I'm glad I get to start this Substack with The Bear -- not only do I love the show, it's an easy intro to this project, which I would call "gourmet tvtropes.org".
If you've never been, TV Tropes is a perfect use of the Internet. It is this monumental wiki maintained by people that I will describe, fondly, as narrative birders. They take their binoculars to the movies, and whenever they spot a MacGuffin, or a red herring, or Chekhov's Gun, etc., they log it under the relevant media property.
It's a fun project -- my favorite entry would be the "load-bearing boss", a video game villain whose lair collapses as soon as you defeat them -- but I find it useless as a writer. Partly because it's fallen victim to its own success: one glance at an overstuffed tropes page will make you appreciate the bloodthirsty pedants who maintain Wikipedia's signal-to-noise ratio. For instance, The Bear's entry cites Bittersweet Ending, Experienced Protagonist, Flashback and Ambiguous Situation
as tropes, which, sure, accurate -- but I can't do anything with that.
On a similar note, the entry describes the show as a "dramedy". Google1 is no better, opting for the clunkier "comedy-drama". But in this case, I think the clunky term should be preferred, because what is a comedy-drama? It's a clunky concept, just one of many in the field of narratology.
To give you an idea of how primitive our poetics is, the guy who wrote the book on it -- Aristotle -- claimed women had fewer teeth in their head than men. On the subject of physics, he distinguished two kinds of motion: "violent" and "natural" motion. On the subject of souls, he counted three: "vegetative", "sensitive", and "rational". So why is he still gathering citations from writers when the dentists and physicists and philosophers have all moved on? Because we just aren't very rigorous in how we describe stories.
It's like food: you can call it whatever you want, so long as it tastes good. When The Bear took down Best Comedy at the Emmys last year, its competition included Abbott Elementary, Ted Lasso, and Barry. Barry, which put a gun in the hand of the Fonz, was submitted as a comedy. Of course, I'm not actually worked up about category fraud at the Primetime Emmys. I think the layman's definition of comedy as "the one with laughs" and drama as "other" is great... right up until you try to sell one.
Because The Bear is one of my favorite shows in recent memory, and if I read "a dramedy set in a chaotic Chicago kitchen" off a TV menu, I would never give it a chance. That sounds like some Bourdain-core shit, and I'm not in any hurry to dig up Bradley Cooper’s one-and-done sitcom for FOX based on Kitchen Confidential. (Sidenote: It got cancelled in 2005 for averaging a then-pathetic 4 million viewers, which would land just outside the top 10 today.)
Here's how I pitched it to my brother when I first started watching:
I confess I was pandering with the mention of Uncut Gems, since my brother and I both liked that movie, but it is an interesting comp. The urban setting, hustling protagonists, and cinematic intensity all match well, but those are superficial characteristics. Having seen two seasons of the show, here's how I'd pitch it today:
A burnt-out chef flees the pressures of haute cuisine to come home to Chicago and the pressures of rehabilitating the family business -- a no-frills Italian beef place once run by the older brother he idolized, who died of a drug addiction. His relentless, exacting style will clash with the eclectic staff he's inheriting.
And here's how the show's Twitter account describes it:
A young chef fights to transform a sandwich shop alongside a rough-around-the-edges kitchen crew.
Which made me realize: vague terms like dramedy are allowed to exist because, at the coalface, loglines are the preferred tool for communicating genre. But I still want to insist on a taxonomy, because there are a bunch of completely orthogonal dimensions being collapsed into one short sentence, and if we want to take inspiration from The Bear, our study should empower us to move along these axes and find our ideal story + audience, not just train us to write another story about stressed out cooks.
These are the first five facets of genre, which fit rather easily into the 14 words of the show's official logline.
World > Kitchen
It's about a chef, this one's a gimme. No mention of the time period (modern day) or the setting (Chicago), but don't be fooled: the city is never another main character in a story, as proved by They Came Together.
Plot > Optimistic > Reclamation
Key phrase: "fights to transform".
The Bear is a comeback story, and you'll find plenty in that nebulous "comedy-drama" zone. The outlook is optimistic and the endings tend to be happy, but you can't call it a comeback if you were never a loser, and losers lead dramatic lives. Even the kid-friendliest of these narratives, The Mighty Ducks, touches on some dark stuff: Gordon Bombay gets the head coaching gig via court order, thanks to a DUI.
Characters > Ensemble > ragtag
Key phrase: "rough-around-the-edges".
In my pitch, I mentioned Carmy's brother being an addict. A side character2 with an addiction problem is a major greenlight for me. As a graphomaniac who is actively suppressing the urge to blow this piece out to 10k, I'm fascinated by addiction as a theme. But more than that, it's a good indicator when a story has room for an addict, because I want to hang out with writers that're comfortable with the full spectrum of human psychology.
The Bear does a lovely job with this, just like another favorite, Deadwood. There, as here, you have a found-family unit working to put aside their own hangups and pull an enterprise out of the mud, while underneath all their bickering and intensity is a very warm, humanistic core.
Conflict > In-group > Family
You will not be surprised to hear that I have no patience for the classic set of conflicts: "man v. man", "man v. nature", etc.
My interest is how the story channels its negativity, which I think only allows for three possibilities: self, in-group, and out-group. The out-group has always been a safe dumping ground for a story's bad feelings, and it remains the dominant approach. The only thing that's changed is how we define the out-group. You could say that the quintessential American action movie is about shooting aliens with guns, and it's just a question of whether that alien is from outer space or Russia.
In The Bear, all of the shouting takes place behind closed doors, among intimates. It's not like there’s a rival sandwich place across the street, or a Ratatouille-esque food critic who will make or break them. The big fights in The Bear are the kind you’d see in the huddle of a football team, and conducted with the same assumption that they’re all on the same side at the end of the day. Richie can even sneak an “I love you” into a shouting match with Carmy.
Temperature > Hot
This is one I haven't nailed down yet, because it affects so many aspects of a production -- nearly all of them in the case of The Bear, which takes its cues from the kitchen. It is hot, cramped, and pressurized, and that expresses itself in busy oners, a lot of crosstalk, strong music cues, and interrupted scenes. The fun is in watching these charged characters bouncing off each other.
I want to stress that the emotional tone isn't necessarily affected by this temperature. Like Mad Men: that's a show with a fantastic sense of humor, but the storytelling is cool to the touch. The arcs, the dialogue, the staging, the costumes: everything is meticulously positioned and maneuvered. Bursts of chaos, which do happen, can feel utterly surreal in such a mannered atmosphere.
So those five are going to be the basis of my analysis, and I'll track those as I start watching episodes. But there is a gigantic sixth one that I haven't touched on at all, and is nowhere to be found in the official logline:
Psychology > Schizoid > Superman
Strange as it may sound, the emotional engine that drives Carmy and therefore this show is the exact same one that is driving Superman. Not that this clarifies matters -- Superman is notoriously difficult to write for, due to his near-omnipotence. But I think I could do it, so James Gunn, let me know if you’re still looking for a script. Here's the core belief of the archetype, which I'll dig into tomorrow in part two:
If you're good enough at what you do, if you can just figure out how to Give The People What They Want, you'll be so useful as to avoid destruction for being different.
Google dropping the ball is not a shocker, considering that their motto since 2021 has been "We put the CTE in Alphabet". Though to be fair, the search engine scraped directly from Wikipedia, which had a 17-year-long argument on a Talk page about whether they should treat the portmanetau as canonical -- just in case you didn't believe me when I say that Wikipedia editors are the hunter-killers of nerds.
Addicted protagonists are a tougher hang, since those stories tend to fixate on the abasement, and I'm not a rubbernecker by nature.