Why <em>The Bear</em> Is So Hard to Watch

For all the time The Bear spends gazing at its protagonist, Jeremy Allen White’s seraphic, tormented chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, I’m hard-pressed to say what its third season has imparted about him that we didn’t already know. Where the show once offered an array of small details that brought Carmy to life—he stuttered as a child; he collects vintage denim; he can make his own Sprite from scratch—of late, it’s felt less like a character study than a series of psychological diagnoses, a portrait of pain rather than a person. The Bear is still extraordinarily artful; it experiments with form and style in Season 3 in ways that seem strikingly modernist for scripted television. But the show also appears less interested in telling a story than in offering an immersive trip for viewers into the recesses and faulty wiring of Carmy’s brain. We’re subsumed, for better and worse, in The Bear’s trauma plot.

To my knowledge, Christopher Storer’s FX series never uses the word trauma, as if to signal its detachment from our current obsession with therapy-speak and armchair diagnoses. (I stopped short for fully five minutes last week to mull a meme that read, “Babe, you’re not an ‘empath,’ you have ptsd from an unstable household and are sensitive to emotional change as a defense mechanism.”) The Bear, in fact, winks at this kind of discourse constantly. Before heading into the hospital to have her baby, Carmy’s sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), is seen listening to a self-help audiobook about the four types of dysfunctional family roles: enabler, scapegoat, hero, lost child. When Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) screams at Carmy in one of infinite shouting matches this season, he does so with weaponized analytical flair: “You’re not fully integrated. Don’t talk to me until you’re integrated, jagoff.” At the end of last season, as the opening night for Carmy’s new restaurant descended into absolute carnage, The Bear presented a triptych of different coping mechanisms among three of its male characters: Pete (Chris Witaske) crying, Josh (Alex Moffat) smoking crack by the dumpsters, Carmy shutting down emotionally while stuck inside a highly symbolic fridge.

Somehow, though, the meaning and implications of trauma have become the only subject The Bear wants to explore—a focus that makes the new season frustrating to watch. Across its 10 episodes, there’s little space for crucial dramatic elements like characterization, plot, and comedy. (The overreliance on slapstick scenes featuring the unwieldy Fak clan this season seems like an attempt to convince us that The Bear is still funny, even as every other character is mired in grief, burnout, and despair.) The show is overwhelmingly filtered through what appear to be Carmy’s experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifests itself in flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, debilitating anxiety, and bursts of rage.

[Read: It’s easy to get lost in ‘The Bear’]

The first episode, “Tomorrow,” is a fragmented tour of his mental state in the days after The Bear’s disastrous opening, scored by the same repetitive musical refrain. In darkness, he arrives at the restaurant the day after first service, the floral arrangements wilting and the tables cluttered with dirty glasses. As he works, we see flashbacks to Carmy’s various jobs at three-starred restaurants, replete with big-name cameos and meaningful lessons. Carmy is mentored by the legendary French chef Daniel Boulud, who tells him to listen for the “music” of ingredients cooking at exactly the right tempo, and by Olivia Colman’s Chef Terry, who chides him when he raises his voice at another chef in her kitchen. He’s also incessantly hazed by a chef named Fields (Joel McHale), whose abusive techniques seem to have imprinted on Carmy in harrowing and cyclical ways.

On television, an overreliance on flashbacks is usually a tell that a show is running out of narrative momentum. Here, though, The Bear appears to be sincerely intent on probing its central character’s damage, regardless of the risk of seeming stuck. Stylistically, the show’s bravado on this front is admirable; watching shot after shot of Carmy plating a particular piece of hamachi, we’re left to wonder where creative genius ends and repetitive compulsion begins. But The Bear’s relentless rooting of itself in Carmy’s psyche becomes hard to endure. In previous seasons, the show has circled rather than spelled out the reality of his unstable childhood: his absent father, his brother’s struggles with drug abuse and death by suicide, his mother’s erratic mood swings and violent outbursts. As the new season progresses, everything comes to a head in ways that test credulity. In Season 1, as Carmy and his sous-chef, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), first discussed their vision for The Bear, they bonded over the idea of a “different” kind of restaurant kitchen, one that wasn’t, in Sydney’s words, “a toxic hierarchical shit show.” Now, under enormous stress, rather than reject Fields’s tactics Carmy emulates them, creating an unpredictable, unstable kitchen that sees Sydney sidelined and beaten down and the line chef Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) struggling to meet his standards.

There’s little by way of relief. No joy, no episode like Season 2’s “Forks,” where Richie found transcendence in attention to detail and a Taylor Swift–scored realization of purpose. Even the food—where the show’s genuine fascination with cooking as a creative art has shone spectacularly—is hardly noted. In another flashback, the American restaurateur Thomas Keller talks to Carmy about the legacies that restaurant kitchens create, via a family tree of chefs taking what they’ve learned out into their own kitchens. But all Carmy is passing on to his chefs at the moment is panic disorder and peptic ulcers. And in The Bear’s commitment to rendering his haunted frame of mind, it ends up feeling similarly static and repetitive, caught in a loop the same way he is.

There’s still a good amount to admire this season, just not much to enjoy. Edebiri and Moss-Bachrach are producing some of the best scenes of silent anguish on television since Jeremy Strong in Succession, though they’re underserved by the story’s backward focus. But “Ice Chips,” in which Natalie prepares to give birth while confronting her mother about aspects of her childhood that she refuses to repeat with her own child, hints at how the show could approach its announced but unscheduled fourth season. “I don’t want her scared like I was scared,” Natalie says of her daughter. “I just don’t want her to feel the way that I felt.” In the parenting realm, this impulse is called “breaking the cycle”: intentionally abandoning the discipline and coping mechanisms you might have absorbed as a child and instead offering your own children acceptance and unfailing emotional support. As a practice, it applies to Carmy, too, who realizes he’s failing catastrophically as a leader and mentor but is unable to do anything about it. “If I were gonna leave something behind, I would want it to be panic-less, anxiety-free,” he tells Marcus (Lionel Boyce) in the episode “Legacy.” “To make it good, I would have to filter out all the bad.” There’s still reason to hope that in Season 4, he can pull it off.