We finished The Bear, as much as has been released last night, and it’s now one of my favourite TV series ever. There was so much to enjoy about it: superb directing, writing and acting, great characters, subtlety, an amazing facility with taking things that are stereotyped or sentimental, and handling them with delicacy to be fresh and meaningful.
There are spoilers.
It was curious that so much online discussion of the show was that it was about toxic masculinity, whereas for me it was clearly (at least in the second season) so much about motherhood and with having a mother or not having a mother. One of the starkest moments of this was in the last episode when Richie taunts Carmy by calling him by his mother’s name, and at that moment you realise that he is in fact his mother in a way that is usually kept for women.
I have rarely seen a show with such tenderness towards its characters, combined with a clear eye watching them grope towards redemption or damnation for themselves. Like the eye of God, perhaps, certainly there was a miracle or two to keep the story going (tomato tins above all, but also the miracle of Marcus), but it really didn’t matter – not to me, and it seems, from online investigation, to not have perturbed too many. There is an almost indiscernable undercurrent of surreality about it, one that surfaces now and then.
I hear a new season is in the work, which feels a shame, as I think the second ended in a very good place. Not with many threads left resolved, in fact almost every character was unresolved, as should be.