The Bear: A Tale of Two Dinners
Judging the second season by the meals it serves
I wrote more than enough below, so for once, I’m cheating a proper intro and just getting into it. Without further ado—The Bear’s remarkable second season, as told by two wildly different (but DNA-sharing) dinners:
Christmas in July!
The seventh episode of The Bear’s second season, “Fishes,” is their longest ever, but it’s easy to forgive them. Buried in the debris of its sixty-six minutes is a skeleton key to crack the Berzatto family wide open—and the entire show along with them.
The episode has the immediate benefit of doubling as the 2018 Character Actor All-Star Game. It’s practically a punchline: a show already so well written and directed and acted by its main roster, throwing us into a family Christmas gathering with a beloved comedian or a revered television star or a hallowed Oscar-winner hiding around every corner. As if they needed them!
But oh, by the night’s end, they get their impact minutes out of the whole squad—taking the show’s epicentral family (and family-adjacents), throwing new agents of chaos and grace in the oven with them, and setting the timer for an hour. By the time it goes off (as in a bomb), we understand with new depth what we already knew about these chefs and their troubles, loving them and worrying about their wellbeing more than ever before.
It starts with a chaotic crosssection of the Berzatto family tree. The players we know are all there: siblings Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Natalie (Abby Elliott), and Mikey (Jon Bernthal), “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), cousins-like Neil (Matty Matheson) and Theodore Fak (Ricky Staffieri), and Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt). Even without the irreplaceable surrounding characters that make up The Bear’s larger restaurant family in the present, this group is so specific, so lovable in their many iniquities that the house would feel full with only them.
But it’s not only them. Shortly, we’re introduced to that All-Star roster of extended family members: Sarah Paulson and John Mulaney as Cousin Michelle and her partner Stevie, the ones that made it out of Chicago; Gillian Jacobs as Tiffany, the sweet (now ex-)wife of Richie; Bob Odenkirk as Uncle Lee, the provocateur; and Jamie Lee Curtis as Donna Berzatto, the fragile matriarch of a crumbling empire.
Beyond the dramedic heft they’re able to bring to their short-but-effective minutes off the bench, there’s a secondary benefit to using such recognizable faces to fill out the Berzatto clan. Their star power acts as a mirror of our own relationships with extended family—these people we see once or twice a year, but whose manners and mythologies claim outsized real estate in our heads. Is there a bigger celebrity sighting than the uncle you only catch up with in five-minute bursts each Christmas, or the cousin you haven’t seen in two years but with whom you share an inextricable collection of memories? That’s a hard thing to convey in a season, much less an episode; having so many actors we already have relationships with is an effective shortcut to get us there.
Crucially, each of these new characters is as likable as the ones we already know. One of The Bear’s greatest achievements is assembling a cast so endearing that they make even the kitchen hellscapes they share seem appealing. It’s a slight variation on Succession’s great feat of making us care about patently unlikable characters; The Bear’s many strivers are likable even when they’re most unlikeable. It’s the reason we root for Carmy through so many outbursts, or for Richie when he’s trying to unlearn slurs—we can sense their buried pains and their desire to be better, even when they fall short.
That’s why, despite the ever-mounting tension in the margins of “Fishes,” I felt the same draw to be near to this group of characters, to this family. Even when they’re jabbing each other or picking at old scabs, there’s an intrinsic closeness that’s hard not to envy, the family ties that offer belonging even when it’s stained by hurt. There’s a risk of toxicity there (as we’ll see), but it’s also a sweet reminder of why so many people create “found families” in the image of this model: sometimes it’s nice to be tethered to anything, even when it’s not so nice.
And the Berzatto family is not always so nice. From the rest of the series, we have an understanding of The Bear’s social hierarchy, starting with Carmy as apex predator, calling the shots even as he shadow boxes with the older brother who isn’t there. But in the flashback of “Fishes,” we get the hierarchy inverted: Carmy as little brother, Richie as happily married insider with the unconditional support of older brother Mikey, Natalie as self-designated caretaker of her mother, and Mikey as the one in charge who maybe/definitely can’t live up to it.
