There are two kinds of people in the world: people who love The Bear and people who hate The Bear.
There are two kinds of people in the world: people who love The Bear and people who hate The Bear.
Except that’s not quite right. There are two more kinds of people: those of us who love The Bear but perfectly understand why others hate it, and those who hated it but couldn’t stop watching, pretty much the way you can’t not look at a car crash.
That fourth group is perfectly exemplified by Dan Foster, who writes: “I have never watched so much of a show that I hate so much.”
When I talk to someone who loves The Bear as much as I do, the shared exhilaration is joyful. But when I talk to someone who hates it, I’m not the least bit put out. I get it! I love that sentence of Dan’s.
I don’t know what explains this. I only know that the Christmas dinner episode (oh, how the haters hate it!) and the wedding episode are two of the greatest episodes of TV ever. I can’t be talked out of this. The Christmas dinner episode (season 2, episode 6, “Fishes”) was either a calamity of overwriting and overacting — over-being — or it was a virtuosic tour de force, tragicomic and transcendent. (I’ve watched it three times.) The wedding episode (season 4, episode 7, “Bears”) brings the main and not-so-main characters together under a long banquet table, where they gather, one by one, to soothe the nerves of the confused little girl — the daughter of the bride — who’s been hiding there. The cousins and friends create a protected, secret world, there under the tent of the white tablecloth, not just for her but for themselves. They’re all children sitting cross-legged under a fort someone’s mom set up in the living room with an old sheet draped over a few chairs. Then they’re ready to face the world again.
My husband and I were once on a highway at night when a bear dashed out right in front of our car, crossing our lane and running across three more back into the darkness. The Bear is like that bear — headlong and headily powerful. A bear in the headlights.
The final season of the show, which aired this year, started out flawed: the first two episodes were like drafts, or even just notes, that got published by mistake. But it recovered, delivering the intensity that Bear lovers craved and then going out in style. Unlike shows you never want to end, this show needed to. Something so intense and frantic has to be allowed to burn hard, then burn out, then subside back into the dark.