You Gotta Have Heart: A Review of “The Bear” and the Post-Debate Reality Show

Both shows are fictions. One pretends to be “reality.” Don’t be fooled.

On “The Bear”

I never understood why more reviewers didn’t get how much the first season of “The Bear” was about what a long, ferocious tail grief has. Maybe the hectic pace? Maybe the need to be distracted from our own post-pandemic depression by sharp writing and memorably hilarious situations?

But that was the first season, and we were only just getting to know Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and his sweet, combustible crew of family and friends, Many questions were unanswered, because in one way or another all the characters were shut down, running away, keeping their bruises hidden to each other. In season two, they opened up—to each other and to us. The pace of the show slowed way, way down, and we get to know all the main characters more intimately—and tenderly.

The writers seemed to have taken the advice of the book that Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri) father (Robert Townsend) gives her and that she carries around for months: Leading With Your Heart. I had to ask my husband why Coach K (Krzyzewski), who wrote the book about his “Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business and Life,” would figure so prominently in the show. He tried not to make me feel like an idiot about sports greats. And because I’m a compulsive researcher, I actually read a few pages of the book, and about how he turned a losing team around by listening rather than bullying, getting to know every member of the team intimately, and keeping his composure when things seemed to be falling apart.

“Emotion doesn’t necessarily have to be shown with your fist pumping,” Coach K writes. There’s a “different kind of heart—a sturdy heart, an unwavering heart,” that’s for others to “grab ahold of” when a tornado is coming. But different people manifest that sturdiness in different ways, and “a true leader will give people the freedom to show the heart they possess” through the building of relationships: “Because if a team is a real family, its members will want to show you their hearts.” (pp. 31-32, Leading With Your Heart).

That’s the kind of team that gets created in season two. And, although when we leave Carmy in the last episode he hasn’t recognized it (he believes he’s failed because he lost focus, forgot to call the fridge guy, and got stuck in the walk-in during the most hectic time of “friends and family night”), he’s the one who has been most responsible for giving the others the freedom “to show the heart they possess.” It’s Carmy who sends Marcus (Lionel Boyce) to Copenhagen to study with Luca (Will Poulter) the same pastry chef who taught him, Carmy who sends Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) to “stage” for the elegant Ever restaurant, where he learns the pleasures of caring for others (and himself) through restraint and respect, and in a wonderful conversation with the owner (Chef Terry, a cameo played by Olivia Coleman ) realizes he can start over. It’s Carmy who sends Tina (Liza Colon-Zara’s) to culinary school (equipped with his own knife), where she shines. And ironically, it’s Carmy’s accidentally locking himself into the walk-in that forces Sydney—with Richie’s help—to take over, restoring the confidence that has been wavering all season and her own very sturdy heart.

Most significantly—but also most problematically for the character—Carmy opens up too, to the possibility of personal happiness with a girlfriend. (Molly Gordon as Claire) And then, because he’s still Carmy, he torments himself over saying some bitter, self-hating words about how no amount of personal happiness is worth the misery he’s feeling, and is sure he may have ruined it all. After the last episode, it’s not clear whether or not he has. But what is clear is that like his mother (Richie even calls him Donna as he berates him through the door of the walk-in) he’s addicted to self-flagellation, even as he’s created such glorious opportunities (and beautiful food) for those who love him, he can’t enjoy it. There’s still some unforgiving God waving a finger. And—oh, did I identify with this!—when he’s happy he’s always looking for that other shoe to drop. When it does, it just proves to him how fucked up he is.

He’s stuck. Sydney realizes that the best part of the day was when she made that luscious omelette ( boursin, chives, sour cream and onion potato chips, and lots of butter) for pregnant Sugar. Richie learns that the joy of making an exquisite dish comes from showing people you care enough to put the time and effort in to peel a mushroom. But Carmy is stuck. Can he exorcise the demons in him to allow himself to experience joy? We didn’t know; it was a cliffhanger ending, even though he’s being freed from the walk-in fridge.

In season three, we get the answer: still stuck. Like his mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) he can’t bring himself to say “I’m sorry” (to Claire) and instead retreats into an obsessive focus with 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?