And guess who they all come from: a mother who definitely/definitely can’t live up to it. Once the shock of seeing Jamie Lee Curtis in this once-small-time FX series wears off, it’s replaced by the realization of how tough it must’ve been for the Berzatto kids to have her as a mother. That’s a harsh thing to say about someone we’ve just met, but it doesn’t take long to read the way everyone navigates around her, either handling her with kid gloves or simply steering clear.
It’s quickly obvious, if we couldn’t draw our own conclusions from the addiction problems we know her son Mikey suffered from, that there’s more going on here than just a mercurial mother. Despite Natalie’s attempts to discreetly dispose of her mother’s wine, Donna’s cup somehow stays replenished as she stresses over her ambitious Christmas dinner: the titular “Seven Fishes.” The wine certainly doesn’t help, but you get the sense that it’s only augmenting deeper problems under the surface, the kind that seem to self-perpetuatingly enable and then worsen addictive cycles.
As various family members pop in and out of the kitchen, we see Donna in any number of moods in any number of minutes, springing from rage to heartbreak to defensiveness depending on who’s talking and about what. It doesn’t take a genius to immediately spot the parallels between this chaotic environment and the one we’re used to in the present-day restaurant; the sometimes-toxic familial bonds aren’t the only thing Carmy and co. have recreated in their mother’s image. Pans clattering, jars shattering, voices raising—this is all at once very familiar and yet more primordial, the blueprint for everything that’s come after.
Though we’re just meeting Donna, we already know her in aggregate: the substance abuse and volatility we’ve seen or heard about in Mikey; the aggressive thirst for perfection she’s gifted to Carmy; even some of the caretaker instincts we see in Natalie. Donna isn’t even in that much of the episode, often lingering unseen (but not unheard) in the other room as the family gameplans how to best defuse her. But in these short, potent glimpses, we see a world—the base of a twisted oak tree, unaware just how much poison is seeping in from its roots.
Even in this flashback, we can already see the poison settling into the second generation’s branches. Of all the inheritances the siblings received from Donna, no one drew a shorter stick than Mikey, whose issues here would be apparent even if we didn’t know his ultimate fate. His charms are braided with his struggles; the same charisma that makes him such an energy source can also sour in a moment, as we see every time Uncle Lee provokes him.
But the great tragedy of Mikey is that he’s not a fully formed Donna yet. In his sweetest moment of the episode, he stops razzing Carmy to catch up with him for a moment, sincerely asking him about the culinary career everyone else has been teasing him about. We can see how much the brotherly interest means to Carmy—and how rare it is—by how much it catches him off guard. He even shyly offers Mikey a gift he made him: a drawing of the dream restaurant we know Mikey won’t live long enough to see. It’s a scene so on-the-nose that it could’ve been manipulative if handled by less skilled hands, but The Bear doesn’t have that problem. We see Mikey break down, briefly, seemingly already aware of the follow-through he won’t be strong enough to offer.
Meanwhile, the great tragedy of Donna doesn’t need to be foreshadowed; we can already read the whole story in one brutal moment. Alone in the kitchen, she sips her wine and bitterly says to herself, “they won’t miss me.” It’s a simple expression of misery, but what lends it such tragic weight is the fact that she’s probably right—but for the wrong reasons. Donna seems to believe she wouldn’t be missed because she’s inherently unlovable, but it’s really because she’s been so horrible to everyone… because she thinks they wouldn’t miss her.
It’s a cycle every bit as vicious as—and no doubt tied up in—her addiction. The chickens and eggs of her insecurities leading to her acting out leading to her drinking leading to her insecurities (ad infinitum) are as easy to recognize as they are difficult to corral, funneling into a downward spiral we can tell has worn deep groves into this family. And the worst part of these addictive cycles is that love alone isn’t always enough to pull someone out of them.
