Please Let The Women Write Season 5 of “The Bear” [Warning: Contains Spoilers and Feminism]

I love “The Bear.” But like “Succession” it has an irritating flaw.

“Maybe Christopher Storer is too identified with Carmy, whose relentless moroseness gets to be a little…extra (smile, dude! Haven’t you seen how gorgeous your body is in those Calvin Klein ads?) Maybe he needs a sloppy, dripping, beef sandwich. Or a bowl of my matzoh ball soup with which my daughter, picking out the odd bone, claims I’m trying to kill her.”¹

Or maybe some hamburger helper enhanced with tomato paste?

My legs desperately needed my recumbent bike after driving for four hours so I jumped on, not noticing that I had accidentally clicked on the second, not the first, episode of season 4 of “The Bear.”

I love this show. Even when it goes astray there’s still so much to love, and the best episodes are sublime—as delicious with character, dialogue, detail and heart as a favorite novel. After days of hot, allergy-producing weather that made the lake part of our mini-vacation useless except as a nice view, season four was waiting for me, and I was happy as I could be (given, you know.)

Having skipped over episode one, it was confusing. And exhausting. And depressing. I considered skipping over to “1,000 Pound Sisters.” It wasn’t so much the fact that the restaurant was in trouble (although I had yet to see the Tribune review) but this:

I forgive Richie “performative”—because I forgive Richie anything.. But Carmy, man! Were we going to suffer through this stuff the entire season? Richie may be willing to endure, but I feel more like Tina, who wants to shove a spoon up “Jeff’s” ass when she finds out he hasn’t gone to see Sugar’s baby. (Tina calls him “Jeff”—as those who remember the first season recognize—when he’s behaving like a constipated white guy.)

My patience with Carmen’s emotional deficiencies was wearing thin by the end of (the very uneven) season 3. The season had made too much of a fetish over the artistry of “the plate” for my taste, and it wasn’t clear to me whether Christopher Storer was himself a worshipper or planning to deconstruct the dish this season:

“Deconstructing a dish, in a culinary context, is about separating the elements and allowing the diner to experience each part individually, or to recombine them in a new way. This technique is used to enhance the dining experience, allowing for a different appreciation of the flavors, textures, and visual appeal of the dish.”

In “The Bear” the original dish is Carmen, released in season 3 from the walk-in fridge but still stuck in unresolved grief and guilt, unable to say a simple “I’m sorry” to Claire, and throughout season 3 obsessively focused on the minutiae of getting the new restaurant “perfect.” Is that plate at just the right angle? Are those hand-shelled peas lined up correctly? Where should I put that sprig of parsley? Why don’t the hand-crafted bowls match each other exactly?

You might interpret it as culinary OCD, except it wasn’t just Carmy. All of them constantly fussed and fretted over just where the tweezers should put this or that herb, how artfully “components” are arranged, whether the swipes of sauce leave a trace of undisciplined smudge. And then there’s the last episode, in which the iconic Ever closes down and there’s a funeral for the passing of the art of fine dining. What happened to the “preparing wonderful food is about nurturing people” message that was conveyed so exquisitely when Sydney made that simple, buttery, potato-chip sprinkled omelette for pregnant Sugar?

But: Throughout the season (and the previous season) we get those separate components, too, in which co-writers Christopher Storer and Joanna Colas shift the focus from the exquisite plates and the seemingly unmovable, silent stuckness of Carmy (reminding me of my father, who would put his fork down and leave the house, slamming the door “performatively” if my mother hadn’t cooked his steak just right) to the “supporting” characters. Two of those episodes in particular (see links to my previous “Bear” stacks in footnotes for discussions of “Napkins” and “Ice Chips) were sublime. They are not so much episodes in a tv series as chapters in a saga, each deepening our understanding of the characters and their histories (in the case of these episodes, Tina and Mikey in “Napkins,”; Sugar and Mama Donna in “Ice Chips”) and letting us breathe outside the walk-in fridge. They—and others almost as good—made season 3 wonderful, despite its sometimes looking like “Top Chef.”

