The Bear on FX: aka HEARD! aka YES CHEF! aka Ketamine Gene Wilder cooks for u

Season 2 starts next week lets gooooo

Jeremy Allen White? Oh, you mean “Ketamine Gene Wilder”? pic.twitter.com/9aESu3OFnO

— Alan Vann (@Alan_Vann_) July 7, 2022

i loved this show so much i binged it twice tbh looking forward to S2

pumped for CHAOS MENU

I came so close to starting this thread a few months ago withe the title "Chicago Beef w/a Side of Wilco"

holy shit I just read "Ketamine Gene Wilder" and was like hmmm I think I know who that is and sure enough it was him

ketamine gene wilder is so hot and i would like him to cook for me

i dont think ive ever been as stressed by watching something as i was with that fucking printer

Good interview with Ebon Moss-Bachrach here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/arts/television/ebon-moss-bachrach-the-bear-season-2.html

Also how the fuck did I miss his partner of many years is photographer Yelena Yemchuk aka Billy Corgan's partner plus artist of choice for the Smashing Pumpkins in the late 90s?

Also given the thread title I do appreciate this:

He had an agent before he graduated and has been working steadily ever since, bouncing between theater, film and TV, studying performers like Gene Wilder, a castmate in Moss-Bachrach’s first onscreen appearance.

I watched one episode of this and immediately wondered if they ever stopped yelling at each other

spoiler: they don’t

i still occasionally do an online pickup order from a local restaurant that i used to frequent during COVID - whenever i do it now i still think of the order printer in The Bear & feel a lot of sympathy pangs for what restaurants must go through w that shit

I watched one episode of this and immediately wondered if they ever stopped yelling at each other

if you can’t stand the heat yelling get out of the kitchen tv show

jk

I watched one episode of this and immediately wondered if they ever stopped yelling at each other

I normally don't like programmes where all they do is shout (I've never managed to get through a whole episode of The Goldbergs, for example), and I don't like it when programmes add in obvious extra tension-building sounds, like smoke alarms or ringing phones or children crying, but after a couple of episodes I was as hooked on this programme as everyone else.

It's a weird show, some good and memorable scenes, but the non-kitchen chaos scenes are often a drag. And there are so many little things that didn't quite make sense to me -- how did the Xanax get into the Ecto Cooler? They played as unintentional but that seemed, uh, logistically improbable. Were they not doing take-out at all before, or just no online ordering? The time of day (and whether this place is doing lunch or dinner or both) is often confusing too.

its about as realistic as a dream sequence in a daytime soap, tbc, its just gritty fun with great performances and moments and direction

i think the micro-specifics of the show are what sold it for me, selling vintage levis for cash (stored in his oven bc he never cooks at home lol) the kitchen stuff like drinking out of the pint containers, the food he eats after a shift (doritos, coke)

like even when parts of story don’t always flesh out perfectly, it all feels so well-observed in terms of details & behaviour

to me, anyway

Ketamine Gene Wilder frequents the pizza place my nephew works and i just missed seeing him there by like 5 mins one time.

Just watched the first episode of season 2, so glad to have this show back. We had just finished season 1 of Succession, and it's wild to veer from a show where i don't give a shit about what happens to anyone and I want them all to fail to a show where I care about everyone and want them all to succeed.

Hell yah. Great music choices too. The Hornsby opener, transcendental blues by Steve Earle into New Noise to close it out.

if no one has seen Matty Matheson’s cooking videos I’d recommend because those are wild fun.

pure chaotic energy, highly recommend

in other news:

password is “speedboatmojito” all one word

just watched the first couple of episodes, going to savor the rest over the weekend. the never-ending chaos was anxiety-inducing in the first season, but the show's rhythms are kinda comforting now heh

the Marcus episode is a really lovely little break of pace

xpost "gofastboatsmojito" !!!!

oh fuck i knew i screwed it up lol thankyou

That made me laugh really hard. Of course that guy would have been a huge fan of the Miami Vice movie...

