The Bear.

I avoided watching The Bear for a long time because A) my toxic trait is I am put off by anything too popular and B) it seemed like a show about a moody White boy telling everybody what to do. But then I, along with the rest of the country, became intrigued by Ayo Edebiri—her hilarious SNL sketches, her equally hilarious role in the queer high school movie Bottoms. I saw her in some sketches with Rachel Sennott, who I loved in the movie Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Around the same time, Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott were showing up again and again in one of my favorite genres: stories about women who are unhinged and ridiculous but still somehow very whole. 

So anyway, I and the rest of the world became an Ayo Edebiri fan, and I knew that The Bear had won a bunch of awards, so I thought why not just give it a chance? (For context, I did not watch Stranger Things until years after it came out because too many people kept saying how good it was. I’ve realized recently that sometimes people talk about things en masse because they are good, and therefore even if I want to be someone who comes across things on my own, a lot of these things could just quite possibly be worth the hype.) 

I thought The Bear was going to be this like White-centered show—this show about a White guy who comes in and helps all of the people of color who cannot help themselves. But the show is way more complicated than that and is not about race in an obvious way but is definitely racially aware in the sense that it gives all of the characters both endearing and annoying traits—no one is fully better than anybody else. Yes, the main guy—Carmy—is coming from a high-end kitchen to this hole in the wall place that’s nothing like what he’s used to, but the reason he’s there is complicated and the reason he’s staying is complicated and he’s too independent to ask for help and is definitely in no place to be anybody’s White savior. 

Ayo Edebiri’s character Sydney, who deserves all the hype, also comes from a fancy kitchen background and so has her own ambitions, which propel the things she does for others. She does not help for the sheer pleasure of helping. She is a Black woman in a kitchen, yes, but she’s in touch with herself, helps out other people only because cooking is an art form to her, one that she’s good at, one that she has plans to take as far as she can. She pushes these plans on others, is insistent in what she wants. 

This show is really interesting because as racially diverse as it is—there’s also Marcus, the bakery chef who becomes increasingly focused on making the perfect donut— it’s not really about race. It’s not colorblind or ignoring race in some weird elephant in the room way, it’s just that everybody is so specific that you don’t really think about it as much. I don’t know how they did it, but The Bear—in my opinion—is worth watching just for that reason. I’ve only seen the first season so far, so maybe it’s different as it goes on, but in this season at least, the characters are individualized and un-symbolic in a way that is very refreshing to see.

Maybe part of what makes this possible is how the characters seem to align and connect on a class level. Again, not in any super conscious, obvious way, not in a way that erases race by categorizing everybody only by class (in the way that feminism can be problematic by being colorblind)—what I mean is that the characters are used to hustling, and privilege isn’t something they have a lot of, which makes them maybe more in touch with the people around them, at least when it comes to racial difference. They are grounded maybe in the practical more than they are in the symbolic, are able to see people for who they are and not just for who they represent. 

That said, when Carmy and Richie interact with Carmy’s brother-in-law who comes from more money, at first, to them, he is what he seems. Somebody says he looks like he’s going to call the cops on us, and this complicates Whiteness, splits it a bit by class. While the brother-in-law later gets a moment to become more complicated too, this class angle was interesting to me. It doesn’t deny Whiteness as White privilege, but it does make it a bit more specific. The show suggests, maybe, that White people can be very different from each other while, at the same time, not exonerating anyone—again, none of the main characters are only good. 

I loved the specificity of The Bear: in the characters, in the dialogue, in the plotlines. It’s a weirder show that I’d anticipated, and things go left in ways that I didn’t see coming. As late as I am to the party, I’m excited to watch the second season, to watch more seasons when they drop, to admit—begrudgingly—that sometimes when people go ga ga over something, it might be worth it to perk up an ear, to listen, at least, to what they have to say.

Image: FX on Hulu / RB Casting

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Ayo Edebiri in the SNL skit “School Hypnotist”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpJQ-1fzhio&t=175s

Ayo and Rachel are Single: “The Dating Trends That Put Ghosting to Shame”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYF8YhIEWjM