Pop Culture Advent 2023: Door 4
This post contains spoilers for The Bear season 1.
The Bear season 2
The Bear was back! One of the televisual hits of 2022, The Bear tells the story of chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), who returns home to Chicago, to run his family’s Italian sandwich shop after the suicide of his elder brother Michael. The first season saw Carmy deal with his brother’s debts, family trauma, the failing shop, and his own mental health.
Season 1 ended with Carmy finding over $300,000 hidden by his late brother in soup cans in the kitchen. Now fully solvent, Carmy and his staff decided to close the sandwich shop, and use the money to open a restaurant instead – called The Bear.
Much of the season deals with the stress of getting the restaurant up and running. This coincides with Carmy digging deeper to process his past trauma.
One memorable flashback episode (“Fishes”) is set over a particularly fraught family gathering at Christmas is in equal parts shocking, anxious, as it is darkly hilarious. The Bear season 2 has a number of famous cameos (Olivia Coleman, Will Poulter), but most notably that episode has Jamie Lee Curtis playing the grotesque character of Carmy’s mother, with John Mulaney, Oliver Platt, and Sarah Paulson as various family members.
I really appreciate The Bear’s commitment to keeping Carmy’s and Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri) relationship platonic. Having been hired in season one as the shop’s newest member of staff, Sydney and Carmy were at loggerheads over the direction of the business. Now much more established, she is his right hand (wo)man. It may not be a romantic relationship, but in many ways it’s better, it’s the kind of relationship we don’t often see, and that’s all the better for it. It would also be remiss of me not to point out Ayo Edebiri’s excellent work elsewhere. I found her hilarious in this summer’s Theater Camp, and she also recently appeared in Bottoms, which I’ve heard really good things about.
Other stand outs in the cast include Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Richie, best friend of Carmy’s late brother, and affectionately referred to as ‘Cousin’, and Abby Elliot as Carmy’s sister Sugar, who is also project manager of the new restaurant.
In one memorable scene, a very stressed out and heavily pregnant Sugar is made an omelette by Sydney. It may seem like a simple dish, but it’s made with such care, that it serves as a reminder of how healing food can be. It also made me extremely hungry and I appreciate that the recipe has been posted here:
The Bear can be found on Disney+ in the UK, and was recently renewed for a third season.
Pop Culture Advent Door Three — Angela Bassett Did The Thing
