When Not Every Second Counts

In the latest installment of Screen Shots, Michael Szalay reviews season three of FX’s “The Bear.”

By Michael SzalayJuly 21, 2024

• Television

This essay is part of the Screen Shots series, monthly takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.

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WHAT TO DO with very good but maddeningly imperfect television? How do we talk about a really smart show that’s less smart than it should be about the one topic it seems to care about the most?

FX’s The Bear (2022– ) reaches highs that few dramas or comedies ever do. It can elicit intense and rare feelings, sometimes in quick succession: from blissfully still, serenely contemplative explorations of what it means to be fully present to a single task, for example, to the frenzied mania of a commercial kitchen in full swing, captured with a dazzling, kinetic density of sight and sound. But in season three, one wants more serenity and less mania, in part because The Bear is also capable of extraordinary character portraits; creator-showrunner Chris Storer and his team elicit from this talented cast miraculous moments of intimacy and connection, as in the episode “Ice Chips,” treated below. But there’s less of that than there might be this season, which seems not to know who the show’s most interesting characters are. There’s far too much Carmen (“Carmy”) Berzatto, the Denmark-inspired chef who lends this show’s title his other nickname, and too much Neil (Matty Matheson) and Teddy (Ricky Staffieri) Fak, the Rosencrantz and Guildensternian brothers who struggle to leaven his brooding intensity.

These complaints are not in and of themselves that interesting. They presume, if not the perfectibility of TV, then at least objective criteria for measuring the success with which the really good approaches the truly great. Almost by definition, prestige TV knocks on Art’s door; it wants entrance. And why not admit The Bear? More imperfect television like this, please. TV is a messy, imperfect medium; there’s too much time to fill, too many hours to log over many months and years, to fault inevitable bad decisions. It’s easy to take for granted what a show like this does well, or resent the praise that’s been heaped upon it: there’s real schadenfreude in some of the clickbait produced in response to season three.

But in truth, it is also easy to resent the show’s pretensions. The Bear isn’t decorously knocking on Art’s door; it’s taking a sledgehammer to the hinges. It wants us to know that it believes in Art, like, a lot, and is about a true artist. However much it focuses on the damaging aspects of Carmy’s maniacal quest for culinary perfection, The Bear is besotted with the Scandinavian aesthetic to which he is in thrall—in a way that does the show a disservice. Carmy’s is a fine-dining minimalism governed by the mandate to “subtract” while also making “every second count.” And The Bear’s confusion about the implications of those mandates has real consequences for how it understands its kitchens.

The Bear is hardly the first prestige TV show to liken itself to the economic enterprise that is its subject. The Sopranos (1999–2007), Breaking Bad (2008–13), and Mad Men (2007–15) do precisely this. But Mad Men is the more telling influence by far, despite The Bear’s large Italian family and the mob-adjacent nature of Uncle Jimmy’s (Oliver Platt) seed money. And that is where the trouble starts. Because, like Mad Men, The Bear loves its protagonist, and what he produces, just a little too much. Indeed, it might be that its emulation of Carmy and his craft keeps this remarkable show from entering a very small circle of nonnegotiable prestige classics.

Season three is smitten with its gorgeously plated delectables; let’s acknowledge the human cost of this perishable perfection, it whispers, while also savoring it. That’s more than simple decadence. Artful food prep edifies, this show believes. The Bear’s working-class characters experience life-changing transformations in the first two seasons, to genuinely moving effect. Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), Marcus (Lionel Boyce), and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)—who prep food, make desserts, and host guests, respectively—enjoy an almost religious grace after making exacting, depersonalizing commitments to their crafts. They lose themselves in a calling and find themselves remade, members of an elect. They remain wage workers in a brutally exploitative industry and live in one of the United States’ most violently segregated cities, polishing forks and tweezing herbs for the rich. But they now belong to the kingdom of Art, The Bear reassures us.