It’s not clear what the writers’ attitude toward this culinary OCD is. In Carmy, it seems disordered, a symptom of his anxiety and dread. But all the characters, not just Carmy, fuss and fret over just where the tweezers should put this or that herb, how artfully “components” are arranged on a plate, whether the swipes of sauce leave a trace of “smudge.” The aesthetic focus is just about as far from the slapdash yumminess of the “Original Beef” sandwiches as possible, and it kind of makes everyone a little crazy. But—particularly in the last episode, in which the iconic Ever closes down—the camerawork, the music, the reverence for the art of “fine dining,” the mourning of its possible passing (there’s a “funeral” for the restaurant)—cast a glow over the beauty of “perfection” that seems at odds with the “preparing wonderful food is about nurturing people” message that was conveyed so exquisitely by Sydney’s simple, buttery, potato-chip sprinkled omelette for Sugar.

I don’t really care on which side of the fish my parsley is placed, do you? If I’m sad or sick, I just want someone to make me that omelette.

I could spend a lot of time writing about what left me confused or disappointed with this season. But none of what went astray makes me love the show less. Maybe Christopher Storer was tired. Or depressed. Or too identified with Carmy, whose relentless moroseness gets to be too much (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. The show has my heart, and I want to nurture not demolish it.

And there are two episodes—both written by women—that are worth the entire season. They are my matzoh ball soups, but without a single bone. One is episode 6, called “Napkins,” written by Catherine Schetina and directed by Ayo Edebiri (who plays Sydney in the series.) It takes place some number of unspecified years before the events of the first series, and is Tina’s “backstory” of how, depressed and desperate after weeks looking for a new job (she’s been laid off after 15 years working the office at a candy factory) happens on the Original Beef. There she walks into the chaos that Carmy inherited after Mikey died and left the store to him—people screaming at each other, laughing, throwing wrapped sandwiches around. There’s also Richie, whose warmth with customers—an ability that Carmy never does adequately value—is evident and who gives the weary Tina coffee and a free sandwich (“an Italian French dip,” he explains to Tina.) She wanders into the back room where Mikey (John Bernthal) is trying to get Neil Fak (Matty Matheson) to stop playing video games and help putting the napkins in their holders. At the first bite, Tina—too overcome to eat and possibly melting down over the little bit of kindness the sandwich represents—can’t hold back her tears. And Mikey notices.

It’s hard for me to describe what the re-appearance of Mikey did to my feels. Both Mikey and their mother Donna haunt not only the characters but the series. They are the unseen-at-first onions whose layers are peeled back, in a minimum of appearances (three of them flashbacks) that reveal, economically and precisely, everything you need to know about them and both the dysfunction and love that war with each other in the family.

What you see in “Napkins”—Mikey’s sweetness, sadness, attentiveness, and vulnerability, as he and Tina share stories and Mikey ultimately offers Tina the job that will change her life—is heartbreaking. Heartbreaking because we know his depression, at that point still being battled by his capacity to care, love, and experience pleasure, is going to win. Heartbreaking because he shows Tina a picture that Carmy has sent him, and is so full of pride over his brother’s talent—a pride Carmy craves and never realizes he has. Heartbreaking because as for so many and despite his gifts, so obvious to us, he’s never believed the “dream” was going to happen to him, but rather that he would get “skipped.”

“Napkins” has the novelistic feel that made season 2 so great. It’s not so much an episode in a tv series as a chapter in a saga—the chapter of how Tina got to work at The Original Beef, intertwined with the unfolding revelation of who Mikey was. Virtually every episode of season 2 was like that—each devoted to a different character, each diving deeper into their past and personality, what made them who they are.

Season three isn’t like that, but it has its moments. Another superb one is “Ice Chips” (written by Joanna Calo and directed by Storer,) in which Sugar, unable to reach any of her other relatives and friends when she unexpectedly goes into labor, reluctantly calls on her mother Donna to be at her side. Donna is still pushy and at times impossibly self-oriented, but she’s thrilled to be there with her daughter, and as the episode progresses, we see the psychological clutter and barriers that have grown between mother and daughter dissolved—for the moment at least—by the simplicity and absolute priority of Sugar’s needs and (to the amazement of both of them) Donna’s ability to actually take care of her. In that hospital bed, returned to a much early form of their relationship (baby needs; mama feeds) the moments when Sugar wants Donna to just go away please!!! dance with and ultimately give way to the moments when she only wants to rest her head against mommy (who, as it turns out, does have a few good tips on how to deal with labor pain.)