Because, of course, Donna’s also wrong—for as awful as she can be, her family is still bound to her by blood, and they wouldn’t feel fully whole without her. Multiple people in the episode try hard to reach her with this message (as hard as they’ll later try to reach Mikey, or each other), but the signal gets lost in the noise. The more we learn, the more the cacophonous kitchens these people keep creating seem like external manifestations of the violent voices within.
Not that the violence always stays contained. The episode peaks (where else) at the dinner table, as the gathered family await Donna’s entrance and rile each other up in the meantime. Specifically, Uncle Lee is back to badgering Mikey, whose earlier attempts at good big-brotherhood are no match for the war raging in his head. When Lee blows past all the obvious signs of danger, Mikey eventually snaps and throws a fork at his head, losing even the most generous sympathies at the table.
As everyone yells, pleads, begs him to back down, it’s Natalie’s love that gets the closest to succeeding—Mikey even makes eye contact with her, acknowledging the love he can’t accept—but once again, it isn’t enough to disarm him. The only thing that is enough is being usurped by the Queen Bear, Donna, who finally, gingerly, arrives. And with her: a fragile calm, the table temporarily quiet in the eye of the hurricane.
In this shelter, cousin Stevie says “grace,” which is more of an offering of gratitude for being given a space at this table—any table—no matter how fraught things get. From his unique position as outsider-turned-insider-by-marriage, he’s able to straddle the battle lines and make a profound observation in the face of the weaponized love being lobbed back and forth: we make meals to show the people we love that we love them.
This is kind of a stunning thing to say, given the circumstances, but it does so much at once: It hears Donna’s private cries about making beautiful things for her family when no one seems to be returning the favor. It reminds everyone at the table (strictly family or not) that the table they’re fighting over is a physical representation of the familial love that welcomes and includes them all. And it recontextualizes every act of cooking or meal prep that’s ever been on the show, toxic or not, as belonging to Donna’s lineage: they scream and fight and deny each other and themselves so they can put everything into the dish that’s going out the door, into the hands of someone they may never even see, much less be thanked by. How could you not be tortured over that?
Stevie’s “grace,” literalized into an olive branch big enough for the entire table, does the trick for a moment. These aren’t just strangers scrapping on the street—they’re joined by their name and by their table, the meal they’re sharing a tether that doesn’t snap even when everything else does. But alas, even family has a breaking point, and a table can only hold so much. Something about Stevie’s kindness can’t quite soothe Donna’s demons, and she gets right back to feeling unappreciated, to the point of screaming at a brokenhearted Natalie before storming out. Uncle Lee cracks a joke, Mikey throws a fork, and Donna drives her car through a wall; the house cannot hold.
Take Two
As crushing as it is that Stevie’s “grace” failed to hold back the darkness warring for purchase at Christmas dinner, The Bear isn’t done with its characters. Over the generous four episodes that close out its second season, the show gives each of these broken people the grace and the space to correct their inherited wrongs.
That starts with Richie, whose stint in “Fishes” was relatively blameless but nonetheless served as a crushing reminder of the lovely family life he’d fumble in the years to follow. In the present, he’s stuck searching for purpose, worrying to Carmy that he might not have a place in this new high-cuisine world of theirs.
Carmy’s not so convinced, and he sends Richie to stage at one of the best restaurants in Chicago in the hopes of finding that elusive purpose. And it works: after begrudgingly buying into the restaurant’s perfectionism-as-acts-of-service (or vice versa) ethos, Richie has a brief heart-to-heart with the executive chef, Terry, played as crisply yet warmly as ever by another Oscar winner, Olivia Colman.
