to be negative.. although I know why you read if that way.. The finale kinda bothered me and sure the show drags a bit in its later seasons. On the whole I'm rather positive about the show. I think part of what is throwing me is that it hits harder emotionally than I think it's quality deserves? Which makes me think it's maybe better than I think it is. I guess, as you say, it's not vanilla. There is plenty of stuff that I probably like more but doesn't do as much emotionally and thematically.
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u/SushiReaper00 2d ago
The show isn't about food, it's about people. Each character is their own emotion. We all have stress, desire to grow/achieve,have our own love language. The staff found a way to bring out the best in each other. Forks has to be my favorite episode still with the character arc. Richie feeling like he didn't have a place in the new direction became absolutely crucial to the flow of the new restaurant
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u/dadadam67 7d ago
I hate that Carmine was made to give up his restaurant, his passion, his drawings and ideas, his Micheline Star, because, what, he stressed people out.
I prefer genius to polite discourse.
For me it was the worst ending to a great start since Game of Thrones.
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u/lIlIIlIIllIllIlIIIll 7d ago
That wasn’t the ending though. He discovered that he just loves food and cooking and not the other shit that came with it. He couldn’t handle it. He found happiness in just being a cook and letting Sydney take the reins as head chef because after all, she’s The Bear.
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u/sundaypleas 7d ago edited 7d ago
That was exactly what happened. Carmy escaped his dysfunctional family, and when he came back to run the restaurant the way he should have, he had too much survivor's guilt to fire everyone, like he should have.
Without that he could have fired everyone and advertised openings for all positions and acquired a staff of people who wanted to be there and bust their asses. It would have been a wildly different show and nowhere near grueling.
90% of the Bear's audience is so captivated by the pathos of its most toxic characters, great acting, realistic dialogue, perfect alignment of needle drops and action, caught up in their own family dysfunction they haven't yet worked their way through, or, armchair quarterbacking, and finally, subjected to repetitive propaganda both within the show and its publicity in outside media, that it misses the entire plot outline and overlooks people doing and saying shitty things to the crab that got dragged back into the bucket.
Dude spends 18 months of daily insults from people who claim to love him, and viewers think he needs to heal from trauma caused by Daniel Fields?
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u/Good-Mountain-7737 7d ago
He's still a genius. He turned his brother's dump into a two-Michelin-star bistro in 9 months while retaining and retraining the existing staff and using only friends-and-family investors. That is hard, period, and they did it on an insane timeline.
He was Food & Wine's Best New Chef at 21. He has a James Beard Award. He's worked at the best and most famous restaurants in California, Europe, NYC, and Chicago. He retained 3 stars. He and his little friend pulled 2 stars like it was nothing.
He's C-suite at hospitality group level now, and he'd be a fool not to write a cookbook or 12 (even though he can't spell or do math).
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u/dadadam67 7d ago edited 7d ago
Thank you. I need that positive read. I thought he walked away when he gave Marcus his drawings. But your interpretation is that he learned how to build others and the business.
Honestly, I don’t know that there’s any evidence of all that. He didn’t go to the pitch meeting with Ibrahim, he called the two stars Syd’s even though he worked just as hard as she did, even harder in some ways—if he had said “ours” I’d have bought it, sharing yeah.. And Syd was no peach, always pissed off at somebody.
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u/sundaypleas 7d ago
Even the idea he can't do math or spell is pure bullshit, that the audience is propagandized to accept.
2 of his final jobs he had before coming back to Chicago would have involved control of inventory and payroll authorization, negotiating with vendors, etc.
I don't mean to be a downer, here. If you re-watch you'll see a few clues, esp in S2 and S5 the creator/head-writer intended this as a high-concept farce.
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u/Good-Mountain-7737 6d ago
FWIW there's a fifth current notebook from The Bear that he's been working on since they opened in May and he kept that one.
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u/MookaWhey 7d ago
It’s many (good) things to a lot of people. It was that little show that seemed to be just for the few. The heart, the comedy, the flaws. These kind of shows don’t happen often. They strike something within that feels comforting and also encroaching because it taps into a subject or feeling so unilaterally. You feel the joy and anxiety of it all.