Hacker Cinema
The Bear
2022 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Christopher Storer
Carmy, a young fine-dining chef, comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop. As he fights to transform the shop and himself, he works alongside a rough-around-the-edges crew that ultimately reveal themselves as his chosen family.
7 positive3 negative14 neutralfrom 24 commenters
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24 comments on Hacker News
Starts with a suspiciously faithful synopsis of The Bear 2x07 "Forks".
Great episode but it's a bit sus.
The classification of "comedy" seems to be a bit ambiguous.
Funny People with Adam Sandler is considered a comedy, and has a trailer to match. But the actual content of the movie is that of a drama / tragedy. (69% critics, 48% audience.)
The Bear (TV show) is called a comedy but everything I've read paints it as... drama.
American Fiction, for me, was a thoughtful drama with dark humor. And I think that's what the audience expected so the scores match. I never thought it was a comedy.
Maybe this is a me problem where I don't consider things comedy when others do.
I mean, Wes Anderson movies aren't exactly comedy either. They are whimsical and silly, and can elicit laughter, but the stories are dramatic.
"Forks", the episode from the second season of The Bear, remains my most favorite episode of the series and I believe is the highest rated episode of the entire series. Also love how the episode ended.
Every second counts.
Slightly OT, but it's been a long time since I've been as disappointed with anything as I was with the last season (3) of The Bear. I made it three episodes in, then deleted it. The first seasons were so good.
I'm not pro austerity! I didn't even make any generalizations, my whole comment is about the position of a few political parties in my country. Are you unable to distinguish relaying the position of a third party from relaying your own beliefs?
Is the bear show the kitchen TV series? I'm still trying to understand what the heck you are referencing but I'm starting to realize you are very difficult to talk to so this is me giving up. I'm sorry I don't have more patience you seem like you know some stuff but are too preoccupied with sounding smart rather than speaking plainly.
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
The same restaurant that was featured in the tv series The Bear right?
>When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2
Honestly, that seems to be part of the playbook for almost every show now. I wonder if people just didn't notice it much until the Bear or Ted Lasso, or maybe just because it's more of an abrupt departure from the main story line in those shows instead of just being a b-plot part of a normal episode.
There's a popular if snarky narrative that Ted Lasso started out as a straightforward comedy and then became too enraptured with character trauma-drama schmaltz. When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2, people mocked it by likening it to Ted Lasso.
> Other folks typically show up, do their jobs, and leave.
I don’t really buy this. When I was in kitchens, I used to agonize over the injustices done by the more psychopathic coworkers/bosses, not to mention the nightmares like you see in some episodes of The Bear. I would also often think about how to improve some situation going on, like kitchen/station layout, workflows, inventory, etc.
My wife works in psych and often ruminates on her patients, trying to figure out some thing about them long after she’s done seeing them for the day. And also the same story as me with psychopathic bosses.
I’m sure there are just people who genuinely care and then people that don’t give a fuck in any given field. I know I’ve run into plenty of both all across society.
I will agree that there is a unique aspect to the mental distress caused by industry software work though, although I don’t want to spill the ink required to elaborate on that here.
This article came out in 2017, five years before the release of "The Bear", a currently hot TV show about fine dining. In this show one of the main characters polishes forks for an entire day and is rebuked for doing a bad job and not respecting the work. Previously this character offers to wash dishes and is told the restaurant has the best dishwashers in the business and can't afford to have someone like him screwing it up.
Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8XSIVhsE4
Everyone should watch “Napkins” in season 3 of The Bear. And all the episodes before.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
Once upon a time I used to be so good at remembering faces that the first two times I encountered someone who knew me but I didn’t recognize, it freaked me out -for days- afterward.
The first time it was someone a year or two behind me in high school who I never recalled interacted with but must have known of me through someone else in school.
The second time my first year chem lab partner said hi to me while I was at work. She had gone through a complete makeover. Lost weight, switched to contacts, clothes that actually fit and complemented her, bleached and straightened her hair. It took me half an hour to figure that one out.
I am still the guy who can point out the boyfriend in the movie was so and so who hasn’t been in a major dip for twenty years, but in last few years I’ve started to confuse actors with each other, and suspecting family connections between people that have none. Which is both bothering me and giving me some sympathy for old people saying “they all look the same”. Maybe it’s not being racist it’s just having an old brain.
I can still pick out voices accurately though. Molly Ringwald was in season 2 of The Bear. After 40 years (yes, 40 years this summer!) she looks completely different from The Breakfast Club, but her voice, while much older now, is exactly the same tempo.
No not everything is bad. Severance, The Bear, Succession off the top of my head are totally worth watching.
The Forks episode of The Bear is one of my favorite stories on giving a shit: a fork polisher at a fancy restaurant learns you don’t work in food service because you love polishing forks. You do it because you want to bring people joy and polishing the forks is one of many steps to that end. You can find purpose in fork polishing through both excellence and empathy for your customers. There’s a lot of days the code I write is about as exciting as fork polishing, but you do it for your teammates and users.
A TV/Streaming queue/schedule - Return to passive, lean-back TV
Do you hate (I do) being in charge of "what to watch tonight" on streaming?
This app would let you put your chosen streaming or broadcast shows (across networks, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.) in an old-school weekly TV Guide grid.
