“The Bear”: What’s a Sitcom Anyway?

Having just binge-watched the fifth and final season of The Bear, I have some strong thoughts on how TV has changed over time. From 1972 to 1983 I was devoted to M*A*S*H, a sort-of sitcom set during the Korean War. Lasting eleven years, the show—about a military surgical unit a stone’s throw from the front lines—focused on the hijinks of young surgeons, nurses, and other American military personnel far from home. So this series (with Alan Alda as “Hawkeye” Pierce, its central figure) blended outrageous comedy with a deep awareness of the tragedies of war and the challenges faced by healers in times of crisis.

 My friend Elias Davis, who co-wrote the famous final episode of M*A*S*H , implies that the show’s outcome was by no means fully planned from the start. But it’s clear that The Bear—officially labeled a comedy, though much of the family backstory is dead serious—was building throughout most of its five-year run toward a very specific conclusion. In the past, American TV didn’t work that way. In long-running comic shows there would be changes over the years as key actors came and went. See, for instance, how the M*A*S*H dynamic evolved when the obtuse Major Frank Burns, as played by Larry Linville, was replaced by the know-it-all snob Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden-Stiers) as Hawkeye’s tent mate.

 Today, of  course, TV series tend to have much shorter seasons: each of the past five years has seen the arrival of only eight episodes of The Bear. (Compare M*A*S*H , which typically had more than 20.) The Bear’s  tight timetable makes it much easier for the writing team to control the show’s narrative, and to plan out in advance where it is going, with some interesting detours along the way. Curiously, although there’s a good-sized cast portraying those who work in and around the Chicago restaurant known as The Bear, not much always happens from episode to episode. Some focus almost entirely on a single character, and it’s not necessarily star Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a talented chef who agonizes over his decision to convert his dead brother’s sandwich shop into a fine-dining establishment. Each of the central characters has a complicated backstory, and the show sometimes pulls away from the restaurant setting to explore cousin Richie working on his people skills, line cook Tina discovering her professional abilities, pastry chef Marcus coping with the loss of his mother, or Somali kitchen helper Ebraheim shyly struggling to get the restaurant on a stronger financial footing. (His mentor is played by the late Rob Reiner, and there’s a subtle, touching tribute to Reiner in Ebraheim’s last-episode final line, “As you wish.” Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy’s addled, sometimes alcoholic, mother does not enter the restaurant until the show’s very last episode, but she’s impossible to forget.  Because we come to know these people so well, we care about what they ultimately accomplish.

 One of my favorite things about The Bear is how it rewards viewers paying close attention. Early in season 4 there’s an episode in which maître d’ Richie, aiming to heighten the celebration of  a family whose daughter has just been declared cancer-free, mesmerizes them all by creating a magical summer snowfall. In passing, some attention is paid to the solo diner at the next table who sees and delights in the family’s joy. Who is this man? We don’t find out until the very last show of season 5, when his appreciation for his dining experience bears important fruit. It’s yet another tasty surprise for a very special show. 

 

Tina Fey in All Seasons

I’m surely not alone in considering Tina Fey a national treasure. She has oodles of talent as a performer, and is a welcome MC at televised events. But I want to focus here on her brilliance as a writer, someone who can look at facets of our culture run amok and synthesize them into comedy gold.  

 Fey has been involved with television since her Saturday Night Live days (basically 1997-2006, though who can forget her return as Sarah Palin before the 2008 election?) In 2006 she created and starred in 30 Rock, an hilarious satire of a TV network, and she was also responsible for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which I found weird and funny. As a screenwriter, she made a brilliant debut with the 2004 teen comedy, Mean Girls. Who but Tina Fey would be smart enough to read a self-help book about adolescent bad behavior, sociologist Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, and fashion it into a hit movie?

 It helped a great deal that the film was populated by rising young stars, including Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried, along with Fey herself (in a teacher role) and best bud Amy Poehler, playing a particularly indulgent mom. This now-classic satire of high school girl-cliques has ultimately become a part of the American vocabulary, labeling self-improved and self-satisfied young women as “The Plastics” and introducing the concept of a “burn book” full of deliciously malicious gossip. (Clearly this reference is what led tech journalist Kara Swisher to publish in 2004 her Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. I’m also amused that the main non-conformist girl in the film, the one who aims to bring down The Plastics for reasons of her own, is dubbed Janis Ian, immortalizing the young singer/songwriter who had expressed her own teen angst through major pop hits like “At Seventeen.”)

 So potent has Mean Girls been that it was reincarnated, with Fey’s help, as a 2018 Broadway musical and a subsequent 2024 film adaptation. But Fey has not been idle since. It intrigues me that her most recent project is a mini-series which has just been renewed for its second season on Netflix. Again she chose her source carefully: a 1981 film written, directed by, and starring the wonderful Alan Alda. Alda’s The Four Seasons, which (natch!) features a lot of Vivaldi on the soundtrack, chronicles three well-heeled married couples who are close friends and always vacation together. Over the course of a particularly eventual year, one husband strays in dramatic fashion, and the others begin to question their lives and their values. The cast is first-rate (Carol Burnett plays Alda’s hyper-efficient wife, and Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston, and Rita Moreno are the others in the friend-group). It was nice to see, at the beginning of the Netflix mini-series, the now eighty-nine-year-old Alda in a gracious cameo role.

 The first season of Fey’s Four Seasons miniseries essentially expands on the basic concept of Alda’s film, showing mature adults—long settled into marriages and careers—suddenly re-thinking their life-choices. It’s interesting to see Fey, who essentially plays the Carol Burnett role, wrestling with being a middle-aged person. We’re so used to her focusing in her projects on teenagers and on career gals: now she’s portraying a wife and the mom of a college-age daughter, someone who has made good choices but is starting to wonder what it all means. At 55, as a wife and a mother of two, Fey is clearly beginning to contemplate the full trajectory of a mature life. And we get to come along for the ride.