The Bear handles COVID better than just about any other show
Perhaps the most underrated feat of The Bear's second season is how it tastefully toasts the real restaurants Chicago lost
TV Features The Bear
The merits of The Bear’s second season have already been picked over like a lovingly assembled charcuterie board—by us as much as anyone else. Still, one morsel has remained oddly untouched, which, like a sprig of rosemary or pot of honey, may not be the flashiest item in the bunch, but elevates the whole array subtly and importantly. That is the decision by showrunners Christoper Storer and Joanna Calo to introduce the pandemic into the background of the story, a move that easily could have come across as jarring and underbaked. Instead, it was handled with the delicate finesse of a Michelin Star chef. (And, yes, I’ll cool it on the food metaphors for a bit.)
No one wants to focus on the existence of the pandemic while watching their favorite shows. Rather, viewers are often looking for a break from the painful ongoing realities of the world (yet another small miracle we should thank film and television writers for). And when pesky real-life issues turn up in our fictional escapes—à la all that cringy Hillary Clinton stuff on Broad City in 2016—it can be best for both the series and audiences alike to move on and pretend it never happened.
Another case in point (and one tackling the actual pandemic): You. I distinctly remember turning into the blinking white guy meme during its third-season premiere in 2021. Joe (Penn Badgley) had just moved to the ritzy suburb of Madre Linda, California, with his wife and newborn son. In his typically snarky voiceover, he profiles the neighborhood’s queen bee (Shalita Grant) by saying, “In August 2020, she had a massive party while the rest of us were home clutching hand sanitizer,” and apparently the whole town got their hands on a secret vaccine meant for the Queen of England and thus were “immune to COVID.”
Looking far beyond how this suggests viewers are to implicitly align themselves with a murderous lunatic on a contentious issue affecting almost the entire global population, it also threw the whole timeline and reality of the show into question. If the gap between seasons two and three lasted approximately the nine-month duration of Love’s (Victoria Pedretti) pregnancy, and now not a single mask is to be seen on the streets (much less in Love’s delivery room), did August 2020 happen in some sort of an alternate reality Joe taps into to make fun of rich people?
Are we meant to believe that these two bitter spouses with a murder problem actually quarantined together? And survived? I had never questioned the convenience of Love suffering from the same killer affliction as Joe, or even their basement fish tank-stalker cage, but this? This was far too much. It made what used to be a silly little diversion—that’s a compliment—feel at once too real and not real enough.
The Bear, however, is the rare series that benefits from this injection of the real, outside world. In an ace montage, there’s an onslaught of headlines about the shuttering of another restaurant due to COVID, with red “permanently closed” labels on Apple Maps and rapidly shuffling “for lease” signs as Sydney scrolls in episode three (“Sundae”) before embarking on her epic Chicago food tour. And it hits as hard as any pre-apocalypse segment. It also serves as a tidy and devastating in memoriam to the dozens of real Chicago restaurants overcome by the joint demands of the pandemic and recession. (The first of these closures shown in said montage—that of a German/Southern-fusion restaurant called Funkenhausen that embodied Syd’s “chaos cooking” ethos—only had its last service in March. So the pain still feels incredibly fresh.)
The pandemic is only explicitly referenced once more in the series, in the excellent episode “Forks.” Richie responds to stage boss Garrett’s (Andrew Lopez) chastising with a retort of “Nice try. You think I don’t know how hard it is hiring people since COVID?” And the dialogue’s effects hang like a specter over the entire season, as they should. While Storer and Calo certainly didn’t need to plop The Bear into our grim reality, even those of us not remotely involved in the restaurant industry get why it’s so hard to open a Michelin-adjacent dining experience right now.
By making this struggle explicit, the show only deepens our empathy (and anxiety) for all that the Berzattos & Co. have to overcome to get this thing off the ground. What’s more, it lets these characters stand in for and pay homage to all the real-life Carmys and Sydneys whose stories may otherwise go untold. It’s a genuinely moving tribute and hopefully one that we’ll start to see more of as other industry-specific shows (à la Superstore, which also introduced the pandemic to great effect in its final season) begin to reckon with the world we live in now.
45 Comments
On the subject of people losing their businesses because of the lockdowns, The New York Times just published a VERY interesting article. Remember that “far-right conspiracy theory” that covid deaths were being overcounted? That hospitals were counting people who died WITH as having died FROM covid, no matter the cause of death? Well, guess what kids! It’s been confirmed by none other than the New York Times.https://archive.is/A1pp2 (original link is paywalled)From paragraph 17:“The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”LMAO! We ruined the economy, and destroyed peoples’ lives based on false data. People lost their livelihoods and ended up homeless because hospitals fudged the numbers by A THIRD!
