Welcome to day one of Together, Alone. To celebrate our debut, we're publishing three pieces today. Starting Thursday, we'll begin our weekly publishing schedule.
Discussed: The Bear, Cheers, Atlanta, Sex and the City, Bruce Hornsby and the Range
The second season of The Bear opens with the sound of a life support machine. A shot of a patient in a hospital bed, face unseen, fades in. The silhouette of a dining room chair suggests this is home care, not a hospital. The character Marcus (Lionel Boyce) enters, sits, talks to the patient. Cut to the bitter outdoors of Chicago winter. Marcus scrapes ice off his windshield then drives toward the skyscrapers of the city center.
The sequence, with its plaintive pace and visual detail, wouldn’t be out of place in a movie or in any buzzy TV drama from the last fifteen or so years. What comes next is more unusual, at least for streaming.
From a ground-level view of Marcus’s car, the show cuts to aerial shots of Chicago. The first piano notes of Bruce Hornsby’s “The Show Goes On” plays. The camera drifts around buildings. The song’s drums kick in over footage of the L train. We see the sign that marked the restaurant—the show’s central location—coming down as the stars look up in thought.
Even on first viewing, this sequence felt familiar. The late-‘80s piano-driven music and establishing shots moving from general to specific reminded me of the sitcoms I grew up watching. I imagined the opening continuing into character introductions. Here’s Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, giving orders to chefs in the kitchen. Here’s Ayo Edebiri as Sydney, walking through the dining room door and dropping a stack of trays. Here’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach as cousin Richie, running an extension cable from the neighbors to steal electricity. This didn’t happen. Instead, we get white block text on a black background: The Bear. Part II.
Because The Bear is a very good show, it gets compared to other very good shows of recent years—programs that would once be called “prestige” but are now simply the standouts in a universe of shows with glossy production, sequential stories, and occasional full-season drops on streaming services. The Bear is worthy of the comparison, especially in appearance and quality. But in many ways, its analogs are the half-hour sitcoms that once filled broadcast TV lineups. On the most basic level, it’s a half-hour show with recurring characters, a central location, and jokes based on the situations that arise when those characters interact at that location. But The Bear shares more than a basic definition with sitcoms, it shares their DNA, their structure, and their appeal.
Calling The Bear a sitcom might seem like a quibble over taxonomy, but it’s a sign of hope. It’s proof that a beloved form hasn’t been lost in the nonsensical business model and aggressive seriousness of television today. The Bear is refreshing. It is a fulfillment of prestige TV’s promise that larger home screens, empowered showrunners, time-shifting technology, and risk-taking networks would raise the overall quality of television, turning it from a medium that might aspire to be cinematic into one with its own language and artistry.
There have been funny shows in this new era. Ten years ago, Emily Nussbaum drew a timeline of prestige TV that placed Sex in the City near the beginning. But, as Nussbaum writes, the show was less a sitcom and more “a bold riff on the romantic comedy.” Atlanta was very funny, but episodes were structured more like art films1. Many modern shows have stylistic counterparts in film or earlier eras of television. Shifts in business, technology, and audience expectations have turned modern television into a transmogrifying machine in which the results are, if not better, then at least in the style of the times. Put in Dallas and out comes Succession. When this machine isn’t updating old forms, it’s repeating new ones, churning out a never-ending supply of dramas that tell two hours of story over twelve episodes.
Just as this machine began rumbling into action, sitcoms underwent their own stylistic revolution, which changed the way they told stories and delivered jokes. Arrested Development deployed gags, plots, and performances that couldn’t work if the show had been shot like a stage play. Soon, the three-camera setup and live audience were gone. Even The Drew Carey Show went single-camera in its final season. The Office (both U.K. and U.S.) made mockumentary the other de facto style for weekly comedies. This persisted through Parks and Recreation and is still viable for What We Do in the Shadows and the excellent Abbott Elementary.
