‘The Bear’ Definitely Doesn’t Qualify As Any Kind of Comedy Anymore

Warning: contains plot spoilers about Season Three of The Bear

During this year’s strike-delayed TV award season, the second season of The Bear was practically unstoppable. From the Critics’ Choice Awards to the Golden Globes to the Emmys — at the last of these, it won three of the four major acting awards — The Bear was an absolute juggernaut. But questions about whether it properly belonged among COMEDY shows were so persistent that the cast has had to weigh in. 

Back in January, after its Emmy sweep, star Jeremy Allen White (who plays Carmy) emphatically stated that it is a comedy; meanwhile, Ebon Moss-Bachrach (who plays Richie) opined, “These ideas about comedy and drama are a little bit outdated.” The question came up again this week, before the brand-new third season dropped last night, with Moss-Bachrach more or less repeating himself: “I just think we’re in a more nuanced place, and those kinds of categories are a bit dusty.”

If Moss-Bachrach is hoping that awards bodies will abandon genre distinctions — perhaps in the way some have eliminated gendered acting categories — so that he doesn’t have to talk about this anymore, I get it. Until then: The Bear can be funny, but making you laugh is no longer its primary purpose, if it ever was.

If you’ve managed to avoid the discourse on this show since it premiered in June 2022, it revolves around Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, who left his native Chicago to become a chef, training in some of the world’s finest (and, in some real-life cases, famous) restaurants. When his brother Mike (Jon Bernthal), who had been running the Beef, dies by suicide, Carmy returns to run the place, announcing that he will be teaching the existing staff to run the kitchen according to the brigade system, and hiring on a young culinary school graduate named Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) to help get everyone up to par. 

Things seem to be falling apart as the first season draws to a close, but an unexpected discovery in the kitchen allows Carmy to dream bigger: The Beef shuts down, and in its place, Carmy will open The Bear, the fine-dining establishment he’s always dreamed of. 

The second season revolves around Carmy and Sydney preparing the former Beef staffers to develop the skills they’ll need to operate at the level The Bear is aiming for: baker Marcus (Lionel Boyce) goes to Copenhagen to train under a pastry chef; Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) goes to culinary school; Richie spends a few days at an extremely elegant restaurant called Ever, learning how to run a restaurant front of house. The season ends on a soft opening for The Bear in which lessons are learned, like: Don’t get yourself locked in the walk-in fridge, CARMY, and if you do, don’t start ranting about your girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon) distracting you from your professional goals unless you’re certain she’s not in the kitchen listening.

Season Three starts immediately after Season Two ends. The Bear is supposed to open to the public, and pretty much everyone in Carmy’s life is mad at him after the way he behaved during the soft opening. Instead of making amends to everyone with whom a harmonious relationship will be integral to the restaurant’s basic functioning, never mind its success, Carmy makes a wildly ambitious list of non-negotiables for The Bear, including changing the menu daily; he also makes this list unilaterally, because none of the dozen times Sydney’s told him he needs to communicate with her and let her share in decision making has had any impact on him. So it’s no wonder that when he tells her he has a partnership agreement for her to sign that will give her an ownership share in the restaurant, she doesn’t immediately pounce on the DocuSign to accept the offer. 

I agree with Moss-Bachrach that the lines between comedy and drama can be blurry, even among shows whose genres are a lot less ambiguous than The Bear’s has been from the start. Mad Men and The Sopranos have laugh-out-loud moments in nearly every episode, and shows like Scrubs and Insecure have made me choke up. But while the tragedy that catalyzes the plot of The Bear has been text since the first season, that tragedy has steadily crept out of the deep background and now lives in the middle of practically every frame, crowding the comedy out in the process. 

The Season Two episode “Fishes,” for instance, is among the most widely praised of the series; it’s a matter of opinion (and, probably, personal experience) whether the screamiest Christmas ever committed to film is a riveting psychological portrait of a family living with a malignant narcissist or a panic attack the viewer did not necessarily sign up to have, but few could possibly disagree with my colleague Keegan Kelly that, precisely two jokes aside, it’s not funny.

The Bear is, of course, under no obligation to solve its characters’ problems with more speed than we might see if they were real people — and, to be fair, the events we’re watching take place over a matter of months, not the years it’s taken for the first three seasons to drop in our timeline. But at a certain point, each of us will have to decide how many more times we’re willing to watch Carmy as he refuses to learn the same lessons, making himself increasingly miserable. 

I understand that Carmy has trauma to work through — lord knows I understand it even more after having met his absolutely unbearable mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) last season — but if he’s not working through his trauma and he’s constantly taking it out on his colleagues AND he’s not doing his job that well otherwise to make up for it AND he’s not even being funny, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of watching him live his miserable life and ruin those of the people he supposedly loves.

While the Beef has officially closed, part of Carmy’s plan for The Bear in the Season One finale is that they’ll still sell Italian beef sandwiches, during the day, out a side window. Said window finally does open in the third season, hiring back a couple of guys who ran the counter back in Mike’s day. Other than when the Faks (Matty Matheson’s Neil, Ricky Staffieri’s Ted, and now Sammy, whose name you shouldn’t click unless you want a big spoiler for one of the season’s celebrity cameos) are getting up to their comic situations — a little repetitively, in my opinion — the only Season Three moments that consistently inject any joy or fun into the proceedings are when Italian beef sandwiches are involved. Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) is delighted to have help at the window; the old employees who return are casual and friendly, chopping it up with the customers. It’s nice, and more importantly, it’s a relief to watch characters on screen feeling something other than dread.

This is the vibe when we’re watching the sandwich business of yesteryear, too. The flashback episode “Napkins” follows Tina just as she loses an office job after 15 years, and struggles to find another, pushing 50 and lacking a college degree. By chance, she ends up at the Beef. It’s busy and lively, Richie and the other counter guys talking a mile a minute and giving Tina a sandwich for free when the customer who bought it is MIA. Tina finds a table and, overcome by the emotion of her day, starts crying. When Richie, Neil Fak and a still-living Mike notice her, Richie quietly suggests that she’s probably crying because Fak’s so bad at Ballbreaker, the video arcade game Fak’s just lost. “I’m sad too, now,” Richie adds. 

The rest of the scene involves Tina and Mike having a heart-to-heart about work and their problems, but Mike says that despite the Beef’s many irritations, he likes the people. Based on what we see in this era, I believe it! Mike offers Tina a job as his new line cook and she takes it; based on what she’s experienced on her first-ever visit to the restaurant, I get why she’d want to stick around! 

The Bear is an elevated dining experience where no one seems to be having any fun, much as The Bear is a “prestige” show that trucks nearly exclusively in despair. The Beef is a casual sandwich joint its regulars love, much as the first season of The Bear set in its original incarnation was capable of levity. Carmy is trying to build something “important,” but it’s not making him happy. I can’t say the same for The Bear creator Christopher Storer; I just know The Bear hasn’t made me happy in quite a while.