This brilliantly written episode not only takes us deeper into the complexity of Donna, but also illustrates how much the failure or success of relationships hangs, not on what the other gives us, but on what we feel we’re able to give the other. And how much the two feed off each other. Carmy can’t tell Claire he’s sorry because he feels like he’s failed her so badly. Donna can’t go inside “the Bear” restaurant on “Family and Friends” night for the same reason; she’s failed her kids and can’t trust herself to not do it again.

So long as they are stuck in the conviction of their own failure, nothing is going to move. For other personalities, it can be simpler. “Just say ‘I’m sorry,’!” Neil Fak tells Carm. “Just come inside!” Sugar’s husband Pete tells Donna (returning to the table, he weeps over a dysfunction he can’t understand but that hurts him so much, for his wife.) But they are simpler souls than the Berzatto’s; loving comes easier to them. Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

On the Post-Debate “Reality” Show¹

“The Bear,” even during a less-than-consistently-great season, has heart.

I wish I could say the same about the show that the mainstream media has put on in the week following Joe Biden’s debate-performance. If that show had heart, the first reaction pundits would have had to Biden’s faltering performance would have been concern. “What’s wrong with Joe? I’ve never seen him like that!” They might have wondered if Donald Trump’s stream-of-consciousness, lie-a-minute barrage of non-answers and irrelevant attacks might have had something to do with Biden’s discombobulation. They might have considered whether, although we couldn’t hear Trump’s interruptions, Biden could—and was knocked off his game by them. They might have wondered if he had contacted COVID on his recent, virtually non-stop travels.

They might have been concerned FOR Joe. It was a concerning performance.

Instead, they went straight to questioning whether Joe was “unfit,” “mentally deficient,” “senile,” and “not up to the job of president.” Soon after came the Opinion Pieces calling for Biden to drop out of the race, the television interviews with those Democrats (only a small handful at first, but deemed worthy of much attention) demanding he do so, and armchair diagnoses of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. No one bothered to consult Biden’s latest medical report, which had ruled those out:

(From the report on Biden’s February, 2024 medical examination.)

Then, predictably, came the endless reporting on the polls, which by now we all should know are highly problematic but which suddenly became utterly trustworthy. And then more opinion pieces, alarmist chyrons, and headlines. The New York Times had the chutzpah to lecture to Biden that he should drop out “for the sake of the country.” MSNBC interviewed and interviewed all the “He must drop out” politicians, and very, very few ordinary people. In this way the media colluded (whether they realized it or not) to turn 90 minutes of one performance into what Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event”: an event made more vibrant, more attention-commanding, more “real” by constant repetition in the media. Trump was having a victory-dance.

Liberal media mavens like to blame Fox for supplanting fact-based reporting with “alternative realities.” But although Fox has clearly been the abuser-in-chief, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other “responsible” news outlets in fact every day perpetuate some realities and “disappear” others. The words they use suggest how to see events. The images they choose to proliferate tell a story all on their own. Events that are headlined, dramatized, and repeated slyly segue into the category of “truth,” while those that are deemed less gripping slip into the purgatory of inattention. And if the chosen Big Story is ultimately proved groundless (as frequently happens) it’s easy to bury the retractions on page 10 (television reporters often just ignore their misreports.)

So into the purgatory of inattention went Donald Trump’s reprehensible (although more “robust”) debate performance and the fact that his plans to be dictator on day one had been made conveniently doable by the Supreme Court. His lying babbling should have been torn apart sentence by sentence. But the story of his appalling performance never got a chance to “get legs,” because we’re used to all that. The media, over the years, has helped normalize it largely by ignoring it. The more shocking, headline-worthy story was Biden.

The Biden “age issue” had been a favorite for quite a while, long before the debate. But now they could say it was “confirmed” by Biden’s performance. And so, of course, “although it makes us so sad, because we feel great affection for Joe,” we “have a duty to report” that we are very, very troubled. Almost all of them acknowledged what a “good job” Biden himself had done as president over the past three-and-a-half-years. Yet many months before the debate they were calling for someone younger and more exciting to step up. The argument: Biden isn’t good at campaigning:

It seems clear enough that Joe Biden is up to the job of being president. The economy is booming, especially for the poor and working class; he has signed more bipartisan legislation (on infrastructure, guns, and domestic manufacturing) than anybody expected; and he has held together the western alliance while maintaining a dogged defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty after Russia expected to swallow up its smaller neighbor.

But whether Biden is up to the task of running for president is another matter….

