Is The Bear a Comedy? And Should I Care?

One morning you wake up, fresh and ready to enjoy a social-media day of brat memes … only to find your timelines have been hijacked. There are subtweets. There’s some outright anger. Everyone is talking about what counts as a real comedy, and you’re not entirely sure where it all came from. But it definitely has something to do with The Bear. Some of your friends can’t stop talking about how great this show is, but some of them seem legitimately annoyed. Is this show a comedy? Is it even funny? Can the idea of what is and is not funny ever be universal enough for that to be a meaningful definition of something? Let’s get into it!

Obviously I have seen all of The Bear so this isn’t even for me, but just in case someone’s reading this who hasn’t had a chance to watch it yet, what, uh, is The Bear?

 
FX’s The Bear is a half-hour-ish-long fictional TV show about a Chicago restaurant and the people who run it. It stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, a fancy Michelin-level chef who inherits his dead brother’s Chicago sandwich joint, The Beef, and quickly discovers that it’s being held together with a few gobs of solidified grease and a prayer. Carmy hires a new sous-chef named Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) to help him get the place in order, but by the end of season one, they realize that they really want to just close the whole thing and reinvent it as a premier fine-dining location.

Carmy’s whole deal is pretty dour — he takes the food very seriously, and he’s got a ton of baggage from his dysfunctional family dynamics and past work history. But many of the show’s side characters can swerve into space that’s lighter or more fun, especially his family friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and the Fak brothers, Shakespearean fool types who hang around and make trouble while trying to fix things. By season two, Carmy and Sydney have reimagined what the restaurant could be and reopened it as The Bear. In season three, Carmy so badly wants The Bear to be stellar that he starts to lose it, and everyone gets very annoyed with him.

So … is it a comedy?

What an interesting question! Here’s the short answer: not really.

The longer answer is that genre is a system of made-up categories that is really only useful as a way to try to group large, disparate bodies of narratives into rough systems that help generally classify something in comparison with other texts. Trying to truly and unequivocally nail down the exact moment when any TV show would stop being a comedy and start being a drama will make you feel dizzy. But especially by the time The Bear gets into its third season, the arguments for it as a comedy start to grow pretty weak in comparison to the arguments for it as a drama.

The argument for it as a comedy is for what Vulture writer Jesse David Fox calls a “post-comedy.” It may not be dense with laugh-out-loud jokes, or even funny-awkward situations that eventually lead to hilarity, but it’s a show that’s still operating in a playful state. In season one, Carmy’s sad and the show is stressful and the stakes feel high, but the underlying foundation is that the characters are in this situation (like a sitcom!) and they’re all operating in this space together. That form of comedy is an easier argument to make for season one, when they’re stuck together in the situation of a failing restaurant. Think about the episode where they forget that to-go orders have been turned on, and they’re all buried in an onslaught of tickets spitting out of the machine. The way it’s shot is stressful, yes, but it’s all based on this one absurd predicament they’re all caught in together. If at any moment Sydney rolled her eyes and said “Oh, brother!” to the accompaniment of a trombone slide, the whole thing would track as instant hilarity. The Bear withholds that sense of relief for a while, but the general structure is the same.

For season two, there’s still a basis for a comedy argument: They’re a dysfunctional family, but they’re all pulling together to make this thing happen. The themes are about creation, discovery, playfulness, love, and growth. And throughout, there’s a balance of tones, especially in the broad sweep of side characters who often leaven the overall sense of doom. There’s Richie and the Faks, but there’s also Tina calling Carmy “Jeff,” lots of burbling humor even in an episode as serious as “Fishes,” and multiple moments when Carmy remembers to puncture and humanize the grandiosity of his own ambitions.

The argument for it as a drama, on the other hand, is simplest in season three: Whereas Carmy’s intensity in earlier seasons is often counterbalanced with humor from other characters, in season three, everyone is dragged down by the burden of his high standards, and no one is having a good time. Even the Faks, the most straightforward funnymen on the show, are left to operate in the margins, their eyes darting around frantically to see if they’ve gotten into trouble. But the drama has also been there from the beginning. Season three is broadly a bummer, but The Bear has been at least occasionally a bummer since season one, and even though it sometimes cares about things like love and getting caught in hilarious situations, what it mostly cares about is pain, trauma, repeating cycles, motherhood, birth (literal and metaphorical), the idea of the artistic genius versus collaboration, and the challenge of making something beautiful under the cruel and unfeeling cloud of capitalism. You can make the argument that season three is different enough that it’s a departure from what came before — it was a comedy in seasons one and two, and now it’s a drama. But you can also see season three as more clearly underlining all the things that were there from the start. The Bear has always been more interested in the idea of a restaurant as a noble but Sisyphean exercise than it is in a restaurant as a place of joy and celebration. It’s always been more interested in the tension of existential sadness than in relieving that tension.

