Bear Market

Do you remember when The Sopranos dropped? I mean, I don’t really, I was pretty freakin’ young, and I’m not even sure if my family had HBO at that point. But the general consensus at the time was that American television would never be the same. Liberated from the strictures of FCC content rules – can’t have the smol beans seeing the dangly bits, now can we? – Matthew Weiner’s often wickedly funny Greek tragedy set in hideous and tasteless Jersey suburbia reset what television was. There was Before Tony Soprano and After Tony Soprano.

This was what was called “prestige” television, i.e. something theoretically better than laugh-tracked man-children whom we the audience are supposed to both identify with and pity, the machinations of cruel heiresses dripping in Swarovski, or the avatars of a masculine ideal we failed to meet, whether embodied as cowboys back then or cops now. This was something that was supposed to use its lengthened timeline to reach the novelistic depth that movies couldn’t, that eschewed the clean Aristotelian endings of procedural TV in favor of uncertainty, complexity, and depth. And I was all in, at least for a time.

A few weeks ago, The Bear launched the long-form episode “Gary,” as an interim between its seasons. And it was godawful.

I’m not the first to comment on the decline of The Bear, and a lot of ink has been spilled over the past couple of years on the show’s wasted potential. “Aimless” seems to be a term that gets thrown around a lot, but I’m OK with aimless, at least certain kinds of aimless. “Self-indulgent” is another, but I think good art is almost definitionally self-indulgent to a certain degree, because it takes itself and its vision seriously, rather than trying to pander to a preexisting set of sensibilities. However, my qualms with the more recent seasons of the show are really just reflections of my qualms with the overall decline of prestige TV in general.

When The Bear dropped in 2022, it was a breath of fresh air in a prestige landscape that had gone stale. The shows that had defined it – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, Deadwood – were all distant memories, and most of the shows that had emerged in the interim had nowhere near the kind of cultural impact. There were a few, sure (Succession, The White Lotus, and The Boys stood out in terms of their contribution to the discourse), but on the whole, each new show seemed to have less and less staying power.

To a certain degree this was inevitable. The idea of high-quality television was no longer a peculiarity, and as glossier, more highbrow programming proved itself to be a bankable asset, more and more media outlets were willing to put forth the effort. Furthermore, audiovisual content was quickly moving online, and countless streaming services and platforms emerged, each with their own suite of shows. Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney, HBO, and Paramount all attempted to woo their subscribers with flagship series featuring A-list actors. However, this necessarily curtailed the potential viewership, and if a show was on a platform you didn’t subscribe to, you probably didn’t watch it. Game of Thrones, it seems, was the last series that you could reasonably assume the guy at the water cooler to have at least a passing familiarity with.

Furthermore, as part of this boom, many of these shows seemed to carry the form of prestige TV – the production values, the top-tier talent, the sense of profundity – but ultimately rang hollow. A show like Westworld, for instance, was basically mediocre pulp sci-fi. But it had Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris and beautiful art direction, so it was deemed prestigious. And so for every groundbreaking Breaking Bad, there were 10 woodenheaded Ozarks.

So when The Bear dropped in 2022, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Like so many of the best shows about working life, it balanced humor and pathos in a way that really, really worked. OK, not early-seasons Simpsons level, little reaches those heights, but pretty damn good! The setting was pleasantly intimate and small-scale, Carmy had demons to slay, and had to get his ragtag band of outsiders on his side and lead them to success, with the daily dramas of kitchen life – health inspections, rush orders, emergency repairs, and the like – providing the drama and tension and challenge. And, in the post-Bourdain world in which the kitchen is deemed a “cool” setting, audiences were hooked along with the critics.

And yet, as so often happens in serial media, Flanderization was inevitable. And when a media landscape is utterly ruled by metrics and engagement, this becomes a feature rather than a bug. You like the family dramas and inability to process trauma? Yeah, have some more of that. You need those heartwarming moments in which said trauma is finally resolved through the power of listening? Sure, have some more of that, you fuckers. We’ve focus-grouped the shit out of this show, so have some of that slop you like, you fucking piggies.

 

The real turning point, the shark-fin soup jump, is at the end of season 2, with Carmy having finally opened his dream restaurant to suitable fanfare, and then loudly declaring his uncertainties and inability to have a relationship to no one in particular while locked in the walk-in. It’s not only an utterly lame and pointless monologue about how sad and insecure he feels that no one would actually say out loud when locked in a room by themselves, so even that premise is ridiculous… but of course his new gf is on the other side of the walk-in door, and she hears everything, and decides to just leave the fucker. If this was on a 1980s midday soap, you’d call it camp, but here it is on the prestige teevee.

“She loves him and he loves her, but to quote RuPaul, ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?’ Let’s please get Carmy a therapist for season three because he very much needs one.” – Marah Eakin, Vulture, who managed to close a review in a manner almost tailor-made to piss me off

And the rest of the show has seemed an extension of that moment. By season 4, it was bordering on parody. Nonstop maudlin emotion punctuated by quietly simmering resentment, all revolving around their shitty narcissistic mom (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really does play her part awfully well), and the lingering effects of the suicide of Carmy’s substance-abusing brother Mikey, as played by Jon Bernthal in flashback after flashback. And yet despite the high-pitched melodrama, no difficulty was insurmountable. Bros came in from around the world to pitch in, and the former janitor can become a wine expert in a matter of a few weeks with just a lil’ heart! Maybe this is what some viewers were looking for from the beginning. But what I was looking for was honesty, and there is nothing more dishonest than this level of sentimental pap.

And “Gary” continued in this vein. What we see is a flashback of an assignment to pick up unknown product in Gary, Indiana, by Jon Bernthal’s Mikey and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie. And eventually they get bored and sidetracked by the allure of substances and loose women (at a working-class bar in 80 percent black Gary that is somehow 100 percent white). Over the course of the hour of David Mamet-aping dialogue and phony confessionalism, the contempt for the audience is palpable, especially as the snarling dialogue paves the way for the required emotional breakdown monologue. Oh, and there’s a twist ending where they get in a car crash or some shit. I stopped caring.

But what sucks is that this didn’t need to be the case. There are echoes of things better. The Mametian Chicago tough guy talk could have actually been captivating, as anyone who has seen Glengarry Glen Ross or American Buffalo can testify. The liberal use of “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes seems a direct reference to Vincent Gallo’s nightmarish journey in the famed Buffalo 66 trailer. And the cinematography is, as is the case in even many shitty prestige shows, truly beautiful. And for this prodigal Midwesterner, the strip mall lights and the flash of hopper cars through the naked winter trees are transcendence itself.

And we can extrapolate that deficiency to the series itself. It could have been the next great show. It wasn’t.