….For now, Democrats are hanging by a thread to a presidential candidate whose every stumble is pored over in the press and who appears to be struggling to handle his public-facing duties…

…This doesn’t mean he can’t handle the job. Speaking fluently and quickly is an important skill for candidates, but presidents have the luxury of gathering their thoughts. It’s hardly disqualifying to lean heavily on staff and advisers if they have the competence to present their boss with good information and decisions….

[When Reagan was POTUS] Democrats mocked the president as senile and unfit, and Republicans brushed it off as irrelevant to his job performance. The parties’ messaging has largely switched sides, even if Democratic voters have not. They would prefer a slow, aging president to an authoritarian criminal one, but they genuinely worry that Biden cannot stand up against Trump’s incoherent yet oddly tireless rants…

….If the Democrats picked their nominee through the boss-driven, smoke-filled rooms of yore, they very well might tap somebody other than Biden. Likewise, if the party’s voters had a plausible choice, they might select someone else. It is only the strange status quo, in which voters will pick their nominee in a series of state primaries with only one sane choice, that guarantees Biden will prevail.

Biden likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Lucky for him, Democrats don’t really have one.

This was Jonathan Chait, back in September of 2023. In a stack I wrote at the time, I “asked” Mr Chait: If you really think Trump is a dangerous authoritarian criminal, why waste your powers of persuasion undercutting someone that apparently feel is a far superior choice for POTUS?? Why not use your words to try to convince people that how one serves is more important than how one “runs”?? Why not use your words to try to argue against the superficial qualities that impress people and against the stupid talking points about “age” that the media reinforces every time they raise the issue? Maybe that would be too boring; maybe that wouldn’t make such a provocative column, huh?

*********

Over the past week, I’ve often thought back to 2016, before MAGA became the cult that it is today and the GOP had not yet entirely lost its mind, and I wonder why the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognized that Trump wasn’t so much elected as Hillary was defeated (and even then only because of the insanity of the electoral college.) I think I know why they don’t get it. They don’t want to get it (or aren’t willing to admit it) because they played such a huge role in her defeat. Giving “bad optics” the prominence of established fact, lazily fitting every news story into the narrative of “untrustworthy Hillary,” paying more attention to the content of every leaked email than the much more significant story of the Russian origin of the leaks, continually declaring “momentum” for Sanders and Trump and “lack of enthusiasm” for Hillary (who did, after all, overwhelmingly win the popular vote)—these are some of the ways in which the mainstream media, both networks and cable news, helped make Trump happen.

The media’s amplification of Biden’s “age problem” makes me think a lot about their contribution to the disaster of 2016 a lot. (I actually wrote a book about it. You can order it; it’s still all true.) I won’t even go into the “email scandal,” which I’ve written about at length in my book and many articles. Recall instead what frequently got billed as “Hillary’s Health Scare.” In September 2016, the then Democratic candidate for the presidency had pneumonia and, like many women, had carried on despite her doctor’s advice. She insisted on attending a 9/11 commemorative ceremony, and nearly fainted — something that has happened to others standing in the sun at long political events. Then, she committed the unpardonable sin of disappearing from the media’s sight for ninety minutes, while she sought calm and cool — and water — in her daughter Chelsea’s apartment.

The media immediately issued a missing persons alert. Where was she? Where did she go? When a video surfaced showing her unsteadily entering her van, supported by the Secret Service and the news of her pneumonia was released, reporters were convinced she had been deliberately concealing her illness, revealing it only when she was "caught in the act" of fainting. And was it really pneumonia? If so, why hadn’t she told the press about it? Hillary’s explanation was that she didn’t announce her illness because she thought she could just push on through, no big deal. And as it turned out, John Kerry and others had also suffered pneumonia without announcing it to the world. But that wouldn’t have made much of a story, and “Secretive Hillary,” “Untrustworthy Hillary” had already proven themselves winners, among both the right and the left. The mainstream media played and replayed the visual of her knees buckling, and adored posing the “lingering questions” that remained concerning Hillary’s “health scare” and how “tight-lipped” her campaign was being:

“She received her pneumonia diagnosis on Friday, but the public was not told about it until hours after the incident at the memorial, raising questions about whether Clinton had any plans to ever inform the public... . . . Opponents are already seeing the incident as proof of their claims that Clinton has been hiding health issues. And others may now be more incredulous of the campaign's statements on her health . . .…” (NBC News)

