There’s Always Another Shoe

In almost every episode of The Bear’s much anticipated sophomore season, there is a montage of a whiteboard, or a wall calendar, or a notebook, or just a loose cache of Post-it notes, all touting vague tasks and events on the horizon for Carmy, Sydney, and the team that’s turning the Original Beef of Chicagoland into the Bear: Chicago Food Fare, Fire Suppression Test, invoices due, “Water, are we on this?,” the name “Terry” circled a bunch of times, STOP USING CREDIT CARD, “Suck my butt” (I think that one’s from Richie), CALL TONY, and on and on. If, in the yearlong interim since The Bear first premiered, you’ve been worried that the series may not be able to keep up the intensity and pace that made it last summer’s most unexpected TV success story … don’t be. Because in Season 2, these gorgeous, beloved, talented little hurricanes of anxiety have taken on the only task more chaotic and secondhand-stress-inducing than manning a kitchen at rush hour, the only thing that stretches the relentlessness and tension of a few hours over the course of several months instead: Carmy, Sydney, and the gang are starting a business.

I’m on record as not-a-chef, but in devouring season 1 of The Bear, I could still feel the burden of these characters churning out beef sandwiches (and, perhaps more notably, short rib risotto) in an unorganized, basically disintegrating kitchen. I could see their harried faces, hear their desperation, smell their sweat, and empathize with the personal stakes of their duties. Despite never actually working in a kitchen myself, watching Season 1 was visceral and magnetic, like a grease fire you couldn’t look away from (or put out with water—I do know that much). But Season 2? Season 2 takes the secondhand anxiety of Season 1 and turns it into a universal and all-too-internal reminder that you need to call your exterminator; that something in the highest corner of your bathroom looks a little like mold (which is getting a lot of traction in recent media cycles); that the Wi-Fi promotional rate you signed on for has lapsed, and now you’re paying double, and you probably need to talk to someone about that before you definitely go broke.

With the crew’s dip into the entrepreneurial, and literal, demolition of Season 1’s kitchen, showrunners Joanna Calo and Christopher Storer have dared to twist The Bear’s signature sense of fiery tension into a subtler but even more constant drip of dread. Few people binge-watching The Bear this weekend may have started a business before, let alone a restaurant—because, honestly, who would do that?—but we have all had a Post-it note reminding us to call Tony. We all need to call Tony this weekend. To which I say: No! I don’t want to call Tony—I want to watch The Bear! Tony only has bad news for us, and even worse? Tony’s not thinking about us at all. Our lives, and our stress, and our dread revolve around calling Tony to do the thing that he does, while Tony just goes on doing that thing, having no idea that he—and each of 100 other Post-it notes—holds the key to unlocking our joy.

But what Season 2 of The Bear slowly (and stressfully) posits … is that he doesn’t. In Episode 2, “Pasta,” Carmy confesses to his Al-Anon group that he recently Googled the word “fun”: “‘What provides amusement or enjoyment,’ that’s what it means.” Carmen tells them that opening his restaurant is providing him with zero amusement and zero enjoyment, but then immediately backtracks. He’s just having trouble being present: “Reminding myself the sky isn’t falling, that there is no other shoe—which is incredibly difficult, because there’s always another shoe.” When Season 2 picks up almost exactly where Season 1 left off, with $300,000 of tomato money and one shared ursine dream, Carmen and Sydney aren’t waxing poetic about brines or getting inspired by new flavor profiles—they’re making rudimentary drywall estimates on a pizza box, and quickly realizing that they’ll run out of money before they even get to all the permits, inspections, and licenses they’ll need to serve the food that allegedly inspired them to seek out such permits in the first place.