The Bear wants to capture the physically and psychically draining grind that makes haute cuisine go, while also adoring the food that business produces; it wants to send up the managerial abuse rampant in the fine-dining industry, while also heaping adulation on famous chefs, many of whom appear in cameos. Throughout, fine dining is something less than the act of “nurture” that Thomas Keller, who appears as himself, purports. But it could be, season three seems earnestly to believe, if only its talented stars would get out of their own way. There’s too much beauty in fine dining, too much painfully exquisite sublimation, too much clarifying elegance for it not to save lives. In its mimetic longing for that beauty and elegance—its hope that it might become as lovely as Carmy’s plates—The Bear loses its way.

“Every second counts” has been the show’s mantra from the start. Having first encountered those words in Ever, a real-life Chicago eatery, Carmy places the phrase beneath the kitchen clock in the Beef, the sausage joint he inherits from his brother Michael (Jon Bernthal), and then the Bear, the upscale establishment into which he transforms it. The third season finds him doubling down. In the second episode, he draws up a list of “nonnegotiables” that includes “consolidation and speed,” “focus,” “perfect means perfect,” “no excuses,” “push boundaries,” and “technique, technique, technique.” Explaining this new tyranny, he stresses the need for “efficiency.” He drove away Claire (Molly Gordon), his season two girlfriend, we learn, by telling her, “It was all a waste of time”; he refuses to explain to his sister Natalie (Abby Elliott) why he’s insisting on nonnegotiables, because he “can’t waste that much time.” Carmy is on the clock and in a hurry.

His maniacal drive is what Richie, a longtime family friend who runs front-of-house service in the Bear, will call “textbook sublimation.” And that sublimation sets up the season’s central conflict (which was also the first and second’s central conflict): if the edict “every second counts” enforces workplace efficiency, it also drives home the preciousness and finitude of life off the clock. Carmy did not take the time to mourn Michael’s suicide, so Carmy’s now stuck in a purgatory between the loss of his brother and the arrival of the kind of grief that might let him move on. (In a flashback, Claire, an ER doctor, asks him if he’s ever been hurt so badly that he didn’t at first feel the hurt.) Indeed, Carmy’s furious on-the-job focus prevented him from savoring even his past apprenticeship at Ever. “Did you know when you were there? That it was special?” sous-chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) asks him. He replies that he “was always too busy to […] know.” Living for work, and for work’s efficiencies, Carmy cannot truly live.

The third and decisive meaning of “every second counts” pertains to The Bear’s insistent identification with Carmy’s fastidious exactitude and food preparation generally. The phrase links the show’s own aesthetic aspirations and the aspirations of its titular kitchen—and not simply because, almost uniquely among contemporary prestige TV, The Bear has arrived like clockwork for three straight years, always at the end of June. More basically, from the start, The Bear has insisted on its own masterful time management. It compresses time, elongates it, folds it back on itself—often with remarkable aplomb.

Most saliently, the show has produced bravura character transformations in remarkably compressed timeframes. The most celebrated of these, “Forks” (season two), finds the supremely annoying Richie serving an apprenticeship at Ever. He’s tasked with polishing forks—with a mindfulness and respect that is entirely foreign to him. Over the course of 35 quiet minutes, he transforms before our eyes, and by the episode’s end, the abrasive loser has become, for how long we do not know, a thoughtful and humble man.

Season three offers one such episode, “Ice Chips,” which finds Natalie in labor and confined in a small room with her estranged, overbearing mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis). Initially, Mom is too much in every sense. We anticipate the unrelenting tension in which this show specializes. But we get something else entirely. After initially chafing, mother and daughter soften and then, unexpectedly, tap into a wellspring of love and tenderness that feels almost miraculous. We never see the birth itself. The delivery here is the serendipitous intimacy that has resulted, by chance, because Natalie had nobody else to call and because, just this once, her mom rose to the occasion.

This newfound intimacy grows in waves, as Natalie’s contractions dictate the episode’s rhythms: we get the best of The Bear in miniature, as the quiet and still give way to a panic-inducing quickening, before receding back into a stunned lassitude. Here, every second does count. One misstep might lead mother and daughter to miss each other. But they navigate the ebb and flow of Natalie’s contractions well, as does the episode. And in the process, as a mouth melts ice chips, they melt their version of the deep familial freeze into which Carmy has placed himself (metaphorically, by refusing to process his grief over Michael’s death, and literally, by locking himself in a freezer at the end of season two).