So, Tuesday we'd watch The Bear then Queer Eye then Prank Panel. Wednesday we'd watch Bake Squad then Star Trek, etc. You could even schedule "movie night" w/ a queue (maybe randomized) of movies on our watch list.
Of course, better than broadcast or a fixed schedule, if you miss Episode S2E6 of in the timeslot you assigned to a show, it would just rollover to its next timeslot.
Even if there's no way easy way to build a universal TV grid that actually plays the shows directly, just having our pre-decided "TV schedule" would save so much hunting and negotiation.
> We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly.
I don't think prestige TV is necesirely expensive though.
The wire, breaking bad, Andor, the bear, severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets.
If anything big budgets have not translated into quality, see GoT, Rings of Power, Stranger Things all getting worse the more moeny thrown at them.
prestigue tv is about talent, and having longer story lines, it just allows for more character work than a movie, but not because of that does it have to cost exponentially more.
Looking at that list I have a feeling you'd like "The Bear".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14452776/
If a movie rental is $6 and you watch one movie a month, it’s maybe worth it if 3 people are watching 1 movie a month (plus a little extra).
But not worth $20 for 1 movie or show a month. Better off just renting stuff or buying shows. Or for some people, worth toggling subscriptions as needed eg I subscribed to Hulu to watch The Bear, Peacock for the Olympics, Fox for the World Cup, etc. Then cancelled immediately after (with Apple I can cancel immediately after subscribing, so I don’t forget!)
It’s funny, I’m more sympathetic than ever to pirates, given how frequently creative works are disappeared or moved these days - pulled from streaming for political/social norms reasons (1984 style), “purchased” items removed from libraries for licensing reasons or because a platform outright closes, and then the garden variety shuffling of content between platforms in what seems like a hypermodern version of IP musical chairs (“who has 30 rock this week”).
But at the same time I engage in piracy less than ever before. For me it seems like the hard part used to be obtaining the content — “why can’t I buy or rent the new Sopranos online” — but now the hard part is choosing something worth my time in the oceans of available titles.
This past week I watched a Norwegian miniseries about people stuck in an airport at Christmas (Netflix). Prior week I watched videos from a London Clojure conference (YouTube premium). Prior to that I rewatched an old Jim Jarmusch movie (Criterion). A couple months ago I was on a Hulu binge (The Bear, Only Murderers) before cancelling. I bought a comedy special from Louis CK’s own website. I only used a couple months of a free year of Apple TV, to watch Ted Lasso.
My default is to watch old Anthony Bourdain, either streaming (back when I had Hulu, or when I had HBO Now for Curb Your Enthusiasm) or buy a copy on Apple’s store.
But just as often I look around and give up. Most nights there’s nothing I want to watch. If I can, I make myself read a book or do some coding or maybe a podcast. I subscribe to streaming platforms then cancel. It’s so easy to sign up and then leave.
My point is, if I can find something I want watch it’s only a few clicks to watch it legally for a decent price (helps that I am not in my 20s, income wise). But it’s hard to find anything I want to watch. Piracy is almost a non sequitir these days, most of the time. But sure, if you find something you love, make sure to torrent a copy, because it will disappear eventually for one reason or another.
> You see this A LOT in food spend in US especially in rich urban areas.
This won't resonate withh you unless you are or were ever a cook, I fear we had so much more left to capture and were forced to leave on the table that was taken away because of COVID, but this transition in the US food culture was paid with lots of hard work and countless sacrifices that most will never get beyond watching an episode of The Bear.
Two big blows came in hard after Bourdain's death (so many concepts and projects were abandoned that never came back) and then followed with COVID destroying the Industry in such a way that I'm doubting will ever get much further than this in my Lifetime any more: food culture in the US still has so much left to catch up with Asia and Europe but we were making massive progress towards that, but I'm staring to accept this will probably be the high-water mark that the next generation of tech workers and cooks alike will need to build off of. And no, ghost kitchens and burning VC money from Softbank on DD is not a solution.
So far, outside of small boutique restaurants and kitchens, all I've seen is a race to the bottom profit seeking with almost no motivation other than to capture what marketshare remains from corps who benefited from PPP and ZIRP at whatever cost it takes and cutting corners until they got bought out by a large Restaurant group. This may seem like hyperbole but ~60% of all restaurants shutdown forever [0] after covid in what was already I high-failure sector with incredibly costly CAPEX/OPEX business models and low profit margins even during the best of times.
My last encounter with a delivery driver from a large vendor (think Shamrock or Sysco type corp) brought it all home: they had essentially succumb to the same exploitative delivery and monitoring systems that an Amazon delivery driver has, which was a stark contrast to getting deliveries from local farmers for produce/protein ha were the highlight of the menu and accompanied with items from small artisans and purveyors for cheeses, deserts breads etc...
We've lost something very vital coming out of COVID, and I'm not sure what can be done to not undo the progress that was made since the culture-shift has swung so hard to this Amazonification of this Industry.
Article about the bear TV show
Depending which country you’re in or bundle you choose, Disney gives you:
- all the fox content which is a massive range of genres
- Disney animation and live action stuff (including Pixar)
- Marvel and Star Wars
- national geographic documentaries
- a bunch of shows on Hulu or from FX
The range is actually quite a bit higher overall.
In the US these are split out over multiple services but in most of the rest of the world, Disney merged it in to the one app.
I currently have the latest Pixar film in my recommended list next to The Bear and Reservation Dogs.