This is absolutely false and should be deleted by the moderators. Excess deaths is the only meaningful metric given the incomplete availability of tests and understanding of the sequelae of infection, and it’s not even in debate among serious mortality experts — COVID-19 caused more deaths than the official counts affirm.
SIDEBAR: Y’know what’d be fun? Legitimately ANY explanation as to why or how people are locked into GOP shit at this point. Like, FROM THEM.I was raised under the umbrella of the GOP. I was the most conservative I’ve ever been directly *after* undergrad. And I got to see the GOP devolve into a u-trap for the worst grifters and most policy-averse fuckos on the planet. I got to see them devolve from the party of William F. Buckley into the party of deeply weird carnival barkers obsessed with obliterating critical thinking. I got to see them actively coerce their base into voting against policies that benefit them, under the pretense that it’d hurt the “liberal agenda.”Like…what’s the fucking appeal here? Do people obsess over strangers’ genitalia THAT fucking much? Is the concept so fucking brain breaking that they’ll forsake all else in pursuit of killing it? Because I look at their policy positions and I see the same failed shit that they’ve been trying for actual decades.
but the mods love her
I’ve been wondering whether whole excess deaths is the best metric, or if the age of those who died should be taken into account. E.g. on a statistical level, it’s clearly more damaging to a society to lose X people who each had 50 years of life left than X people who each had 5 years of life left. (This is not meant to minimize those losses, especially to the family members of those who died.)
It’s actually not “absolutely false”.You’re definitely a really good person for wanting things you disagree with on a political level to be wiped out of existence.
My mother died “with COVID” not “from COVID” although it was COVID that did her in along with her existing heart condition. People still died. Without shutdown more would have died.
I’m sorry for your loss. Your mom is not one of the deaths that were falsely attributed to covid.HOWEVER. We’re talking about hospitals running covid tests on people who died from car crashes and gunshot wounds, so they could falsely list covid as a cause of death. This was a thing that actually happened throughout the lockdowns.
Be quiet you boring liar.
NoItFuckingDidNotYou
Nutjob
Cool. Your opinion means very little.
“Without shutdown more would have died.”That’s actually very debatable. Sweden didn’t shut down at all and did better than almost every other country in Europe as a result.
Not sure what a rightwing covid denier is doing lurking around the AV Club, but here:“Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official RECENT Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.Even so, some Americans are still dying from Covid. “I don’t know anybody who thinks we’re going to eradicate Covid,” Jha said.Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white.Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic.”Recent! They’re talking about deaths likely in 2023 or at the earliest late 2022, and you are talking about deaths in 2020 and 2021 to try to confirm your bias, as evidence for a conspiracy theory you likely eagerly bought into in the first days of covid.
“…almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths…”I’m curious what “recent” means. The past 6 months? Year? Depending on the timeframe, I’d be careful about jumping to the conclusion that numbers have been inflated by 1/3 all along (esp. the early days when hospitalizations/deaths were astronomical).
Are you on some kind of weird troll training program where you have to start by haunting the barely functional comment section of an entertainment site?
Do you send screenshots to the underside of a bridge somewhere hoping they’ll give you a username and password for Twitter?
It’s funny because the dude’s crowing about something that we knew was happening THEN. This is not “news,” it’s barely even a “gotcha.”What’s true is that we should have had a better plan for shutdowns, and a more targeted stimulus. Did I need a stimulus check? Not really. Did my buddy who works three different “side hustle” gigs to make ends meet need it? Yep. He probably could’ve done with his AND mine.But we had no national plan, and we’re a foresight-averse country made up of 50 smaller countries that more than occasionally react to destabilizing events in the manner of toddlers.
It’s probably because he knows there’s no moderation whatsoever. Dude always posts conspiracy nonsense and bigotted shit. His avatar is just the “I identify as an attack helicopter” joke that transphobes love.
I suppose. Kind makes it even more pathetic, though, right? Dude can’t even troll well enough to avoid places where they actually give a fuck about the comment section.
Be quiet you boring liar.
I knew when I clicked on this story there would some conspiracy theorizing goober in the comments.
I can’t wait till the next round of small pox makes its return. Or
Marburg takes the stage! Then we won’t have to hear from fuck wits like
that.
I have seen your bullshit anti-covid talking points of three years now. A having a virus that is known to weaken the immune system, cause major internal organ damage (heart, lungs, reproductive, brain) and nervous system damage, and you die, yes does mean that COVID is part of cause of death. If you have cancer and get into a car accident, and die, the Cancer still brings you down enough to no be able to recover. Get back to us when you stop parroting shitty studies (yes the NYT has been doing a lot of that) and get back to us with the studies that show that COVID deaths were greatly underreported by as much a x10, because hospitals have not had the full capacities to do proper pathology/diagnostic testing. The economy was not ruined, it is in fact impossible to ruin the economy. That is basic Econ 101 stuff.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Please be quiet.