Natalie is not saved in any absolute sense. The episode is still about her painful, body-wracking “labor.” Natalie’s water breaks while she’s shopping for the restaurant and her birthing unsettlingly evokes her time on the clock. As she cycles through highs and lows, she confesses a lifelong fear of Donna and a corresponding desire to please. “I ask people if they’re all right way too much,” she says. “If someone feels sick, I start to feel sick.” That’s her role at the Bear: she keeps the emotional books as well as the accounts, and even here, giving birth, she’s servicing her narcissistic mom.

All in the shadow of her brother’s trauma. Donna will insist, clutching her daughter a bit too vigorously, that she breathes through her contractions by mouthing the word “he,” over and over again. One brother’s death and another’s ongoing self-destruction hover in the air in a simple pronoun. Natalie succumbs to the breathing exercise and listens to long accounts of her brothers’ births (before quietly requesting, “Tell me about me”). And when Mom, rubbing her back, clutches her ass and tells her it’s tight just like Dad’s, Natalie submits again to a physical discipline meted out in the name of the father. Indeed, a show this smart casts Jamie Lee Curtis, presumably, to insist that Donna is, even when accepting a maternal embrace, submitting to something like male authority.

“Breathe,” Natalie’s mom commands her, too insistently. One wishes season three would let all its characters breathe more deeply. We don’t get enough of Marcus and Tina, even if the season’s other great episode, “Napkins,” recounts Tina’s first experience of the Beef. Instead, we get a whole lot of Carmy, who has become a gnomic shorthand for the too insistently reiterated traumas that drive him.

In the season’s finale, Carmy confronts the abusive chef under whom he once worked. “You gave me ulcers, and panic attacks, and—and nightmares,” Carmy stammers. “My life stopped.” The third season stops also. Where the second drives toward the titular restaurant’s opening, the third grinds to a halt, in part to convey the purgatory that attends Carmy’s sublimation. His workers feel stuck in turn. With the exception of a funeral, a move, a birth, and wedding planning, each handled briefly, remembrance is our only respite from frenzied labor. Workdays bleed into one another. For the most part, we leave work only in flashbacks that recount how characters found their way to the job that now consumes them.

When Carmy tells his old boss that his life stopped, the boss replies, “That’s the point, right? […] You wanted to be great. You wanted to be excellent. So you got rid of all the bullshit, and you concentrated, and you got focused, and you got great. You got excellent. It worked.” We know the show believes this, but we don’t know exactly what it means. When Carmy throws away yet another dish because it’s not perfect, we don’t know what perfection signifies. One dish looks as lovely as the next. The Bear places before us a sumptuous elegance without supplying the criteria with which to evaluate and ultimately value this ostensible Art.

The bigger problem is that The Bear doesn’t know how to compare its own excellence to Carmy’s. The fetish made of “every second counts” does not help. It’s hard to speak of eliminating extraneous time in a season that is about being stuck in time. Without development or forward progress, it’s hard to say what’s necessary and what isn’t, what is bullshit and what is not. But even if, say, the season’s pacing were perfect, and we felt, as we do in standout episodes, an achieved minimalism in which characters evolve rapidly in short bursts of screen time, we’d be left with a singular problem. Because, as it turns out, while we can see how “every second counts” is important to televisual art, its relation to culinary art is willfully obscured.

Carmy’s obsessive attention to detail produces great results, even his sous-chef confesses, after he changes one of her dishes yet again. But that’s not because he’s counting seconds. When a kitchen hums, customers get their food on time. And yet, Carmy is no more attentive to customers than to cost-effective productivity. Increased speed should make the kitchen more profitable, able to produce more in a given unit of time. And yet, Carmy cares not a whit about profitability. His menu can’t really be standardized or rationalized because it changes every day. “[T]he economics aren’t great,” he acknowledges. Nor are they great when he throws finished dishes in the trash—because they are not yet perfect. The waste in his kitchen is obscene, in fact.

