I Regret To Inform You That I Didn't Like The Finale Of "The Bear"
Carmy's stellar monologue aside
When I started The Bear, I, like many others, thought, “This show is excellent, I will make it my entire personality.” As a whole, it’s gotten pretty rave reviews, both because it’s great TV and because it realistically shows kitchen life in a way that we haven’t seen before.
The Bear felt like it often had theatrical tendencies, particularly in the ways that it showcased its actors. The scenes often veered on the longer side, with few cuts, and the camera would hold the focus on a certain actor even if they were just the one listening rather than speaking. There’s lots of character work, lots of dysfunctional family dynamics, and lots of emotions bubbling under the surface of everyday interactions. I thought this would continue through the end of the season, as plays can sometimes have uncomfortable, uncertain endings. No one leaves Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf thinking, “How nice, they all lived happily ever after.” And in fairness to TV, finales don’t always tie everything up nicely either, The Sopranos being perhaps the most famous example of an ambiguous ending.
All this to say, it seemed like an odd decision for the season finale of The Bear to wrap as cleanly as it did. Using a deus ex machina, no matter how clever or how enjoyable — and believe me, I did enjoy chefs gleefully tearing open tomato cans and pulling out wads of cash — feels like a disservice to the theme of the show. If the close ups of broken eggs and dirty ovens have shown us anything, it’s that this show wants to fly fairly close to realism. That means characters acting like assholes, things failing and then failing again even harder (seriously, how many times can the meat deliveries get messed up at this restaurant?), and, importantly, no easy answers. This is not a show where the issues of each episode are easily fixed by the time the credits roll, this is a show about people who have big, deep problems that are going to take a lot of hard work to solve.
I’m not saying I want characters to suffer for no reason, or that I wanted the finale to end with everyone dying a violent, fiery death. What I am saying, though, is that the ending felt too neat, like a happy ending for the sake of closure and comfort. But throughout the season, there was never a moment where a perfect solution was presented that would solve everything. More often than not, characters were stuck in different situations and had to just feel their way through until they got out of it. Did they pick the right path? The wrong one? Impossible to say. And you know what? Good! I didn’t come to this show expecting easy answers, and it felt realistic that the characters would just try and juggle their problems as best they could.
The final scene, with everyone eating pasta together in a big family meal, felt like it wanted to press a particular emotional button. “Look, everyone’s happy and everything is ok!” And that’s all well and good, but I don’t actually think everyone needs to be happy and everything needs to be ok. Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) has to acknowledge some of the horrible things she said to Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)! Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sugar (Abby Elliott) still have a lot of work to do grieving their brother! Richie needs to heal his relationship with his ex and his daughter! These are not five-minute conversations that end in a handshake, these are long, hard, jagged journeys that take years, decades even, to get under control.
It’s ironic, because Carmy’s emotional monologue towards the top of the episode is actually a more powerful indicator of growth than the big dinner at the end. In finally talking about his relationship with his brother — how close they were as kids, how their estrangement pushed him career-wise, and how Carmy didn’t know his brother was an addict until too late — it became clear that this was Carmy’s happy ending. For the entire season, Carmy was unable to face his grief head-on. He didn’t talk much about it and tried to push it out of his system through work. He was guarded, walking everywhere shoulders-first and rarely cracking a smile. To see him open up and actually talk about his feelings (again, for seven minutes) felt like real movement. It felt well-earned. And it wasn’t because some money fell from the sky or because someone swooped in to save him, it was because he had spent a season trying and failing and trying and failing and was finally making some progress.
Am I excited for season two of The Bear? Certainly. But I hope it’s confusing and difficult and covered in dirt and grime, because that’s what makes it real.