In exploring one restaurant and its staff, FX’s “The Bear” is a cautionary tale about the toxicity that comes from defining ourselves by our work, a Northeastern expert says.
“The Bear,” FX’s acclaimed TV show that takes place in an upstart Chicago sandwich shop turned fine dining restaurant, has become known for a few things: its performances, a focus on restaurant workers and its stress-inducing response in viewers.
However, at the heart of it all, “The Bear” is a workplace dramedy that wants to examine the good, the bad and the ugly of modern work culture. In focusing on one restaurant’s evolution from a grimy family-run sandwich shop to a perfection-seeking, fine dining restaurant, it has become a cautionary tale about our potentially toxic relationship with work.
Sam Waterman, an expert in the histories and theories of work at Northeastern University, says that could help explain part of why the show has become such a huge hit in a post #MeToo world that is increasingly aware of toxic workplace culture, microaggressions and harassment.
“Yes, it’s in the zeitgeist, but [‘The Bear’] is almost changing it,” Waterman says. “It actually seems to be leading the conversation.”
“The Bear” follows the staff of the titular restaurant, a sandwich shop that was a favorite of locals but also chaotic and run like an “anarchic collective,” Waterman says. Carmine “Carmy” Berzatto, the younger brother of the former owner, comes back from his fine dining success in New York City and tries to transform the shop into a Michelin Star-worthy restaurant with help from his staff.
Unfortunately, Carmy brings not only his culinary genius but the worst parts of his upbringing in a, to put it lightly, dysfunctional family and his experience in the pressure cooker world of fine dining. Despite attempts to improve on what he had coming up, Carmy’s need for perfection and control hits a fever pitch in the third season of the show. Clientele eating their beautiful, intricate plates in the dining room came head to head with profanity-filled shouting matches (that almost became more) in the kitchen.
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Waterman says the entire enterprise of “The Bear” is a tightrope walk between glamorizing what restaurant workers create every day and the conditions those creations often come out of.
“Some of the episodes just have these beautiful closeups of these dishes for five or 10 seconds at a time,” Waterman says. “The contradiction is to produce that end product you’re working within, often, a structure that is highly pressurized, often exploitative, poorly paid in which labor is often split along racial lines.”
The show is unafraid to interrogate the toxic culture that Carmy and others create at the restaurant. Waterman explains that one of the keys to the show’s success is how it traces so much of the behavior back to a single-minded –– and unsustainable –– dedication to work.
In a post-pandemic world where people have been rethinking work-life balance, “The Bear” interrogates what happens when we define ourselves by our work.
“One hundred percent it’s a cautionary tale in the sense that other parts of [Carmy’s] life suffer and the people around him suffer, his relationships suffer,” Waterman says. “At the same time, he’s bloody brilliant, isn’t he? The show obviously wants us to recognize that in some ways his absolute dedication to his passion and to food is in some twisted sense what makes him such a brilliant chef.”
“A lot of the [recent] mental health discourse has really asked us to question that and say, ‘Actually, maybe we want to be more balanced, rounded, healthy individuals,’” he adds.
Carmy loses out on a potential romantic relationship and further fractures his relationship with his “cousin” Richie. By the time the third season ends, Sydney, a brilliant chef who only wanted to work at the original sandwich shop because of Carmy’s genius, is ready to jump ship.
Through Sydney, “The Bear” is also able to comment on an element of workplace culture that has become common in passion-fueled industries like the arts and even tech, Waterman explains.
“It’s really difficult because on the one hand we do want to bring our passion to the workplace and we do want the workplace to be somewhere where we can express ourselves and engage in forms of self-realization,” Waterman says. “On the other hand, managers and corporate executives know that and are very good at exploiting it. Hence why you now have all this discourse about self-realization at work … that you can become your best self through work. The show is just really good at flagging up that contradiction.”
“The Bear” also finds room to represent more positive workplaces, namely in Ever, another fine dining restaurant in the show. It’s almost utopian in how it seemingly “solved the contradiction” at the core of what “The Bear” is exploring, Waterman says. It’s an excellent restaurant that also provides a humane workplace for its staff; greatness and kindness coexist.
As it enters its fourth season, the question “The Bear” asks its viewers and characters is whether that’s just fiction or if it can be a reality, in the restaurant kitchen and in our own workplace.