‘The Bear’ Season 3 Pre miere Is Ballsy as Hell

This Week

My Favorite Comedy to Cry to While Watching

People are divided over whether The Bear is a comedy or a drama. Regardless, I will say this: It is absolutely the best show on television that always gives me a migraine.

After several aspirins, I’m working through what I admired—and was put off by—in the first batch of episodes I watched of Season 3 of the Emmy-winning series, which returned this week. (I cannot handle binge-watching this series; if you can, you have a stronger constitution than me.)

The Bear’s greatest strength, and the reason why I think so many people from so many different demographics have come to champion it, is that it is the rare TV show that doesn’t treat viewers like they’re stupid. It trusts them to understand every tonal shift—which, on this show, is a wrecking ball swinging like a pendulum—and narrative departure. It certainly has faith in viewers’ strength and fortitude, parachuting us into the relentless, loud intensity of The Bear kitchen with no easing in or buffer.

Reviews for Season 3 have ranged from ecstatic to pans, a spectrum one should expect from a show this popular and, thus, this scrutinized at this point in its run. But there’s no denying that this is an undeniably audacious TV show.

Case in point: the Season 3 premiere. After a second season that won just about every TV award it was eligible for, was lauded for the bullet train of stress that was its “Seven Fishes” episode, and had a finale that ended with a calamitous screaming match at a restaurant opening, The Bear’s return episode features almost no dialogue.

Given the bedlam The Bear is known for, launching Season 3 with a poignant, montage-filled tone poem is a ballsy swerve. Yes, some of the best episodes of the series have been on the quieter side, like last season’s spotlight on Lionel Boyce’s Marcus, “Amsterdam.” But to launch a new season in such a manner, with a depressive, hyper-emotional lilt, is a fascinating way for a series to meet a moment of so much hype and anticipation.

Through a patchwork of moody, largely wordless flashbacks, we see how Carmen (Jeremy Allen White) got to the point where we last witnessed him: in the midst of triumph at the restaurant opening, yet still painfully self-destructive. We see the support of his sister, Sugar (Abby Elliott), and the emotional abuse of other family members. It’s revealed how the antagonism and, eventually, belief in him from mentor chefs shaped his culinary passion. And we get more insight into how his brother’s death and breakup with his girlfriend irrevocably damaged him.

I found it to be a stunning episode of television, but jarring as a season opener; in fact, that’s part of what impressed me the most about it.

The outing will surely rankle those who are most outraged over The Bear’s categorization as a comedy. (Their argument doesn’t get any less strong as the season progresses; in the first three episodes alone, I wept my way through glimpses of two different funerals, and winced through an excruciating-to-watch anxiety attack.) But that’s where the show’s audacity comes in. It’s not long into Episode 2 that we’re ricocheting between a seven-person screaming match like a pinball with a rocket attached, an example of outlandishh chaos that might be one of the more humorous sequences in the series so far. Although, that might demand on how much of people shouting “fuck you” at each other in rapid succession you can take and still call it funny.

That tonal dance is why I think so much of what I’ve seen of the season so far is so bold.

There’s familiarity to the early episodes, which is to say ear-splitting, pulse-racing chaos. But the show seems to sense that such a harshness becoming familiar, when it was once so novel and groundbreaking, isn’t a good thing—that it could even become a rut. Did I marvel at the editing, the choreography, and the pandemonium of Episode 3, “Doors”? Yes. Did each time someone shouted, “Doors!” amplify a growing headache as I watched? Immensely so.

I admire a meandering season that doesn’t do the same thing fans expect, and I admire that it trusts our intelligence to go along for the ride of thwarted expectations—for the sake of a series that continues to evolve.

Now I’m going to put an icepack on my head and turn on the next batch of episodes.

Advertisement

Finally, a Good Laugh

There’s nothing better than laughing so hard that you feel like you’re screaming, you’re running out of breath, and tears start falling. The best is when, after, you say out loud, “I haven’t laughed this hard in such a long time.”