Most of the time, we’re waiting for that other shoe to drop just so we can move past the dread of it hanging over us, threatening to imprint a Nike swoosh on our skull with its mere theoretical existence. One of Sydney’s goals in opening the Bear is to get a Michelin star, which Carmy thinks of as nothing more than a trap. When Sydney pushes, he tells her what it felt like to receive (or more accurately, retain) a three-star rating at his last restaurant: “The first 10 seconds felt like panic because I knew I had to retain them. And your brain does this weird thing where it just bypasses any sense of joy. It just, like, attaches itself to dread … and after those shitty 10 seconds, I had to turn over a really slow table because the entire United Nations Security Council was coming in.”

The joy won’t come after those three months of calendar pages pass if the joy isn’t somewhere in between those pages too. And the great joy of this season of The Bear is watching these characters not just fight to keep their heads above water, but fight to live outside their kitchen walls. Two of the season’s standout episodes—that don’t involve Jamie Lee Curtis, may god have mercy on our souls and sedans—center on two of our favorite chefs straying far from the Bear, exploring the parts of the world that made them want to invest their time and energy into a restaurant in the first place.

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One of those, of course, features my favorite new character, “European Marcus,” who travels to Copenhagen to receive high-level pastry training and inspiration—from my other favorite new character, Luca the pastry chef, played by a startlingly handsome, understated, and already viral Will Poulter—for three new desserts for the Bear. His joy and fascination with a new country, and new food, and new methods reads all over actor Lionel Boyce’s face … as does the frequent conflict over whether he should be enjoying those things at all. Because while Marcus is thriving in Copenhagen, we’re at home watching our TVs, waiting for the other shoe: Marcus’s mom is sick, as we learn in the season’s very first scene as he methodically applies lotion to her still hands in the early morning before he leaves for work. Marcus is waiting on that too: He tells Sydney that while he’s in Copenhagen, he keeps having nightmares that his mother’s nurse is calling him to tell him his mom has died, but the calls aren’t going through …

The shoe doesn’t ultimately drop, though. And Marcus doesn’t let the dread of it overtake him, either. He sends photos of his food back home, and tries brunsviger, and sleeps on a boat. A little closer to home, Sydney powers through the dread of Carmy maybe not being a totally reliable business partner by making her way around the entire city of Chicago, trying enough local food to inspire a chef and send a layperson into a coma. To be honest, Sydney still seems pretty stressed afterward, but for The Bear itself, giving us more access to Sydney’s interiority, and palate, and place within the Chicago culinary scene is so worthwhile. She is a unique character, played with such realism by Ayo Edebiri; it’s one of those performances, and one of those episodes, that makes you think, “I don’t ever want this to end.”

That’s a feeling I’ve had with each new installment of The Bear, and it comes down to moments like these. Joy isn’t easy, and The Bear doesn’t pretend it is. The magic of this show is that it allows for the humor and the idiosyncrasies that make relationships worthwhile while also allowing for the hardships that make them human. The Bear may be the only TV show on air that briefly makes me think I’m an empath because I feel these characters’ emotions so deeply inside me—but I’m not an empath. The Bear is just overrun with gifted writers and performers.

So, yes, Season 2 somehow finds a way to be even more anxiety-inducing than Season 1, what with livelihoods and liquor licenses on the line, in addition to mental health. I’d wager to say that “Fishes” could put the tension of Season 1’s unbelievable and highly acclaimed 20-minute tracking shot into a sobbing fetal position. And yes, three months to open a restaurant sets slightly higher stakes than just keeping a restaurant open. But who would have guessed that the existential dread of ever getting the right amount of amperage for the HVAC, or passing a fire suppression test could be so perfectly balanced by these very present moments of joy? The show trains us to expect that other shoe at all times: to bypass joy and leap straight into dread. But I Googled “fun” the other day, and it was a picture of Tina singing karaoke while she explores heretofore unseen sides of her personal ambition; it was Marcus figuring out what the fuck dextrose is; it was Ebra finally getting the courage to come back; my goodness, it was Richie scream-singing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” after finding a little purpose at the bottom of a Michelin-star bucket of forks.