He and every other sensible person.

i'm a fiend for italian beef

In the Ever/Alinea-restaurant episode, I love how a) it's Ritchie who gets sent into that 3-Michelin star world and how he dials up the Chicago accent when presenting the deep-dish canapés. Also, having Olivia Coleman as the chef keeps it credibly as someone very privileged without having it be a dude at the top. And her warmth and unintimidating manner seemed very credible as the kind of person who is nearly impossible to reach one-on-one and with tough underlings, but face-to-face can be incredibly friendly.

What a series. Again.
PS I adored the little omelette scene. Just process and reaction; making something with love and seeing it received with love.

oh damn, I put this off after Star Trek last night because I thought it was week to week and wanted to save up episodes

i watched through ep 5 last night, hoping to finish today but ep 6 is weirdly over an hour long?

god help me i could look at ketamine gene wilder all day

I have managed to convince the husband to watch this, which means I will be going in on season one again before season two. A treat for me!

big fan of shortish episodes too

i have read elsewhere that S2 not quite as safdi-esque insane?

We've seen five of the new season so far, and while there is still plenty of hectic screaming, it's in service of something productive. The characters, acting, music cues, use of the city, all top notch.

made it up to half-way through the guest-star packed christmas episode last night.

i got up early & watched 2 eps while eating breakfast

brb going to copenhagen

the scenes w carmy & claire are so good, the way they talk about random shit & stare morse code to each other is v good

omg that “can’t hardly wait” needledrop

literally a …

(are you ready)

.. CHEFS KISS

youre welcome

THIS GODDAMN GORGEOUS BEAUTIFUL SHOW WTF WTF

#gofastboatsmojitos obviously unassailable but the stuff with Carmy and the alarm is also A+++.

i have read elsewhere that S2 not quite as safdi-esque insane?

NCIS: Lake Michigan

well buckle up for the christmas episode fuckos

Haha was gonna say….

real talk

the family stuff at the heart of this is so real.

like, i don’t even have a 10th of that level of craziness in my own family, i don’t know chicago from shit, etc etc

but the way when you have a family w ~history~ to a level that you are a telepathic air traffic controller waving each other away from the hazards

the way when you visit after being away that at it’s worst the house itself is like a vice that is constantly squeezing you down to your smallest denominator… the way you are always, ALWAYS the person you were when you were 10, the way you start feeling like you’re 10 just being around it too long
… the way you expand & become alive when you go away and you contract & sort of die a little when you return…
the way the love is so crystallized & so real but so small you can hold it; the way it lifts you up so quickly but the way all that bad is just always there, hanging, unsaid, in the air like a poison gas that only becomes toxic if you acknowledge it

sorry tl:dr

this christmas episode really got me feeling some type of way

the series def seems closeup heavy in general

Even as a bit of a Paul Simon head, I hadn't heard the Rhymin' Simon outtake "Let Me Live in Your City."

I literally had to search to see 1) if Sydney makes a damn decision this season and 2) what episode it was in.

Heh. My wife gave up after last season, so I am watching this one by myself. I was watching episode 5 when she came into the room and I said, "By the way, it's halfway through the season, and Syd still hasn't signed the partnership agreement she was dithering over for most of Season 3."

Is it the entire series or this season in particular that heavily relies on the extreme closeup? I swear I sit down to watch this show and it’s mostly a parade of giant heads on my screen.

This is one of the things that made my wife stop watching in s1, lol.

i like the closeups! - esp White & Edibiri & Bacharach bc so much of their character is like, interiority you gotta see behind the eyes, shows off how good they are in these roles

but also pvmic bc i’m so pathetically bear-pilled lol

We're doing one episode a night and just watched #4 yesterday, which I loved. The scenes between Sydney and the little girl were fantastic, just watching the kid watch Sydney shop and then cook and let her help, and talk to her about real-world shit and take her opinion seriously...

Close ups can be a little much, I agree. But this season is worth it I think. My favorite since S1. Wedding episode was excellent in how it came *this close* to overt sentimentality and just veered into tenderly reinforcing the bond these characters have with each other.

I think my problem is that the balance between restaurant stuff and personal tender feelings stuff is off for my liking. The closeups seem to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. When I realized how many of them there were was when I started to wonder if maybe this show is not for me.