And for that, I thank Martin Short.

This week, Short resurfaced his iconic interviewer character, Jiminy Glick. I have to reiterate: I haven’t laughed this hard in such a long time.

Glick began as a recurring character on 1999’s The Martin Short Show before gaining the spotlight in his own 2001 series, Primetime Glick. The gimmick is that Short-as-Glick, in a fat suit and prosthetics, was both boorish and utterly silly as he interviewed celebrities “expecting” a normal junket interview. He’d ask ludicrous questions, slyly insult them, and, often, chow down on a tower of donuts in the middle of conversations.

This week, Short revived Glick in interviews with Bill Hader, Sean Hayes, and Melissa McCarthy. The shade on their careers were as hilarious as the random questions he’d interject—“Were you for or against drones to take out the late Mickey Rooney?”—and otherwise left-turn statements: “So Willie Mays just died…”

None of the celebs being interviewed could keep a straight face, and neither could I. What stuck out to me, though, is how perfect a counter-argument these segments are to those crotchety comedians who say “you can’t be funny anymore” because everything is too woke and people are too sensitive.

This is a character who, truly, should be canceled; Jiminy Glick is very much a byproduct of the Y2K era where “guy in a fatsuit” constituted the funniest joke anyone could imagine.

But here Short is as Glick, still in the fatsuit, delivering some of the edgiest lines any comedian has given in recent years, and earning the laughs because they have a point of view and a perspective on the cultural attitudes of the current moment. Case in point: a man, again, wearing a fatsuit, making gay jokes to Sean Hayes. But they are smart. They are evolved. They are still crude and ribald, but reflect evolved taste.

Anyway, watch them for yourselves for a good time this weekend.

Bill Hader, watch here.

Sean Hayes, watch here.

Melissa McCarthy, watch here.

A Huge Return

Sometimes, there is entertainment news that is absolutely seismic to a certain segment of people, while probably not registering to most of the population.

The announcement that Jonathan Jackson is returning to the soap opera General Hospital to play Lucky Spencer is to many people—including my mother, my Aunt Ruthie, and myself—the equivalent of a 6.1 on the Richter scale.

I grew up in a household where I knew who Luke, Laura, Sonny, and Carly were before I knew about John, Paul, George, and Ringo. General Hospital was foundational to my upbringing, and, if I’m being honest, Jackson’s Lucky was a start of my sexual awakening. (Kudos to him and Boy Meets World’s Rider Strong.)

This is such a fun update for the long-running show, and I apologize to my bosses in advance for being absent every day from 3-4 pm when his comeback starts.

How Old Am I?

I have vivid memories of David Archuleta performing on American Idol, and have read over the years about his journey coming out and how difficult it was because of his Mormon upbringing.

Those Idol days seem like a million years ago, yet seeing the videos of him performing the Song of the Moment, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” made me feel like it was just yesterday. Such a wild confluence of pop-culture time periods. (Also, the performance is great. Watch it here.)

Huh?

The world is such that, by this point, any random Mad Libs of names in a headline should be greeted with a shrug. Still, this one made me wonder if I had somehow woken up in the middle of a melatonin-induced fever dream and started reading the news.

What in the world?

More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed

People thought the presidential debate was so stressful that they turned it off to watch The Bear…famously TV’s most stressful show. Read more.

Everyone hates this House of the Dragon character so much that the actor playing him had to turn off his social media mentions. Read more.

If you’re ever having a bad day, I highly recommend you talk with June Squibb about becoming an action hero at age 94. Read more.

Last Summer: The hottest movie of the summer also happens to be sorta incestuous. (Now in theaters)

Family Affair: Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron are an absurdly sexy pair. (Now on Netflix)

A Quiet Place: Day One: Lupita Nyong’o is the best part. (Of the movie... Of everything…) (Now in theaters)

Advertisement

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.