But what to do about Carmy? Or more precisely, what will Christopher Storer and Joanna Colas do about Carmy? What do they have in mind for him? Once I realized I’d missed the first episode, I cycled back to it. It opens with a flashback to Carm telling Mikey about his idea to open a restaurant at the same time as he stirs a sauce that threatens to stick to the bottom of the pan (a metaphor?) Let me say first that anything with Mikey in it already cracks my heart open. And Carmen, after some signature hemming and hawing (which infuriates Mikey, bless him) becomes all eloquent about what makes restaurants special. And nails it:

The relief of the AC in “Ming’s” which had the best spare-ribs I’ve ever eaten and where we’d go when I was a child to escape the Newark heat. Feeling awake and beautiful, my eyes freshly made up, going “out to eat” after an afternoon of sex with my lover (remember that wonderful scene with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christy in “Don’t Look Back”?) The warm, noisy coziness of cheap British pubs and the calm, cool elegance of expensive French restaurants. Having my chair pulled out for me. The way you breathe differently when you enter a restaurant. The loss of all that during COVID.

It turns out, though, that the flashback will be book-ended—WARNING: BIG SPOILER—by the final episode, in which Carmy, having decided (of course without discussing it first with anyone, and it takes him an infuriatingly long time to actually say it) that he’s the thing standing in the way of “The Bear”s success, tells Sydney and Richie that he’s leaving the restaurant. Looking back over the season, you can see all the little presentiments—I wouldn’t call them “hints” because they are strange (as Charlotte Bronte calls such moments) and confusing to everyone—that now make sense. (The numerous times Carmy says “heard, chef”—and seems actually to have heard. Sydney’s baffled expression when he doesn’t interrogate or challenge her about changes to the menu. The trip to the Frank Lloyd Wright house. Etc.) And yes, he’s right—he’s been ruining things with his obdurate quest for what he mistakenly saw as “perfection” but he now sees was his own ego seeking validation by being a big show-off with the menu at the expense of everyone else’s sanity, turning the restaurant into something far from the calm, people-nurturing vision he describes to Richie.

Maybe objectively speaking it’s the right decision. But looked at in another way, it’s more of the same. We’re meant to see Carm, this season, as going through some kind of process of “healing” and I’ll give Storer that if that’s what he wants to be the take-away. But what a self-indulgent, wasteful privilege it must be to feel justified to quit something you’ve spent years taking as seriously as it’s possible—and always with the benefit of other people’s care, patience, energy, dedication, and love—just because you can’t sustain the endorphin high you got when your ego was driving things? “It’s ok to not love it any more,” Sugar tells him, recalling on the telephone how excited and inspired he was when he first left Chicago to study in New York. Yeah, for sure. But is it ok to leave just because the thrill is gone? Just because you make some major mistakes and might need to change in order to make things work better? Take a leave of absence, man, and see the world. Or put Sydney and Richie in charge of the restaurant and train young chefs behind the scenes. Why is this an either/or between being the center of the universe and stepping away completely?

There’s a little voice in my head that wonders whether the show runners hadn’t begun to feel what I and many other viewers have felt: that the anchor of the show was beginning to drag it down. Maybe Storer and Joanna Cole (co-showrunner of “The Bear”) are the ones—not Carmy—who want to put Syd and Richie at the helm. Maybe they’ve recognized that they’ve squeezed all the juice they can out of Carmy’s silent, brooding, self-involved, solipsistic—and I’m sorry/not sorry, but very male—suffering? That’s a recognition that Jesse Armstrong (creator and head writer of “Succession”) never achieved, and why I spent many stacks defending Siobhan Roy against the bro-identified haters.²

Jesse Armstrong only had Sarah Snook, who played Siobhan, to give the character sympathetic shading. “The Bear,” in contrast, has a brilliant female co-showrunner³ who co-wrote many episodes and was the main writer for “Ice Chips.” My other favorite from season 3–“Napkins”—was written by Catherine Schetina (a regular contributing writer and story-editor) and directed by Ayo Edebiri, who plays Sydney.

