What Makes THE BEAR Tick? Or, Plot Does Not Equal Story
Too often in the streaming landscape, TV series are sluggish and consistently boring. The Disney+ catalog, overstuffed by temporary CEO Bob Chapek, is largely made up of 5-10 episode seasons of shows that spend their runtime of four or more hours meandering to a cliffhanger ending that never seems to be as exciting as the show’s writers think it is. Even America’s favorites like Stranger Things can’t help but feel the need to promise something larger with every passing moment; nearly every scene attempts to tie itself into a season finale with impossibly high stakes, a finale which inevitably promises even higher stakes in the following season. This isn’t to say world-ending, life-or-death consequences are a bad thing in storytelling – they often help build effectively escapist and emotional narratives, but the constant reliance on them, and a subsequent lack of smaller-scale empathy, is making wading through the unrelenting current of television exhausting.
It seems likely that this is due to a cultural shift around the early 2010s (almost undoubtedly linked to the rise of social media) in which audiences began focusing more on plot rather than story. Qualitative assessment of fiction, for many, is has increasingly become based upon the logical cohesiveness of plot events over emotional or thematic craft; TV watchers seek out plot holes and “useless” scenes (see: the tiresome sex scene discourse) and seemingly forget to consider what these plot characteristics may be doing for the story: the moral messaging and intended atmosphere of the text. Reinforced by YouTube “critics” like CinemaSins and clickbait-fueled media outlets like ScreenRant and Looper, this societal trend has convinced viewers that scripts should consist only of a bullet-pointed list of events and no “filler” like characters having futile disputes or unspoken feelings. A show that thwarts these unrealistic and unimaginative expectations, and one that we might learn something from, is Christopher Storer’s The Bear.
In concept, The Bear is something you feel like you’ve probably already seen. When fine dining chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) is willed his brother’s sandwich shop after his untimely death, he’s forced to pick up the pieces and get the restaurant back on its feet. It’s an oddly trite logline, but it doesn’t capture the strengths of the show, which come from humanistic moments rather than the overarching plot. The conclusion of the first season is inevitable, but the script and the performances are rarely actively seeking that conclusion; the characters and the camera live in the moment, and they feel visceral and real. Herein lies the lesson: while a narrative climax is usually satisfying, the climax is not what should carry viewers from episode to episode. We as an audience should be seeking the next episode not because of how it may resolve the story’s overarching conflicts, but because we care about how the characters are feeling, and how they make us feel. This is also why The Bear functions so well in shorter-form, episodic format and why, say, the entirety of The Mandalorian probably could have been cut down to 90 minutes. Even though each episode is a pressure cooker where virtually nothing “happens” (for the plot, that is), we aren’t constantly concerned with where the restaurant is going to end up in the long term, we care deeply about the stories and personalities on screen. Tone and feeling, rather than an appeal to plot, are what carry it to success.
The first season of The Bear is made up of eight tightly packed 30-minute episodes. The first, “System”, introduces us to the characters. The aforementioned Carmy, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) rest at the show’s core, accompanied by some notable ensemble characters as well, including Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas). Another major character in the show is the city of Chicago, which is shot so beautifully and lovingly in a way that, again, adds nothing to the plot but so much to the story. Each of these characters has their moment in this episode, but the show doesn’t miss a single opportunity to set a tone either. Scenes bounce between the inevitable high-intensity of food service, pragmatic family drama between Carmy and his sister Sugar (Abby Elliott), and privately repressed grief. Also in this first episode is a moment that shows Richie finding a letter to Carmy from his deceased brother, then tucking it away for fear of opening emotional floodgates. This moment effectively plants a seed in the audience’s memory, but isn’t dwelled on; the story keeps marching onward. The letter does not return until the final episode of the season.
As time progresses, characters’ relationships ebb and flow, and we slowly and patiently learn more about their private lives. Richie is a divorced but loving father, Sydney is a failed catering entrepreneur, Marcus has a passion for baking. They get angry at each other, they grieve, they fight and solve problems, and we, as the viewer, are just in it. We feel like we’re living with them, and we want the best for them, but we know how hard (and how important) it is for them to face their problems on their own. When the conclusion arrives, we’re relieved, but not because we’ve been told to be. The relief comes from seeing the characters feel relieved, and knowing they’ve earned it. What The Bear demonstrates in its simplicity is how invaluable story is, and how plot is nothing without it.
