What if…I’m never gonna watch The Bear?

On secondhand nostalgia content and things you “should” like

Hello!

You’re about to wade into another meandering situation brought to you by a Jami Attenburg #1000wordsofsummer meetup. Tighter editing and structure will return in the future (maybe?). For now, here’s a half-baked Italian beef, served wet. 

In case it is not immediately made apparent, I will be playing the part of “the clown” here.

In the last 72 hours, I have had four separate conversations about The Bear. It turns out if you’re a person who is “into TV” and also a person who lived in Chicago for the better part of a decade, this is a piece of media you are expected to have an opinion about. I do not. Or actually, maybe I do? Perhaps the larger question is: do you have to completely consume a piece of media or art to have an opinion on it? 

First, we should probably talk about what I mean by the aforementioned conversations. I’m going to be generous here and save all my hot takes for later instead of throwing my friends and family under the bus for having opinions I disagree with but also think are perfect and correct (because I love them, because how much you like a Hulu show is extremely low stakes, because taste and desire are subjective, etc). But when I say “conversation,” I mean evangelization. I should know — this flavor of obsession sharing/fixation spewing is my native language. Being on the other side, though? A wild experience. 

Wanting to share the things you love is surely some lizard brain wiring. It has to be. Nothing else explains my partner spending approximately 27 minutes of dinner the other night giving me a play-by-play of The Bear’s second season episode where some character goes to a bunch of Chicago restaurants in the ultimate tour de food porn. She goes to Elske (maybe?) and at least four other specific spots my partner could only loosely describe but not name. We have been there, though (supposedly), and the food looks sublime (mmhmm), and it feels exactly how it feels IRL (sure). Also, Funkenhousen is roasted twice (reportedly, but also, it’s what she deserves 😈). 

I contributed to this conversation by trying to name the restaurants based on descriptions like “that one place with the Instagram lady with the dog and also the outside” and then going into a tirade about how I think food culture is stupid and how I prefer to not re-live service industry work in a time when service industry workers are still increasingly treated like trash, all via the proxy of stressful, sweaty, man-forward glory media.  

This is a bad-faith interpretation. Because if I’m being honest, I have only seen 27 minutes of The Bear. I could not get past the fact that they tried to simultaneously get us to believe “this is a REAL Chicago show” and “River North is a gritty, edgy place and definitely nothing like being inside of a Cheesecake Factory inside of a party bus shaped like a barrel inside of a navy and white checked J.Crew oxford.”

And that’s before we got to the stress of it all. I am sure it got better. Maybe that episode was a fluke in the Chicago verisimilitude department, and the rest is a perfect painting of living in a city that actually is pretty fucking great (albeit not for the faint of heart), especially if it’s an alternate universe where Lori Lightfoot never existed. Maybe all the “living in actual Chicago — not Naperville! — for longer than two days” writers were struck with explosive norovirus when it came time to write the pilot. That’s probably definitely what happened, and it all got better from there. Because nothing else explains the obsession people have with this show. Occams Razor. 

I guess it could also be the performances or whatever. Capital-A actors are doing capital-A acting. Cool, great. Get the awards ready. Writing this is really just an exercise in forcing myself to really choke down some “hating popular things doesn’t make you interesting” pills. I’m not sure how relevant that notion is, though, when the “popular thing” is a critically acclaimed drama like The Bear versus genre-forward-fun-content like Love Island or those fairies-fucking books by Sarah J. Maas or whatever. Plus, I don’t think my pettiness is interesting. I think the idea of things you should like but the sum of parts don’t add up is interesting.

Because on paper, The Bear has a lot of stuff I like: tight run times, hot people with and without shitty tattoos, drama, addiction/recovery content, the city of Chicago. But it turns out the things I do not like are somehow heavier. My “the only food content I enjoy involves reviewing novelty Pop-Tart flavors” finger is weighing heavy on the scale. My, at best, ambivalence (at worst, deep disdain) toward fine dining is just too strong to make space for things like acting performances and technically glorious cinematography. 

And that’s without getting into the nostalgia of it all. Talking about The Bear has made me realize that I’m missing whatever brain cell is responsible for wistful location-based longing. In its place is a gruff lil’ ogre who is unimpressed by stunt casting and b-roll propaganda. He points out things like, “That’s more of the November winter, total child’s play. Let’s see these fools in February, foot sweat in a perpetual soak/ice crystal cycle, throwing elbows to fight for a spot under the one working heat lamp at the Western Blue Line stop.” The no-nostalgia ogre does not care about a carefully edited past. He only wants acknowledgment of the imperfect present, raw delight at seeing “that horrible coffee shop down the street” on an episode of Selling Sunset or someone onscreen drinking our household’s second-favorite seltzer brand. Otherwise, he wants to be left alone. 

So I give the ogre what he wants. Right now, that’s Platonic, the newest season of Taskmaster, and a lot of silence. But that doesn’t mean y’all should stop evangelizing! Ogre be damned, the only thing I love more than being a hater is to be slowly proven incorrect.

This newsletter brought to you by:

• All my Bear-head besties. Y’all are probably on the right side of history here. Stay gold.

• Colleen, Mia, and Andante cold brew.

• Probably subconscious frustration that LA to Chicago flights are absurdly expensive right now, and I cannot waste my limited disposable income doing on-the-ground scene reporting.