Carmy Loves Food but Hates His Customers: Season 4 Episode 1 of Hulu’s “The Bear” Plays the Hits and Rights the Proverbial Ship
by Ted Kluck
Season 3 of “The Bear” was, at times, a tough watch. It featured LONG stretches of effete shots of tweezer food, too much Fak, too many celebrity cameos including the disastrous John Cena run, too much Therapy Richie (“I’m working on myself” sigh), and too many self-congratulatory food celebrity appearances (Will Guidara et. al.). It felt like a season-long placeholder, story-wise, and felt like a show that, to me, was playing in its own food a little too much. Nobody wants a series that feels like a big-budget student art film.
A note about how I watch and write about things: When the show dropped last night, I only watched the first episode. “Wanna do another one?” I asked my wife, to which she replied “Well, do you want to gorge yourself on it or savor it?” I knew the right answer.
Season 4 episode 1 seemed to steal a page from the Cameron Crowe playbook, which is a story/sentimentality playbook I like very much, even lifting a couple of outstanding needle-drops from Crowe’s “Jerry Maguire” and “Almost Famous,” and borrowing existentially from the movie “Groundhog Day,” as Carmy opens up to Marcus about feeling stuck in his life as though it is the same every day, with nothing ever changing.
This, I think, is an interesting commentary on work and dreams: in a world in which the fall of mankind has happened (see: Genesis 2), everything (even our dream) eventually becomes work, and work is by Genesis-definition hard and unfulfilling regardless of what the day-crushing cold-tub-taking LinkedIn/Instagram tech billionaire influencers would have you believe. Because of Christ, they don’t have to be joyless, but our dreams and work won’t do for us what we often expect them to. I’ve interviewed enough rich, famous, and miserable professional athletes to know this to be true.
To borrow a sports analogy, the show felt like it has started to get the roster right again, after a season of feeding too many “touches” and minutes to the wrong characters. The episode started with five minutes of a Jon Bernthal flashback, which was the right call. Bernthal has too much horsepower as an actor and too much to do with Carmy’s existential fragility to let him sit on the bench. We got a relatively heaping dose of Oliver Platt as Uncle Cicero and his sidekick, Computer, who is fun as an occasional contributor whose job it is to tell Carmy, Syd, and by extension the audience, how badly the restaurant is performing.
On that note: as we saw coming, the sandwich window is outperforming the Michelin-star-seeking fine dining restaurant, which was a nice win for Ebraheim, who is a nice character. Story-wise, the show seems to be leaning on some tried-and-true mechanisms, such as the introduction of a literal countdown clock, which the staff must work against, as it has two months to save the restaurant. This gave us a nice Episode 1 “Rocky IV” training montage, right down to the overlaid financial charts and 80s synth-pop soundtrack.
Ultimately, there’s a nice class-tension developing between the t-shirts who run the window, and the white coats who tweezer the food. This mirrors the tension in Carmy’s own psyche, as revealed in Scene 1: Mikey never wanted to make food for rich, particular yuppies and critics, and in his heart of hearts neither does Carmy. “Restaurants make people happy,” Carmy said in that scene. Except that his is making him miserable.
The clock will provide a nice guardrail on Carmy’s existential navel-gazing, which is interesting but only to a point, as he’s really the last remaining character to “fix.” Marcus and Tina are fully-cooked, as characters, and sadly I think the show’s creators think Richie is too – although I miss the Richie who swore and carried a Glock in his sweatpants. He was a much better hang. Syd will either leave the restaurant (not likely), be the sage voice of reason for Carmy (more likely), or surpass him as a chef which will prove he’s Healed (or whatever) when he deals with it graciously (also kinda likely).
At the end of the day, can lost, secular people have real joy? That question is above my theological pay grade but I’m inclined to think “probably not.” But there was a really joyful version of this show, and Season 4 Episode 1 is a step back in that direction.