As a perfect digestif to wash down the acid burn of “Fishes,” Richie and Chef Terry chat about their own overlapping heritages—military dads, short on affection—and choose to parse the good from them. Though neither had a great relationship with their father, they were able to salvage certain strands of their DNA (standards! respect!) and imbue them with the warmth their dads didn’t have to spare. Borrowing from Terry’s father’s approach to journaling about the little things worth noticing, Richie finds a coded purpose hidden in the simple details he has the power to affect, the forks he has the power to desmudge. By learning to live like Every Second Counts, he can ensure his time is always well spent. The right aphorism, well applied, can change lives.
This new inner peace is quickly paid forward, as Richie wastes no time in apologizing to Natalie for his various tomfoolery. Doing so must remind him of family, a subject he then broaches with his once-stabber, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri). They commiserate about being only children, but she reminds him of the family that adopted him: “It’s nice, though, that you had Carm and Nat.” He’s come a long way, so Richie returns the favor to Syd: “Yeah. Now you do too.”
The impact of “Fishes” lies in seeing a home-grown version of the toxic kitchen atmospheres Carmy and the gang have since made their habitat, and in realizing why they gravitate towards them. For better or worse, we’re drawn to what we’re used to. How much of Carmy’s culinary career has been a subconscious attempt to recreate the loud, caustic kitchens he grew up in?
But the emotional wallop of the ensuing episodes offers a more hopeful read on generational progress: maybe the kitchens always end up crazy by default, but the families that grow to fill them offer a chance to put a fresh spin on the bad recipes that get handed down. Sure, Carmy retreats into his mother’s and brother’s worst habits when he’s at his worst, but his best is better than they ever were, as he demonstrates by asking Syd and Fak for advice on how to treat his new girlfriend, Claire (Molly Gordon). He doesn’t know normal, healthy relationships, but he’s willing to learn. And as he and Sydney remind each other in one of the best scenes of the season, they’re not alone—they’ve always got a partner to hold the roof up over their head when they can’t.
Turns out, taking care of problems at home can take care of problems in business. Soon enough, with buy-in from the whole team, they’re no longer recreating a toxic family life in their restaurant, but a healthy (or at least getting healthier) one. And poetically, they get a second, five-years-later “family” dinner to prove how far they’ve come, as the new-look restaurant’s first test is an invite-only, friends-and-family service.
This is The Bear, after all, so even three episodes straight of warm-and-fuzzies aren’t enough to hold off the stress demons. They come back with a vengeance in the beginning of the finale, “The Bear,” with this season’s showstopper: a fifteen-minute “oner” that slaloms between back-of-house pandemonium and front-of-house luxury. Though every bit as virtuosic and overwhelming as season one’s “Review,” by contrast, this seamless mini-play demonstrates the progress these characters have made.
Even when mishaps inevitably happen (meals aren’t cooked right; Carmy’s locked in the freezer), the foundation they’ve built together holds. Though the night takes its toll on everyone, they make it through, earning rave reviews from their guests and fulfilling the hope of Stevie’s prayer: they made their love for friends and families manifest by cooking it into a five-star meal. After a season of self-sacrifice and self-sabotage, they’ve finally burst into the light.
…with two notable, mother-son exceptions. First, there’s Donna, for whom Natalie anxiously waits throughout the night. Despite her doting husband Pete’s (Chris Witaski) gentle encouragements to detach her idea of a successful night from her mother’s attendance, it’s clear it’s all she wants—which makes it even sadder when Pete steps outside for a moment and finds Donna dithering on the stoop.
She’s embarrassed to be spotted, but Pete quickly begs her to come in and see what her kids have pulled off. She can’t stomach it: “I love them so much. I don’t know how to show it. I don’t know how to say I’m sorry.” This is Donna, putting her finger on the cycle, facing the vortex she can’t escape. She knows she loves them, she knows she wants them to know it, she knows she just lacks the language to tell them beyond cooking them seven fishes nobody wants and driving her car through the wall.
But she also knows they’ve survived her. “I don’t deserve to see how good this is. I want them to have this good thing, and I don’t wanna hurt it.” Once again, she’s right and she’s wrong. It’s very possible, given her documented history, that she wouldn’t be able to physically restrain herself from causing a scene and undermining her kids’ success. But it’s also possible that they made this dinner—this night, this whole restaurant—in a way, for her. Someone finally made something beautiful for Donna, and she can’t bear to see it.
