Review of The Bear Season 1

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

Since the job hunt after graduate school really took longer than expected, it meant that I was going to have even more time than anticipated to go through and watch all of these shows I wanted to. I also read a ton of books during this time, which means I have such an incredible backlog of book reviews I need to plough through the rest of the year.

Anyways, I know I’m late on the train for The Bear. It’s been a hot minute since Season 1 came out, but I never really had Hulu beyond the screeners I would be sent as a critic. I reviewed quite a few Hulu shows throughout the years outside of this blog, but I was never given a screener of this show specifically.

Because I had all of this free time in-between applying for jobs, I kind of just shrugged my shoulders and decided to go all in with this show. I watched all three seasons out at the time over the course of a month, and it was a glorious ride up and down the world of The Bear.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much.

Carmy returns home from the world of fine dining to run his brother’s rundown restaurant in Chicago.

The premise of this series begins with something tragic: the main character, Carmy, has to grapple with his brother Michael’s suicide. Carmy works in the world of fine dining as a chef, having had the culinary training, and has even won a James Beard Award for his work. However, his brother’s death leaves a major gap in his life.

He has to come home to Chicago to manage his brother’s restaurant, known simply as The Original Beef of Chicagoland. It’s a standard sandwich and fries kind of joint; the exact opposite of what Carmy was running back in the city. It also doesn’t help that the staff has an attitude with Carmy, and he doesn’t know what really to do while he’s helping out here.

His brother’s best friend Richie is also the manager of the joint, and he’s stuck in his ways too. Whenever Carmy tries to suggest the group do something different, no one listens to him, and Richie openly jeers at his ideas and rejects his authority in the joint. That leads him to seek out new talent, which happens to be Sydney.

Trained at the Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA here in the States), Sydney takes on the job solely because she knows that her father loved the heck out of this restaurant and would be sad to see it go. Throughout the course of the series we’re going to see everyone’s collective struggles in getting this place out of the hole, as well as learning to like and work with each other.

One of the big charms of The Bear is about how much we come to learn and love about these characters themselves. From the original staff like Marcus and Natalie, everyone has a story on how exactly they got here, at this restaurant, in this moment. It was a quite frank reminder to me about how everyone in the world has a story, even if they’re working at a burger joint.

And, of course, we focus heavily on Carmy and his unique struggle. I mean, his brother just died, he left behind his award winning career for this, and noone in the restaurant seems to understand why he wants things run a certain way.

We learn there are other problems throughout the course of the season as well, which makes Carmy a more complicated character and less than a hero in the eyes of the viewer and the staff.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a solid first season of a series. I will admit: a lot of shows these days don’t seem too original to me, and that’s why I get bored of them at the end of the day. I want good writing and originality, which seems to be severely lacking in favor of the tried and tested recipes that people flock to.

We can extend that discussion to the book world and tropes, but, regardless, I find The Bear to be something that has a lot of soul and originality to it. That’s why people liked it so much when it first came out, and that’s why people keep returning to it in the coming seasons. How long it’ll last, though, is a good story.

I say watch it if you haven’t already, and if you want to rewatch it, go ahead and do that, too. I think it’s worth it at the end of the day, and this is such a good television series. It feels rare because of how good it is.

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