And the ratings for this season are worse than the first two by a long shot.
Edit: Downvote all you want but the audience score for season 3 is currently 58% compared to the prior 2 seasons of 92%+. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_bear/s03
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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I don't understand the love for this show. My wife watches it, and randomly I'll catch a few minutes of it, and I swear every single scene is depressed people screaming at each other, or repeatedly yelling the word CHEF a thousand times in a row. Is there a single scene when a person smiles? Is happy? I call it "the yelling show".
You'd need to watch it through to understand. (And I'm not telling you to do that.)
It's about troubled people trying to build themselves into something more, and what it can cost you in the moment.
You see a dozen people screaming at each other and yelling Chef - I see a family trying to work through their issues, one of those being the toxicity of families, while being honest and showing each other love and respect.
My wife also loves Schitt's Creek and I can't stand the shallow, one-note characters... but that's because I haven't put in the time to get to know them and see how they grow and change.
A lot of shows are like this, and it's totally okay to bounce off of them if they don't resonate with you.
But I love this one. The Bear is great fun.
It's a lot like Mad Men. No one does anything interesting in that show either. I've watched it five or six times now and they still haven't done anything interesting. I'll probably watch it again just to double check.
Most scripted dramas don't work when you randomly drop in on them. You have to build a relationship with the characters by following them through their journey which starts at the start. Then when things escalate to yelling you know why.
I love it because it captures what I love about early movies and pre-home-screen-theatre like George Bernard Shaw, Chekov, Ibsen, or even modernist drama - Noel Coward, John Osborne, Kingsley Amis...
It's the working man as Byronic hero, with the visual aesthetic being considered but not opulent or overbearing, focusing on what drama does best: two sympathic, relatable, understandable and mostly correct opinions that are equal and opposite from each other, where neither can afford to lose, but one must win.
It also takes massive risks - some don't pay off - but I still love to see the risk!
My wife has worked in restaurants AND in TV, and the first two seasons had her absolutely entranced (I ... am not a TV person, though it's impossible to say that without sounding smug). This season? "They started sniffing their own farts," was her reaction after the first couple of episodes, after which she stopped watching.
Man that first (S03) episode kinda sucked. I expect those filler episodes around 6 or 7, not right out the gate!
Really? Huh, I was absolutely floored by that. It reminds me of when you're on the other side of a fight (like Carmy coming out of season 2) you start replaying moments in your head, not just of the fight but random moments in your life in this long stream of consciousness while you're trying to get your shit figured out. To me this episode conveyed that emotion better than any I've seen in the past. Plus it fleshes out his working relationship with chef Terry making the impact of the news later in the season matter more.
It was certainly odd to do that as the first episode of the new season but that episode was anything but "filler"; it added in a ton of the missing pieces the show hadn't gone over yet. I get the format and not many conversations was odd but the episode flew by for me and was cool to finally meet his actual mentor and not just Joel McHale
It was all filler. The to be continued at the end was the final kick in the teeth.
This is exactly how I felt too. All filler that didn’t serve any sort of real purpose (character building I guess, maybe, but they were doing just fine with that prior to making a whole season of it).
So disappointing. I mean the episodes themselves were ok, but very meh compared to the prior two seasons.
The best part of the season for me was Jamie Lee Curtis. She killed it. Otherwise I was pretty disappointed.
I'm only 2 episodes in, you're saying the whole season is like this??