Inside the kitchen, her youngest son is experiencing a similar problem from the inside out. Carmy would love to see the something beautiful he’s worked so hard to make, but he’s trapped in a fridge, barricaded from enjoying his life’s work. And following in his mom’s footprints, he’s taking exactly the wrong lesson from his situation. What his accidental entrapment is really proving is that his kinder methods—empowering Sydney, believing in Richie, encouraging Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), unleashing Marcus (Lionel Boyce)—have worked, building a better system that can function even when it’s down a member or two.
But Carmy can’t see any of that, so he slides right into the familiar pattern of Mikey before him, and their mother before them: he blames himself. For dating Claire, for taking his eye off the ball, for allowing himself the pleasure he doesn’t think he deserves. Without even knowing that he’s quoting his mom from minutes earlier, he completes the cycle of Donna, castigating himself for ruining everything. Talking to himself, to Tina on the other side of the fridge, to nobody, he says, “I don’t need to provide amusement or enjoyment. I don’t need to receive any amusement and enjoyment… No amount of good is worth how terrible this feels.”
Even beyond the fact that we know what he doesn’t—that his fridge mistake ultimately cost the restaurant nothing, that they still succeeded—what makes these words extra crushing is how they tragically close an arc Carmy opened back at the beginning of the season, when he wondered aloud how he could find some happiness and thus be better equipped to provide it to others. What he doesn’t realize is that it’s mostly worked: he’s genuinely happy with Claire, and outside of some still-in-progress work-life balance calibration, that happiness has spilled over into a kitchen that’s imperfect but certainly happier than it was when he was exclusively killing himself for it. But when he should be celebrating, Carmy seems generationally cursed to be suffering; some cycles are so vicious that even when you escape them, you’re dizzy enough to think that you’re still stuck.
This resignation to asceticism in pursuit of perfection is even more crushing to watch because Carmy thinks he’s telling it to Tina, but it’s really Claire on the other side of the fridge door. Hearing him call their relationship a “waste of time,” she can only say, “I’m really sorry you feel that way, Carm.” Just as their romance began with them leaning on the same side of one fridge door, it dies with them on opposite sides of another. Despite his best efforts, Carmy has quite literally iced her out, or himself in. When Richie sees Claire with tears in her eyes, he straight-up calls Carmy “Donna,” asking him why he can’t just let something good happen for once. Why can’t a Berzatto ever make a good meal without ruining it in the end?
Maybe that problem isn’t limited to the Berzattos. For every moment of high-flying sweetness, The Bear certainly seems interested in making us pay: Sydney finally earns validation from her dad (“It’s the thing”), but it barely lands before she’s retching in the alley. Richie finds an avenue to purpose, but he can’t celebrate it with Tiffany, who’s getting remarried. Marcus finds his dessert zen, but misses a potentially devastating phone call from his mother’s nurse in the dinner rush. Perhaps, The Bear seems to be saying, nothing good can exist without its painful counterweight.
Or perhaps, the sweet and the salty all go in the same pot. We get the best news of our life on the same day we’re dumped; we walk out of a hospital and face the prettiest sunset we’ve ever seen. There’s the Berzatto way of looking at it: we don’t deserve the good, what with all the bad we’ve been a part of. Or there’s the optimistic way: the bad’s going to keep coming, so don’t we owe it to ourselves (and to each other) to keep pushing the good?
The good news is, learning that lesson and escaping the cycles that would rip it away from us probably takes closer to a lifetime than a half-season of television. The process is not linear, and it’s not over—the important thing is that Carmy and co. have started down the path, and I have nothing but the most resilient faith that they’ll keep walking it. Who knows better than a chef that one bad night can’t kill you? There’s always next service, and for the lovable denizens of The Bear, there’s always next season.