The Bear surprised audiences by dropping a surprise episode this week, almost 11 months since its previous season aired and a month before its new season is set to release.
The show is an Emmy-winning, zeitgeist-seizing hit. The unexpected episode, then, should be so exciting.
But, oh my god, is this the most tedious and underwhelming hour of television I’ve watched in ages.
“Gary” is a standalone episode of The Bear that takes place before the events of the first season.
Written by Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal, it features their characters, the perennially spiraling Richie (Moss-Bachrach), aka “Cuz,” and Mikey (Bernthal), the brother of Carmen (Jeremy Allen White), whose death by suicide is the reason Carmy moves home and the series The Bear even exists.
Mikey’s ghost essentially haunts every episode of The Bear, and his connection to Richie is always alluded to, if not ever really excavated. So this flashback episode is meant to give context to their relationship and the trauma they inevitably unearth in each other. The episode, however, is a case study in why it’s sometimes better to reference and not show. What an unpleasant episode of television this was.
The premise barely sustains the nearly hour-long runtime.
On the eve of his child’s birth, Richie joins Mikey on what seems like some sort of illicit “drop off” of goods, traveling from Chicago to Gary, Indiana, with the precious cargo. They chat in the car. They chat in a bar. In the climax, Mikey delivers a drugged-out, drunken roasting of what an idiot Richie is.
Outside of that monologue, which, ostensibly, is supposed to be the piece that completes the puzzle for The Bear fans who wondered about the specifics of Richie and Mikey’s relationship, the episode is one of The Bear’s trademark “slice-of-life” portraits.
As a result, the series indulges in all of its most insufferable and irritating trademarks.
Sure, it’s remarkable how good Moss-Bachrach and Bernthal are at portraying working-class people joshing each other, bickering, and just getting through the day’s most mundane tasks, like driving from one city to another, or drinking at a bar. But the reason we don’t often see those things in TV shows is because of how epically boring it is.
Yes, I was impressed with how uncanny these actors are as salt-of-the-earth Chicagoans. No, watching them just simply chit-chat is not entertaining. Especially because they are like some actors’ fetish version of what blue-collar people would be. It’s semi-realistic, but mostly actors orgasming at the chance to play “real people,” to the point that they wrote their own one-hour episode to do so.
On The Bear, Richie is intriguing in doses. Mikey is fascinating in flashback. A whole episode of their energy is far too much.
They’re the guys who your friend brings to the hangout at the bar and takes over the conversation, even though they don’t know anyone, and are insufferably annoying. But after six or seven beers, you take one of them home and sleep with them because they’re kind of cute.
My friend Saloni Gajjar described why this episode was so irritating perfectly in her assessment for The AV Club: “‘Gary’ doubles down on some of The Bear’s self-indulgent storytelling impulses: characters yelling at or over each other constantly, lazily written interactions (why in the world is Ireland’s Sherri waxing poetic about trees to Mikey?), and a visual aesthetic that has gone from gritty to gimmicky with its close-up shots. Crucially, the show doesn’t seem to trust its audience’s intelligence to grasp a fairly simple anecdote it’s been telling since 2022.”
“Indulgent” is the perfect word to describe the episode.
The Bear, for all of its acclaim and all of the discourse it inspired, may be the most precarious show on TV.
Its first season was such a powder keg of intensity and stress that it makes sense it exploded the way it did. But maintaining that has, for the show, been a constant balancing act. How much of the screaming anxiety is compelling versus headache-inducing and annoying?
To make the obvious comparison, it’s like a great dish of food. Seasoning is an acute exercise of perfection. Too much salt and it’s unpalatable. Too little and it’s so bland that it’s not even worth consuming.
It’s a corner The Bear has boxed itself into it. The word we’ve been using, “indulgent,” is both a compliment and a criticism in the restaurant world, just as it is in TV. The connotation is in the eye of the consumer. This one (me) hated it.
