By rights, a pop-culture newsletter should this week be discussing the biggest pop-cultural event of the year so far: the atomic bomb v the pneumatic bum. But you’re hardly lacking for Barbenheimer coverage elsewhere on the Guardian (here are our Barbie pieces; here are our Oppenheimer ones), and besides, there’s another major cultural drop this week that merits its share of the limelight: the arrival (in the UK) of The Bear’s second season.
Of course, some might argue that The Bear has had its share of the limelight already: its first series was the Guardian’s TV show of 2022, after all. In fact, as excellent as this drama about a former fine-dining chef’s attempts to turn his brother’s old fast food joint into a truly great restaurant was, I’d argue that its first series was a tiny bit overhyped. For all its propulsive qualities, there was always a nagging feeling that it might only have one speed: full-on, five-alarm freakout.
This second series, which released in full on Disney+ this week, however fully deserves all the praise it received in the month or so since it was released in the US. This time around, the Original Beef sandwich shop of series one is getting ready to become cutting edge dining establishment The Bear, so the entire focus of this second series is on all the work that goes into getting a restaurant ready for its grand reopening. That might not sound as exciting as the weekly mad scramble to keep The Beef afloat in series one, but in reality it makes for a deeper, richer programme. Showrunner Christopher Storer has recognised that there are times when a drama needs to be on a gentle searing rather than a full flambé. So there are changes of pace and departures from the cramped confines of season one: a beautiful, calm episode set in Copenhagen, where pastry chef Marcus has been sent to hone his talents; a lovely, meandering ep where head chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) briefly experiences a life outside of relentlessly shouting “service please!” at underlings for 18 hours a day; and a standout instalment where Richie, Carmy’s “cousin” and general on-site screwup (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), gets an education at a gleaming, whisper-quiet Michelin-star restaurant.
Which isn’t to say the show isn’t afraid to get the blowtorch out when required. There’s its much discussed sixth episode, which you should know as little about before watching as possible, other than that it will make you reconsider a big family Christmas get-together this year. And of course as the reopening date looms and the pressure builds towards the end of the series, that feeling of panic and dread from season one’s most uncomfortable moments returns with a vengeance.
Watching those compelling, cringe-inducing scenes, I realised how much The Bear causes you to care for, even root for, its characters, and what a rare sensation that is in prestige TV. For the last two decades the standout shows of the moment have tended to present audiences with characters whose behaviour makes rooting for them extremely challenging. This has been the age of the antihero, where behaviour has been uniformly toxic, even if the level of toxicity – from everyday bullying and womanising to running a murderous drug cartel – has been variable. The skill of series from The Sopranos and Mad Men to Succession has been in convincing us that we want to follow these characters’ journeys, but there are limits to our attachment to them: while we may sympathise with Kendall Roy or Don Draper we know, deep down, that any downfall they suffer is pretty much merited, and part of us might even be willing it to happen.
This isn’t to say that likeable characters have been entirely absent from our screens. They’re there in comedies, and in plenty of dramas, particularly mainstream, ratings-courting ones: procedurals, hospital dramas, big weepy family sagas. But the series that have shaped these last 20 years of TV, that have been critically acclaimed, have hoovered up all the awards, have undoubtedly tended towards the antiheroic. (The situation is a little different in the UK, where a show like Happy Valley can be considered groundbreaking and brilliant, while still having a lead whose main failing is that she’s too good at her job.)
The Bear though is something slightly new … or perhaps something old made new again. Its characters, while sometimes desperately flawed – selfish, unthinking, cruel to one another – do want something better for themselves and the fledgling restaurant they are building. Where the underlying message of many of those golden age shows was essentially that people (and institutions) are incapable of change, trapped in enervating cycles of harm, The Bear’s characters strive for self-improvement, and – slowly, incrementally, in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back sense – achieve it.
That isn’t a terribly in-vogue sentiment. We’ve slowly convinced ourselves over the past two decades, or even going back to Seinfeld and its “no hugging, no learning” mantra, that good TV should have a pessimistic worldview: people don’t change, a better world isn’t possible, things can only get worse. In this context, personal growth seems easy and a little cheap, the sort of thing you’d expect from an 80s action movie montage, not from of-the-moment prestige telly.
But The Bear never takes self-improvement lightly. It knows that it’s hard to achieve and never guaranteed. Characters backslide into bad habits or find new ways to be flawed. And two series into the show, there’s no guarantee that they will reach their respective nirvanas: Carmy might alienate his employees again with his anger; Richie might revert to being a flake; Sydney, his talented if obsessive chef de cuisine (played by Ayo Edebiri), might push herself beyond the limits of what she can withstand; and the restaurant might completely flop. Watching these characters try – and knowing they may well fail – is what makes The Bear an irresistible watch, and one which is as heartwarming as it is heartstopping.
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