The only deaths that match up to Covid in 2020/2021, even at 1/3 of the count for covid associated deaths, are non-infectious disease and accidents…
Not sure what point you’re trying to prove, but “LMAO!” I guess. Twat.
All you do is post garbage.
“We overcounted the deaths!!! It’s just a coincidence that 25% more people died during covid due to random reasons that had nothing to do with covid and only during covid.”Okay, bud. The inevitability of massive spikes in deaths and mass graves and overburdened hospitals that had nothing to do with a pandemic that happened at the exact same time.And there was actually a covid UNDERCOUNT in New York City.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/01/us-covid-surge-cases-ratehttps://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/covid-19-deaths-in-the-us-continue-to-be-undercounted-research-shows-despite-claims-of-overcounts/The reality is that capitalists think the solution to problems caused by capitalism is more capitalism and not social services, so they pretend that very obvious things that other countries can easily solve are unmanageable and that the consequences are unavoidable.
You’re not an intelligent person. Sorry you feel the need to justify a political overreaction years later because you feel personally attacked by it for some reason.
LOVED how they incorporated the pandemic into this show AND Superstore. This one felt subtle at first yet became a bigger part of the “plot” over time while Superstore just smacks the hell out of you with it, to great effect.
Shameless & Always Sunny both covered COVID really well, especially since they both made entire seasons out of it.
Out of eight paragraphs in this article, three of them are about an entirely different show. Is this a sample piece to get a job writing for a Disney+ Star Wars show?
You’re damn lucky I wasn’t drinking anything when I read your comment. Take your star.
The article is about how a show did something different than other shows, they should be talking about those other shows, shouldn’t they?
“Talking” about shows (plural) would be one thing. Devoting 40% of your article to an entirely different show is just poor planning.
We could also talk about how thin eight paragraphs is in general compared to the in-depth FYC pieces from the AVClub of old, but we probably don’t need to go that far.
In 2021, every movie and TV show assumed we would want storylines about the pandemic, when in reality we wanted anything but. We’re still filtering through all that stuff – The Simpsons finally aired their ‘lockdown’ episode earlier this year, and it felt positively ancient. The worst offender was Knives Out 2, a movie that had absolutely zero need to take place during the pandemic, but for some reason they felt they needed to shoehorn it in.
This show just KILLS it with storytelling. Like, actual, real deal, “trust your fucking audience” storytelling. They show more than they tell, and they expect that you’ll keep up.
I really loved the episode focused on Richie this season. It was so good.
I loved the nod towards a complex backstory between the Danish chef and Carmie that was never spelled out, as just one example.
I’m just surprised this show is doing so well with American viewers. It’s very diverse, urban, features non-traditional lead characters. It also depicts intense scenes of traumatic mental disorders and physical/mental abuse. All very polarizing and controversial topics right now. Maybe its the forbidden fruit of those topics that has drawn so many to the show. Either way, The Bear is great and really captures restaurant life/personal life unfiltered.
The supposed “politics” of the characters and the shows makeup has never even occurred to me. I just love the show and the music and the sets and the food world it is portraying.
I mean, to be blunt, it’s probably a show that does really well with (e.g.) educated urban liberals and less well with (e.g.) less-educated rural conservatives.
The more diverse a show is, typically the more popular it is. This has been a well-known fact of television for about fifteen years.There’s a reason CBS is filled with fifty cop shows that are half women and mostly minority and why The Big Bang Theory out of nowhere just added four women to its main cast. They’re not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, they’re doing it for money.This also applies to movies (see: the Fast and Furious series, Star Wars, the inexplicable economic success of the Snyderverse despite bad reviews, and in the Snyderverse’s wake with Suicide Squad, Justice League, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman the rapid expansion of diverse casting in the MCU). But movies rely less on advertising dollars and more on handshakes and BS to get funding for production.Basically, Go Woke Go Broke hasn’t been a thing since the 1960’s. The people saying this were just incredibly angry that the opposite was increasingly, obviously true.
“The more diverse a show is, typically the more popular it is. This has been a well-known fact of television for about fifteen years.”
This is one of the dumbest things i’ve ever seen written. You realize this is wholly made up by your diseased mind right?
Jesus, can someone tell me if the whole show looks like this? Because that teal-orange color grading looks terrible. Seriously, I thought I was watching Hot Tub Time Machine for a second.
season 2 of both “this way up” and “love life” did great job of representing covid as well.
They also threw in a line about COVID in season 1 when Carmy discovered that his brother/Richie were dealing drugs out of the back. I think Richie said “how do you think we made it through COVID?”