The notion that Clinton was “covering up” more serious health issues was a favorite among more right-wing sources. Parkinson’s disease was just one of many disorders Clinton was suspected of hiding. It had been going on for weeks, even before the fainting episode: Descriptions of her as “exhausted” (or without “stamina,” as Trump was fond of putting it) and unable to stand up on her own, suggestions of “traumatic brain injury” and talk of “seizures” and “dysphasia.” Throughout the media, there were demands for fuller health records from Clinton (while Trump produced a laughable doctor’s letter describing his health in such rigorous medical language as “astonishingly excellent” and declaring that he would be ‘“the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”)

Hillary’s “ health scare ” amounted to nothing. It acquired its outsize importance not because it was accurate, but because the media repeated it, exaggerated it, visually re-played it, made an indelible mantra of it. In the process, like a piece of trashy gossip that has made the rounds of the high school cafeteria became stamped in viewers’ minds as true.

And now, in 2024, they jumped on a 90-minute debate to “confirm” an anti-Biden talking point that Donald Trump first spun (“sleepy Joe”) and that they themselves have amplified for the past several years. Except now it’s gone beyond Chait’s “not a good enough campaigner” to “is he mentally fit enough to serve?” And now they are bringing forward the post-debate explanations of post-travel exhaustion and an ensuing cold as further evidence of unfitness: “Presidents can’t fall down on the job just because they have a cold” and “He had a whole week to recuperate from his travel” and “Presidents have to be alert 24-seven”, etc. etc. They are still muttering about senility and shamelessly producing covers that are not only disinformation when it comes to Biden, who bikes every day, but an affront to Tammy Duckworth and every other disabled public servant.

You’d think nothing else of moment has happened since the debate. You know, like the Supreme Court decimating the rule of law and turning the POTUS into a quasi-king. Like the revelation of “Project 2025,” which the extremist Right has been working on for years with plans, once Trump is re-elected, to turn the United States into an authoritarian, religious regime.

********

Apparently, though, the debate itself wasn’t generating enough headlines, so they got George Stephanopoulus to subject Biden to an additional televised test of his faculties. Tim Ryan called it “a master class in how to do an interview”. It reminded me more of a police interrogation in which the whole point is to get a confession.

George basically had one question to ask, and when he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he tried and tried again.

The question: “Aren’t you too old?”

Biden: “No.”

George: “But….” “But….” “But….” “And what about…?” “But….”

The “Buts” and “what about” were basically two things: the polls and the “fact” that the rest of the world thinks he’s too old (“rest of world”= polls, some other Dems, Opinion pieces, and some more polls.)

And then there were the double-binds:

Are you fit enough?”

“Will you step down if enough people ask you to?”

Because Biden persisted in answering with a resounding “yes” to the first question—which after all is presumably what was at stake—he was accused of being in denial. Being arrogant. Not willing to listen to other Democrats who’d said otherwise. But suppose he’d answered instead, “well, I’m not sure if I’m fit enough.” Not very confident and kind of shaky, right?

Double-bind. You lose no matter which way you answer.

And the pummeling away at the same question, over and over:

“Do you dispute that there have been more lapses, especially in the last several months?”

“Are you more frail?”

“Are you sure you’re being honest with yourself when you say you have the mental and physical capacity to serve another four years?”

“But are you being with honest — with yourself as well about your ability to defeat Donald Trump right now?”

Tell me: How does one answer such questions???????

Yes, I’m frail. And getting frailer all the time. Yes, there have been more lapses. No, I’m not being honest with myself. Is that what George was looking for?

These are rhetorical questions. They are there to make a point, not to get a real answer. I suggest that most of the interview was just like that. An opinion piece with an agenda. Disguised as “hard-hitting journalism.”

I thought the point of the interview was to give Biden “another chance” to show he is cognitively intact. Instead, it seems to have been a test of whether he was willing to humble himself adequately before the press. Hillary was also not willing to do that. And she paid. And we paid. Most of all, we paid.

I don’t know how this will all play itself out. I do know that some serious self-scrutiny by the media is long overdue. It should have happened after 2016. It didn’t. And it doesn’t look like it’s happening now.²

1. Note: this second section is essentially a compilation of notes that I posted during the past week.

2. P.S. If Biden does drop out, I’ll be watching how the media treats Kamala Harris…!