Nevertheless, Carmy repeats the mantra he learned from previous bosses: faster, always faster. Knowing he’s not that interested in efficiency’s outcomes, this feels like an insistence on efficiency for efficiency’s sake, one that colludes vaguely with the “nonnegotiables” with which he declares his high seriousness. However improbably, driving his workers faster becomes itself a principled aesthetic stand. The Bear thus makes Carmy’s drive for more efficient production tantamount to a drive for aesthetic autonomy. “Every second counts” is, in this way, a key piece of the show’s “legerdemain,” to quote one season three episode, a trick that convinces kitchen workers and audience members alike that we’ve together embarked upon the pursuit of excellence, rather than an incoherent if still brutal bit of business. The season’s willful artiness, its imprecise whirlwind of aesthetic pretension, is essential to that sleight of hand.

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This might be the season’s foundational truth: we are watching at all because FX wanted many, many more seconds from its breakaway hit, a whole season’s worth. Chris Storer originally conceived the show in three seasons. Some have speculated that FX asked for another, so it could have a fourth season with which to sell more advertising.

We should not clutch our pearls. That’s the business. But it’s absolutely significant that, while season three might represent The Bear dancing for its Disney-owned overlords, the season opts nevertheless to depict the restaurant losing money, not making it. Unlike FX, for whom this show has been enormously profitable, Uncle Jimmy is going broke on his investment. Thus does The Bear preserve Carmy’s prestige and, by extension, its own. The art world is, as Pierre Bourdieu has it, the economic world turned upside down; even in Hollywood, losing money guarantees prestige in ways that making it never quite does.

However seemingly committed to efficiency, and even at $175-plus-tip per head (not including wine), Carmy’s cooking, The Bear insists, is an Art for Art’s sake that loses money. Thus does the show suggest that fine dining is worse for owners than for workers. The latter get paid, while the former accumulate debts. Some version of that perverse logic explains why Syd delays signing her ownership papers even before receiving a competing offer: better to be a wageworker than an owner in a kitchen like this.

Not once in three seasons do we see a food industry worker struggling to make ends meet on paltry wages. The Bear is ready to call out the abusive narcissism that drives kitchens like Carmy’s. But while it certainly asks if he produces great food at too great a cost, and if his staff works for him at too great a cost, the costs in question remain fundamentally personal and human—which is to say, measured in the show’s version of the New Age rhetoric of self-actualization that issues so readily from Richie’s lips.

Another version of this show might have treated the catholically deployed epithet “chef” a tad more ironically. But The Bear wants finally to dramatize the travails of ownership. The working-class characters are there, one feels, as object lessons in successful management: see how congenial workers in this luxury industry become when they think themselves creators, all equal and equally saved in their selfless commitment to the task at hand. One is almost embarrassed to note that, no matter his personal growth, or managerial softening, Carmy can’t change the industry’s profit margins, or the reality that craft labor and artistic autonomy promise owners and workers very different kinds of salvation.

The Bear comes close to acknowledging as much during a flashback between Michael and Tina. He’s about to offer her a job—she has been looking unsuccessfully for weeks—and tells her about a field trip he took as a kid to a beautiful Art Deco building that struck him as a “building of dreams,” because it contained floor after floor of office workers who were doing, it seemed to him, what they were born to do. The experience crushes him because he knows he’ll never have that. Tina agrees but is up against a more pressing problem. “I don’t need to be inspired,” she says. “I don’t need to be impassioned. I don’t need to make magic. I don’t need to save the world, you know? I just … I just wanna feed my kid, you know?”

But this distinction is muffled by our awareness that, relative to her recollection of this moment, Tina already has been inspired. One of the kitchen workers most outwardly suspicious of Carmy’s first-season revamp, she’s eventually moved, deeply so, by the prospect of a more potentially fulfilling devotion to craft. The flashback to Michael does double duty in this respect: we’re told once again that workers like Tina think themselves less part of a labor collectivity than of a community defined in significant ways by its members’ shared relation to Michael’s death. This isn’t a business, but a family.

And an inspiring family at that: In the season’s penultimate episode, Tina is experimenting with her own haute cuisine. Marcus tastes a dish on which she’s been working and gives her tips: what if you smoked the horseradish, and what if the cauliflower were pureed? “Yes,” Tina replies. “Thank you, Chef.” He replies, “Of course, Chef.” Thus does the working class discover meaning, purpose, and Art.