Kind of gratifying I’m not alone in that. Ultimately I have enjoyed watching this show but a show about families is not what I signed up for, personally.

Rather traditional families, babies and siblings and cousins and whatnot.

Missing a comma after rather sorry. Not meant as intensifier!

I am enjoying (and choosing to assume "enjoyment" is the creators' goal) the current season, but the music suuuuucks. Asking me to put up with Paul Simon AND Lou Reed in the same half hour is asking TOO MUCH.

Didn’t mind those two but I could’ve done without the dull contempo Nick Cave track. Seems he’s the current Music Supervisor go-to when that pensive piano ballad is needed in the cut. Yeesh.

Real q: Is it the entire series or this season in particular that heavily relies on the extreme closeup? I swear I sit down to watch this show and it’s mostly a parade of giant heads on my screen.

I was just saying the same thing last night. I feel like I sat in the front row of the IMAX by mistake. Is it because they figure everyone (except me) watches this on their phone?

I think the ECUs are carrying the emotional weight like we are supposed to get super close to someone’s lip hairs to see into their soul.

Saw the first two episodes of the new season, seems fine to me. Not sure what people have been complaining about and/or what they expect.

Season 5 officially greenlit.

really enjoyed the wedding episode

Just watched the wedding episode, which was good, and realized that one of the small but real pleasures of this show is observing Oliver Platt's transformation into Robert Prosky. (The repeated use of the music from Thief should have been a bigger hint.)

Platt is very good in this show, esp. because he reminds me so much of my own Chicago uncles.

platt is so great

There's that pretty well known adage that the sign of a good ensemble cast is when every character can support their own stand alone episode. I think that's where this show is at (and has for sure demonstrated a few times already). We just saw the Sydney hair episode and it was great, and mostly funny (for once).

yeah that episode was so good. directed by Janicza Bravo who is lowkey kind of a goat imo (ie she did juneteenth ep of Atlanta, hook ep of Pokerface, etc)

i like how much of Ayo we get in this season where you really palpably feel and see her anxiety and emotional blockages at the same level we’ve seen carmy

it really sets the table well for ep9 and 10

The hair ep also written by Ayo and Lionel Boyce (Marcus!).

The hair episode and the wedding episode were my favourites. I did not care for the final episode, with its return to people just shouting at each other. Plus, I feel like I'm being mildly gaslighted by talk of season five. I thought we all agreed this was the final season. I didn't think it was a case of it possibly getting axed, I thought this was the end of the story.

We just saw the wedding episode, which was a bit mawkish but sweet and really played to the show's strengths and themes and deep bench of actors doing good things. I am starting to get mildly annoyed with all the needle drops - constant, relentless - which I find a little lazy, given how much emotional heavy lifting they are doing for the show. And all the close-ups ... once you notice it you can't un-notice it! "I feel like I sat in the front row of the IMAX by mistake" otm.

Wouldn't say the constant background music bothers me but the final episode was striking in its lack of cues. They probably could benefit from cutting the music back some

Catching up with the new season and 4 episodes in, and it's already miles better than last season. They remembered the jokes! Ayo's episode is also fab.

finally watching season 3, about halfway through and i love it. kinda aimless but enjoying the art direction and the mood/texture. not really much more to reveal about these core characters i guess but i still care about what theyre doing and how they do it.

https://i.imgur.com/lH9F163.png

lmao

My fave phone contacts detail is that Carmy still has Pete saved as "Sugar's boyfriend (Pete?)"

A moment to consider the Fak gene pool is broad/deep enough to produce Matty Matheson, John Cena, and Brie Larson.

Had mixed feelings about this season in the end. I feel like it sort of crept away from itself and the characters, and in this season it was like these are the most articulate and open emotionally troubled people of all time, who voice that state of being in great detail very often. It reminded me more than once of Dawson's Creek. It felt like everyone had gone to therapy a lot.

I like the first half of the season more then felt it just sort of slid away as it went on. The final episode was hugely disappointing imo, like just a page of dialogue, when it became clear it wasn't going to move on from that one scene it was a real anticlimax.

