‘The Bear’ Season 3 Premiere Is One Of The Worst Half-Hours In TV History

I asked it before, and I’ll ask again: who is The Bear for? Going by the respective Tomatometer scores, the third season, which launched the other day, is more for critics than for your average home viewer, which seems about right. Critics watch a lot of TV. They must crave novelty. And that first episode, “Tomorrow,” certainly is unusual in many ways. The problem is, it’s wretched.

Or rather, it’s a parade of wretchedness, a jumbled stream of all the griefs laid upon the back of Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto. Not only does The Bear give us repeated flashes of his mother’s contorted face at the disastrous Feast of the Seven Fishes from last season’s worst episode, the episode treats us to a litany of all the humiliations he ever suffered at the hands of vindictive master chefs. There’s a lot tossed in there about his lost, er, dumped love. And don’t forget the brother who killed himself. And look, here’s some food, and some more food, in ogling close-ups.

The whole thing skips around in time, so there’s no point trying to make any linear sense of it. It’s not a narrative, it’s a pastiche. Tying it together is a broody, piano-based tune by Nine Inch Nails (“Together”) that somehow plays almost the whole 36 minutes even though it’s only about ten minutes long. The gang all show up at one point or another, with Sydney making a very coincidental appearance in New York City toward the end to vindicate Carmy by just plain loving a dish he made for that one super-mean chef. Throughout, this episode of The Bear cuts back to Carmy in the restaurant, cleaning up obsessively, straightening chairs obsessively, big blue eyes always distant, as though remembering something. Something that we, the viewers, are going to be seeing in just a second.

The question is, why? If someone hasn’t come to a conclusion as to whether Carmy is a good but flawed man or just a self-interested jerk after two seasons of watching him rage, mope, and cook, how will this obvious attempt to build sympathy for the character help? Is it more to give us a sense of how he grew and developed as a chef? The episode does spend most of its time on scenes of him cooking, at one prestigious restaurant or another—but then we get things like him sitting in his car outside his brother’s funeral. Maybe grief makes you a better chef, I don’t know.

Over and over, when we’re back in the present rather than meandering down Carmory Lane, the camera returns to an ugly scar that goes right across Carmy’s palm. He keeps looking at it, can’t hardly leave it alone. And that’s the episode’s tell. It’s not about the career-of-a-chef thing after all; that’s just thrown in there because people like to look at food-porn, and the show is, nominally, about a chef and a restaurant. The message is: Here’s a scarred man. He knows he’s scarred. This is a show about him. Really, you couldn’t ask for a blunter metaphor.

All in all, this was about the worst thing I’ve ever seen on television, counting even Knight Rider and Beverly Hills 90210. From its requisite window-dressing shots of Lake Michigan and downtown Chicago and its Metra commuter trains, to its resolute refusal to provide anything like a narrative, to its tedious zooms onto richly marbled beef, to its repetitious soundtrack, it all adds up to not even a character study: just a hectic, frustrating string of non-sequiturs that tell you only one thing about Carmy, that’s he’s had it hard. World’s smallest violin over here.

If the folks making The Bear really cared about their characters, and the story they’re telling, and, hell, their audience, they’d actually tell a story instead of doing a poor man’s David Lynch, who at least always nails it on atmosphere. This episode has no atmosphere, just movement. It’s an airless thing, frenetic for its own sake, serving no other purpose than to gratify its showrunners’ vanity that they could make something unique. And they did that. They made something singularly awful, that will serve as a cautionary example in the future. Congratulations to them.