The Bear season 5, episode five.
Courtesy of FX
Even though it’s my job to write about the TV business and have at least some idea of what’s happening on a bunch of shows, I can’t keep up with everything. Sometimes it takes me months, or even a year or more, to get current on a big show. Introducing Latecomer, where I finally catch up on some talked-about series. You’ll see this every once in a while on The Data Stream … when I finally get around to watching something.
My wife and I finished The Bear last night. We were late to get to it in the first place: The first season just after our family moved from Texas to Illinois, and after hearing about how stressful a viewing experience it was, it was not something I wanted to watch in the midst of unpacking and getting settled in a new home.
Eventually, we watched the first two seasons together and liked the show a whole lot. Then, well, it fell out of the rotation again — for more than a year. The less positive critical reaction to later seasons maybe played a part in that, but it was mostly just life getting in the way. We started up again around the time the final season premiered last month and powered through seasons 3-5 over the course of the past few weeks.
And, I have to say, my opinion of the show hasn’t changed much: I really, really enjoyed watching The Bear.
I have never considered myself a TV critic. I wrote a decent number of reviews and did a ton of episode recaps when I worked at Zap2it in the 2000s and early ‘10s, but I also was writing straight news stories and doing interviews and other things. I also don’t have any kind of background in film or TV — I never worked on any productions nor did I take any film classes in college. None of that is strictly necessary to be a critic, of course, but I think those things are pretty helpful to writing interesting, well-considered reviews.
All of which is to say that when I do watch TV, I do it more as a regular viewer than as a critic. I do think about why I’m enjoying or not enjoying something, but my grading curve is probably less harsh than most actual critics.
So The Bear opening season 3 with an episode-long, very dialogue-light discursion into everything that led up to Carmy losing his shit while locked inside the walk-in at the end of season 2 didn’t strike me as such a bad choice. I was very much aware of the discourse around that storytelling decision, and about the rest of season 3 being a letdown from the first two. It was in the back of my mind as we started watching again.
But — and this might be a function of it only being in the back of my mind, not the front of it — I thought that was an excellent piece of television. The editing of The Bear has been fantastic throughout its run (it won Emmys for picture editing for the first two seasons), but I thought it was exceptional in that episode. It pulled me entirely back into the show’s world.