I basically just skimmed all of that. Let me try again. Is it funny?

You’re gonna laugh sometimes, but you’re going to laugh less and less as the show goes on. And even when you do laugh, it’s often going to be at least halfway into “pained groan” territory.

All right, this seems like a fun little debate for people who watch this show, but why am I hearing so much complaining about it?

It used to be much easier to tell TV comedies and TV dramas apart. But we’re now at least a decade into a period in TV development where most half-hour shows are no longer multi-cam sitcoms, and most of the biggest buzziest ones don’t look anything like Bob Hearts Abishola or Young Sheldon or even Only Murders in the Building, a show that’s about true crime but also has a running joke about one guy’s obsession with eating dips.

We’re now many years into half-hours like Transparent, Louie, Atlanta, Fleabag, Barry, and Russian Doll operating in this much more serious register, and we’re even longer (like, centuries longer) into a cultural bias that says that serious things are more valuable — more important, more meaningful, harder to make, more artistically worthy — than funny things. Of course, anyone who’s ever tried to make an audience laugh knows this is bullshit. Comedy is really fucking hard to do. But there’s been more acclaim and awards recognition for shows like Barry and The Bear than for patently comedic shows like What We Do in the Shadows, and the anti-Bear-as-comedy contingent believes that Funny Haha shows are getting shafted.

Are they?

This is an eye-of-the-beholder thing. If you believe The Bear is a comedy, then no, the Emmys are just doing what they should do and paying attention to a great TV comedy. If you think it’s a drama masquerading as a comedy, then yeah — shows like Shadows, Colin From Accounts, and Ghosts are not getting their due, because this category fraudster is sweeping in and distracting everyone with its pretentious self-seriousness.

Wait, this whole thing is about the Emmys?!

Kind of, yeah!

Nominations for the 76th Emmy Awards were announced last week, and once again, The Bear has swept many of the big comedy categories, with nominations for best series, writing, directing, supporting actors, guest actors, and lead performances from Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White. Then came the backlash, characterized by a piece in The Guardian and a post from an Abbott Elementary writer celebrating Abbott’s nominations while also making a pointed joke about how their series has at least six episodes that are “primarily comedic, according to the TV Academy.”

If the Emmys did not have such definitive, binary categories for its big prime-time awards (acting, directing, best overall), we could all happily argue it as a comedy or a drama while also comfortably acknowledging that it’s in between. But the prime-time Emmys, much like contemporary politics and TikTok posters, do not do well with nuance. Half-hour shows traditionally get called “comedies,” regardless of what happens inside that half-hour. Hour-long shows are often called “dramas” in the same way. For decades, this was a reasonable reflection of how most television worked: Half-hour shows were almost always multi-cam comedies filmed in front of a live studio audience and full of obvious laugh lines; while dramas were more likely to be single-camera productions, the province of murder mysteries, legal dramas, or primetime soaps. But as shows like Fleabag and Atlanta have reshaped the half-hour TV landscape, the Emmys haven’t done anything to redefine those categories.

Is there a solution?

There are a couple! The Bear could pull an Orange Is the New Black and submit in the drama category for season three — honestly not a bad option, given how weak the current drama offerings are. Or the Emmys could commit to a more elaborate overhaul of its prime-time categories and make them more like the Creative Arts Emmys, where makeup is broken out into fantasy and non-fantasy series, and reality shows are split by things like competition versus unstructured. (Half-hour single-cam versus half-hour multi-cam, maybe?) Of course, these are solutions that would help lower the Emmys pressure, but shows like The Bear will always live in enough of a gray space that some of us nerds will keep arguing about it no matter what.

Or, we could all participate in a mass-awareness campaign targeted at Emmys voters, aimed at opening their minds to the remarkable craft and ingenuity involved in being funny. Matt Berry would win the Emmy he deserves and our nation would be healed.