The Bear is lit, shot, and edited like a drama; it dispenses with many of the visual elements of a sitcom—flat lighting, corny introduction shots of characters. It retains something more essential. The Bear is written like a classic sitcom, one with characters with very different personalities whose relationships form and evolve in front of us, laying a groundwork for the jokes. When the show begins, we don’t know how these people know each other, beyond the occasional mentions of “uncle” or “cousin” and the shared workplace. By season two, characters are paired in ways that allow jokes and plot to move simultaneously. A restaurant renovation sequence is funny in large part because we’ve seen the two characters leading the project—Richie and coworker Fak (Matty Matheson)—interact enough to know their rapport. The fact they were childhood friends is trivial2. It’s like an exchange between Norm and Cliff in Cheers—funny to an outsider, but funnier to longtime viewers who know the characters.
With the characters in place, The Bear deploys them in classic sitcom story structures, though with a modern television twist. The first season episode “Review” is essentially a bottle episode. Every action takes place in the kitchen and the friction of the close quarters provides laughs, dramatic tension, and character development. “Review” is also presented as one long shot, a tactic that might seem like a gimmick if the episode weren’t so well-directed. The second season episode “Fishes” is simultaneously a bottle episode (everyone is in Carmy’s family home) a flashback (it’s set five years before the rest of the show) and a holiday episode (it’s Christmas Eve). The episode is so sharply edited and well-acted that watching it feels like being trapped in a stuffy house with a family that’s falling apart. The sound design is crucial to this effect, with a recurring kitchen timer chime, overlapping dialogue, and a general din of dysfunction. When shocking moments happen, they’re dismaying but still funny. The show has conditioned us to expect punchlines.
While researching this piece, I found several questions and posts asking why The Bear is categorized as a comedy, given the amount of drama in each episode. It’s true, there are stretches of The Bear with no jokes. The second season episode “Sundae” sees Sydney go on a physical and emotional journey, sampling food across Chicago while doubting her decisions about life and work. The episode is told largely in montages that grow increasingly abstract as the day progresses. What begins as a series of shots of Sydney researching restaurants turns into a visualization of Sydney’s mental state. We see entrees, the architecture of Chicago, and old family photos morph into inspiration for imaged dishes. It’s an ode to the creative process, a leap in our understanding of Sydney as a character. It’s beautifully crafted and emotionally powerful. It’s not especially funny. But apart from Seinfeld, a show that’s celebrated for its “no hugging, no learning” ethos, every great sitcom had dramatic moments. Critics used to call this “heart.” Like those shows, The Bear uses our relationship with the characters, to make the drama effective. “Sundae” also features a running gag about Sydney reading Coach K’s memoir, a plot point that’s played for laughs all season, until it provides a strong emotional payoff in the finale.
And that’s key to why this matters. My classification of The Bear as a sitcom doesn’t change whether or not it’s a good show (it’s a great show). It may not even be much of an enticement for you to watch it (you should)3. But thinking of The Bear as a sitcom means thinking of the potential of television. Questions of why The Bear is a comedy are a sign that many of us expect shows to deliver a single emotional experience, and quite often that emotion is sadness. In the endless polishing of the appearance of shows, we’ve lost track of things that have always worked on the small screen. Character development through relationships, setting as a hub for stories, and a dedication to concision. These are elements of all good storytelling, yes, but they were on display consistently in sitcoms. Plus, sitcoms had jokes. No other style of TV show understands the range of emotions we’re capable of, or how deeply the people we’re around the most can make us feel those emotions.
There’s a misconception that something must be serious in order to be taken seriously. But what list of the greatest television shows of all time would be complete without several sitcoms in the top ten? Meanwhile, there are plenty of shows that tell stories with world-ending stakes. They’re the ones you pass over on your way to watch an episode of The Simpsons you’ve seen ten times before. Sitcoms have always been popular, beloved, and praised because we like spending time with people who know how to make us laugh. It can be easy to lose sight of this. Fortunately, we have The Bear.
Among The Bear’s producers is Hiro Murai, who was a producer and director on Atlanta.
The reveal in season two that there are many Fak siblings would, thirty years ago, surely inspire a spinoff series called The Faks.
This comparison might, unfortunately, inspire one of those YouTube trailers that recuts footage from a show or movie to present it as a different genre. Like most broadcast sitcoms, these stopped being funny before the 2010s.