It actually came as news to me when I discovered, only when researching long after seeing the episodes, that “Napkins” and “Ice Chips” were written by women. So is the standout episode from this season—“Worms”—which also has the distinction of having an all-Black creative team: written by Ayo Edebiri and Lionel Boyce, who plays the indispensable pastry chef Marcus, and directed by screenwriter/producer/director Janicza Bravo.

Even if you’re down on “The Bear” you should watch this episode. It may seem like hubris for me, as a white person, to declare that “Worms” gets it so, so right. But I have a Black daughter whose hair I was responsible for until she was old enough to decide what to do with it herself (at this point in her life, age 26 and working on a horse farm, she doesn’t do much of anything) and spent many hours hanging around, sometimes running off to get supplies or milk shakes, sometimes watching tv with the other kids, while Cassie got her hair braided in the homes of Black stylists. So I feel at least somewhat justified in the delighted recognition this episode gave me.

But “Worms” isn’t just about taking Sydney out of the North Side (where they don’t put cheese on their beef sandwiches!) and into the South Side home of her cousin Chantelle (Danielle Deadwyler), whose life is very different from Syd’s but with whom Syd still connects—some of the time. They don’t always speak the same language, but then they do. It’s a familiar experience for those of us who have “moved on” from the culture of our relatives (and our own childhood), but not really. I left New Jersey when I was 17. But a half-hour with people who grew up in Newark and I’m talking East Coast again.

Watch Syd’s expression in the following clip. As soon as her niece TJ (Arion King) says “Damn” to her mother she knows what’s coming.

Syd’s hair remains part-done for the next couple of hours because Chantelle runs into her sometimes-boyfriend at the hair supply store, and Syd winds up shopping with TJ and cooking up elevated Hamburger Helper for her while trying to help TJ decide whether or not to go to a sleepover that she’s not sure she’s really invited to. Syd’s got her own dilemma on her mind, though. Should she take a job with (Adam) Shapiro, ex-chef at the now-closed Ever who wants to recruit Syd for the new restaurant he’s planning, or stay with “The Bear.” Syd is tormented by the decision.

To know Syd is to love her. And I do. But if you don’t know her, you might find it very weird when TJ’s sleepover decision becomes the springboard for Syd’s improvisational sharing of her own situation—via metaphor—with an eleven-year-old. Syd surprises even herself with how far she goes, but TJ, although reacting quizzically at times to some of the more bizarre details, takes it adorably seriously:

It’s precious how appreciative TJ is of Syd’s sharing with her and how attentive TJ is, and I’m reminded of times when I can say crazy things to my daughter that I wouldn’t say to anyone else, not because we understand each other perfectly but because she is so accepting of the fact that I’m both weird and wise, and doesn’t require me to be perfectly clear or careful. Actually, she kind of likes it when I’m not. It’s something we bond over.

After getting a call from the girl who is having the sleepover, TJ decides she’s going to go, and that her aunt, because she’s such a good cook, “should work wherever you want, even if it’s scary.” For the moment and after checking her phone, which has five urgent texts from Carmy about some unspecified “issue” at the restaurant, she decides to go with Shapiro, despite the fact that he’s trying so cringingly hard (Wouldn’t it be cool to bring Afro-Caribbean influences into the restaurant? And he’s just streamed Good Hair; has she seen it? And Syd, once again, is required to be polite in the face of white boy cluelessness.)

But that’s just for that moment.

1. Quote is from my review of Season Three of “The Bear”:

See also:

2. I wrote stacks about the final season of “Succession” virtually every week. Here’s one in which I question whether Jesse Armstrong “gets” Siobhan:

3. For an interview with Calo, see: https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/the-woman-behind-the-bear-summers-hottest-tv-show/.