This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
It’s funny to me—and quite thrilling—that in its second season, The Bear is irrefutably TV’s coolest show.
I remember a time when the world outside seemed apocalyptic, the news made us wonder if democracy was crumbling, and existence meant surviving an exploding powder keg of stress and dread daily. We responded by seeking comfort TV and retreating to utopian worlds full of niceness and warmth, where we were reminded of just how fulfilled we could be if we remembered to value connection.
Shows like Schitt’s Creek and Ted Lasso became pop-culture phenomena. A sense of nostalgia and yearning for community led to a resurgence in popularity for game shows like Jeopardy!, which was tethered to cherished, foundational family memories for so many people—and which we could all watch and talk about together, at a time when we were forced to be apart.
That apocalyptic-seeming, democracy-crumbling, incessantly stressful period never really abated. (What a fun time to be alive!) It’s merely morphed into new and disturbing forms. But in terms of pop culture, the way we’re responding this time—both as a collective TV-loving audience and myself, personally—seems to be by seeking stress.
For the past week or so, I’ve handled strings of tough days with my typical coping mechanisms: screaming into a pillow, eating an entire bag of gummy bears, and then turning on the TV. Watching TV calms us down. How, then, to explain the urge—the need, even—to keep putting on episodes of The Bear?
The show is the equivalent of watching two or three dozen panic attacks occur in rapid succession, then having that tumult reverberate from the screen and directly into your body, where the chaos rattles around until you can’t breathe or blink. Yet I’ve found watching it so calming.
I’m not the only one who feels the way, it seems. From a pure metrics standpoint, Season 2 of The Bear is FX’s most-watched debut ever on Hulu, with a 70 percent increase over Season 1 in total hours streamed in its first four days of release. It’s tempting to meet stats like that with an eye roll: What do they even mean? “Most-watched” in relation to what? I concur; my eyes are spasming as I type. But anecdotally, “everyone”—the people I know, the people I follow on social media, the people whose work I read—is obsessed with The Bear. It’s so cool.
Having covered television for a while now—there’s a special place in Hell reserved for anyone who asks how long—I can say this isn’t the typical series that would catch on in this way or garner this level of buzz.
When a show comes out of nowhere to be the thing that everyone is talking about, it usually makes sense. Big Little Lies and Mare of Easttown boasted starry casts and offered audiences a weekly guessing game of deciphering the twists. Succession and The White Lotus were incessantly meme’d. Abbott Elementary infuses elements of past hits like Modern Family or The Office into a topical, relatable premise. Euphoria is scandalous. Squid Game had the Netflix reach and bonkers premise. Yellowjackets has people eating each other—and Melanie Lynskey!
The Bear, however, may be uncategorizable.
The FX on Hulu series follows a talented chef, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), who returns home to Chicago to run his brother’s sandwich shop after his death. In Season 2, Carmy partners with chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), sister Natalie (Abby Elliott), and “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) to reopen the shop as an elevated, fine-dining restaurant.
Because most episodes hover around 30 minutes, The Bear competes in the comedy categories at awards shows, perhaps by default. I certainly laugh a lot while watching. I cry more. Mostly, though, my blood pressure spikes, and my soul struggles to release an audible wail from the stress and intensity of most scenes.
Season 1 gave me PTSD from my years working in restaurants as a server. (I still wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares where there are tables I didn’t know were sitting in my section and never served, or I have to tell the chef that a customer sent their food back.) Season 2, of which a huge portion involves the mayhem of gutting and rebuilding the restaurant space, has triggered my PTSD from my home renovation days. (In my case, that’s the one time I tried to build an IKEA dresser on my own. But the sentiment stands.)
What’s remarkable about The Bear is that, unlike most other buzzy hits, every episode feels like you’re watching an entirely different show, in an entirely different genre. But still, miraculously, it never doesn’t feel like you’re watching The Bear.
There are times when scenes from a certain episode unfold like a ballet—so carefully choreographed, lithe, and graceful that you’re transported to that soulful place that doesn’t seem of this world. Other times, watching the sheer chaos feels like someone is on one side of you shaking a coffee can full of screws and nails, someone else is on the other side banging a sheet pan with a metal spoon, and a strobe light is blinking inches from your face. It brings you back down to Earth.
There’s a palpable intimacy between the characters that allows both extremes to believably happen—owed especially, this season, to further centering Edebiri’s Sydney and increasing the presence of Elliott’s Natalie. As human and lovely as some of those moments can be, there’s also the torturous viewing experience of desperately needing these people to finish one conversation coherently, without 17 interruptions, five side arguments, a phone call in one ear, and a ceiling caving in above them.
It’s stunning what each successive, wildly different episode can bring and contribute to a season that illustrates a human experience we can all relate to—even if our families or workplaces aren’t quite as dysfunctional. The stress of executing a passion, the thrill of discovering it, the doubt of whether it’s worth it: I think these are things we’re all continually experiencing at one stage or another. An episode like “Forks,” the seventh of the season, especially drives home the point that the place where you thought you were lost could also be where you find your purpose.
The Bear delivers all those emotional attributes, plus a roster of guest stars that rivals the cast of Knives Out; white-hot Twitter discourse over whether Carmy should be with girlfriend Claire, or if it’s Syd and Carmy who belong together (gross! no!); and the most unexpected,epic needle drop of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” which no show or movie will ever top.
For the cacophony of any given episode, it’s such a quiet show. Quiet shows don’t normally take off like this. (No matter how much screaming about Somebody Somewhere I do.) I love that this is what’s considered cool. And, in a rare instance of things that are cool, that I get to feel like a part of the fun.
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