In the end it resisted having any of the main characters do anything, besides commitments to future actions. Maybe that's setting up a new season but even worse if so. All the plot, in fact, just completely disappeared despite the fact this season had a lot of quite hard and specific plot points, a literal ticking clock!

I like the show a lot in general but I think it could be so much better if they weren't afraid of making decisions as they have been for two seasons now.

If anything, this entire show has kind of been about fear and anxiety over making decisions.

I'm heading into the finale, and yes, I do agree that the pace in the last few episodes has slowed and kind of tries my patience. (Also the wedding bit under the table was a bit too cute and precious, like the temperamental opposite of DD's family dinner, but without the teeth or car-crash catharsis.)

But OTOH: "He made you a great offer! Go suck his balls."

Ayo

Adjacent to the show, but this story about abuse at Noma reminds me of what was frustrating about this show after season one. Carmy had left this exacting, abusive kitchen to return to Chicago, and take over his brother's humble sandwich shop...but then aspires to turn it into the kind of restaurant that traumatized him. This is fine in itself, but the show became about aspirational and exacting fine dining (with Amex bumper ads) without really going into: is it possible for Carmy to run an exacting kitchen without it becoming toxic? Season One was special, especially coming out of the #MeToo era, in figuring out how this diverse group of people (diverse in experience, temperament, all that) would work together, and it felt like a way of modeling that. After the first season, it just became a kitchen with the authority of EVERY SECOND COUNTS looming over them.

Well, as another story about Trauma (tm), there's that thread of generational abuse, where Carmy is simultaneously attempting to break from his family (depressives, alcoholics, emotionally abusive) while inflicting or at least enabling the same damage on his coworkers. In the past few seasons they've showed glimmers of him Doing the Work, but iirc they haven't really depicted him moving on, emotionally. Probably because the show is fueled by yelling and stress, and eliminating that leaves it with little but shots of prepping fancy food. It would be a bit like watching The Pitt if it was set in a fancy clinic instead of a big city ER.

https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/tv-shows/the-bear-gary-episode-explained/

Ahead of “The Bear” Season 5, FX dropped a surprise tie-in episode of its critically-acclaimed darling on Tuesday. The hourlong “Gary” is available to watch now on Hulu.

The installment focuses on Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Mikey (Jon Bernthal) and was written by both Moss-Bachrach and Bernthal. Series creator Christopher Storer directed the episode. Set a few years before the beginning of “The Bear,” Gary follows best friends Richie and Mikey on a work trip.

I hope we finally learn how he became the Bear.

Hell yes. Moss Bacharach & Bernthal could take turns reading the phone book & I’d watch it

In the past few seasons they've showed glimmers of him Doing the Work, but iirc they haven't really depicted him moving on, emotionally. Probably because the show is fueled by yelling and stress, and eliminating that leaves it with little but shots of prepping fancy food. It would be a bit like watching The Pitt if it was set in a fancy clinic instead of a big city ER.

Which is why this show would have been soooo much more transcendent as a shorter 3-4 season arc, with every episode firmly advancing the ensemble's emotional and professional growth rather than playing crap out (Syd's decision, Carm's mother/brother issues, Fak filler). The show needs to just end already, and I'm ecstatic the 5th season will be the final one. Wonder how they're going to handle the passing of Rob Reiner - I adored his role and it was just getting ramped up.

your enjoyment of “Gary” will vary depending on how much you enjoy coked-out conversations jk

It’s a nice showcase of how good these two actors are together, just watching them play in a sandbox for their characters. I dug it.

the ending is kinda “whoah!”

Also I am vey down with Cousin Richie’s road trip cd

*very

This was fucking fantastic imo, Bernthal was just next level good (so was Moss Bacharach but less surprised about his turn). Wondering if I'm not remembering something I should from the main series, but wasn't clear on the timeline for that ending.

also, "Althea when Althea"

I liked that the entire premise of the episode was about doing a mundane thing for Uncle Jimmy, when both the viewers and Richie are always trying to suss out exactly how shady his business dealings are. Just some unspoken tension underlying the entire plot.

mm hmm, how do they feel about ketamine vibes?
https://deadline.com/2026/06/gene-wilder-biopic-dito-montiel-in-works-1236932047/