The Bear Is What AI Will Never Do, Because It Is Achingly Human
This is a spoiler free review/discussion of The Bear.
We're in the middle of a television and movie writers strike. One of the conditions that pushed writers to feel they needed to strike to protect their interests is the advancement of AI, and the degree to which AI is clearly going to be able to mimic a certain basic variety of storytelling. Studios are already turning to AI to make decisions about what gets produced and what doesn't. Related to this strike, is the degree to which "prestige television" has come to dominate the television landscape. Usually, they are also essentially one long story. Prestige television has more often than not eschewed the truly episodic format which dominated television for decades.
The Bear in its first two seasons shows exactly why writers and all of the creative people making television and film need to be paid fairly, and why AI is never going to be able to do what they do. It could not have come at a time better than in the middle of this writers strike.
Movies and television in the last decade or two, most especially what's being called "prestige television," have been obsessed with big things. They've been about huge stakes, people with power very few human beings have access to (whether it's social, economic and institutional power or literal super powers), and fantasy. Even going back to The Sopranos, arguably the first incarnation of what we understand prestige television to be now, the center of the show is a mob boss, and the consequences of the decisions characters make are life and death. Breaking Bad, begins with a humble high school chemistry teacher. Still, it's about his descent into becoming a sociopathic drug kingpin, and again, the decisions are life and death. Game Of Thrones is a full on fantasy bonanza, and the characters are jockeying for position around the throne of this fantasy kingdom, with dragons flying around. State intrigue, murder, assassination, incest, multi-generational rivalries, an army of the dead spends the first eight seasons on the march ot erase humanity... lots of BIG stuff being thrown around in Game Of Thrones. The world altering stakes are part of the fun of the show. Even Succession, as centered in the shortcomings of human beings as it is, is concerned with people who can decide who gets a real shot at the most powerful elected office in the world, the direction of a corporate media juggernaut that shapes an entire political movement and influences the culture in which it exists, and whose decisions effect the livelihoods of many thousands of people. Billions of dollars hang in the balance of single conversations. The Walking Dead and The Last Of Us take place in post apocalyptic versions of our world, and are about life and death decisions, as well as the survival of humanity.
Let's clear about what I'm using as a definition of "prestige television." It's most often television which is working with what for tv is a huge budget, and it is aspiring to the level of writing, performance and thematic ideas which for most of televisions history were part of the distinction between television and film. It's aspiring to the level of productions quality, the level of performance (as well as the casting), the level of dramatic quality which has been the purview of the best Hollywood has produced.
On the surface, The Bear is about a group of people trying to successfully run a high quality restaurant. Carm, essentially the protagonist, is the closest to a traditional prestige television character that we get. He's made a career working in the best restaurants in the world, and becoming one of the most respected chefs in the industry. Carm, as a character, also runs contrary to everything we've learned to expect from the protagonists in prestige television. He is a mess, and barely even knows what his motivation for continuing to work in the industry is from episode to episode. The only thing he really knows how to do is be a great chef, and that has almost come about my mistake. Part of his journey is coming to understand why it's meant so much to him to achieve this. One of the beautiful things The Bear does is create and elicit the same or greater emotional weight as the many prestige shows centered on life and death circumstances, when we know these are not life and death circumstances.
Every year, many thousands of people engage in the endeavor of running a restaurant at the highest quality level they are capable of or interested in. Every year, thousands of restaurants open and thousands close. The most successful restauranteurs can go through a handful of failed restaurants before they either land on a concept or find the right mixture of staff and concept to succeed. Eighty percent of restaurants never make it to the five year mark. Sixty percent fail in the first year. We all know the restaurant industry is extremely difficult, but it's not life and death. Nations don't topple or change trajectory based on the failure of a restaurant. No matter how great the restaurant, the survival of humanity is not effected by the survival of a restaurant. If Carm and his partner/sous chef Syd fail to get the restaurant to reach the zenith they are separately/collectively dreaming of, a dragon is not going to burn them to ash, a crime boss is not going to have his goons burying their bodies in the woods, the trajectory of the media industry and political life of the nation are not going to be effected.
The attention to detail and the care for the reality of working in the restaurant industry has been a central focus of the discussion around the show. If you've spent more than a few weeks in a high pressure restaurant atmosphere, it is impossible not to recognize how well the show captures it. Whether you are preparing food at the level of three Michelin stars or as The Beef is in the first season, at a local sandwich spot, working in a kitchen is existing in a pressure cooker. It is high intensity, high stress, no matter what. By itself, portraying this as authentically as the show does is an achievement. There hasn't been a tv show or film to depict the feeling of it this well. To the point, one of the features of discussion around the show has been many people who are in the restaurant industry or spent many years in it and got out because of how stressful it is, stating their decision not to stick with the show because of how authentic it is. "I can't leave work and then go watch a show that is just like being at work" or "I can't watch it because it makes me feel all the things that made me get out of the industry in the first place," are regular comments by people who are or who have been restaurant professionals.
That alone is something AI couldn't do. It could write something that mimics reality shows about cooking in a professional setting, and combine it with the melodrama of most prestige television, but it couldn't ever understand the motivation to be good at it, in the sense of working in a restaurant or creating a television show nominally about a restaurant. It couldn't ever present something that feels the way it does to be in a kitchen in the middle of the lunch or dinner rush and have things go catastrophically wrong or even what it's like to exist in the cacophony of an average day. It can't now deliver an authentic emotional similitude on this level, and it will never be able to.
Not content with this achievement the creators and team behind The Bear, have used season 2 to put the same amount of attention to detail and care into the emotional lives of its central and supporting characters. No shortage of television and shows would be content to lean back on the success of their depiction of restaurant life, the dazzle of the high quality filmmaking that the first season used to portray it, and turn it into something like a McGuffin, basically using it to cover the degree to which it's not paying that same level of attention to the characters. The creators of The Bear have done the opposite. It goes into that level of detail and gives that same level of care to the emotional and psychological lives of the characters, and weaves that successfully, and realistically, into how those effect the way this cast of characters reacts to the difficulties of running a high quality restaurant, and why they react to each other the way they do.
The Bear ultimately becomes something more than most prestige television shows dream of being. It is, due in part to how not huge the stakes of the show are. It is in many ways a distinctly humble show. These are characters and a show dedicated to something everyday people can identify with at almost every level. It may not be a restaurant, and it may not be food of this quality, but most of us have worked somewhere that we have been asked to execute at the highest level in an industry or at least execute at a level higher than what we've previously been expected to. We have all tried to find the way to somehow manage the balance between our emotional and psychological well being and doing something better than we've done it before, and struggled with what that means in its fullness and complexity. The Bear is using food and restaurant life as a way to talk about work/labor, creativity, how central those are to our most basic humanity, and it's relationship to the rest of what our basic humanity is.
That respect and care for our shared basic humanity is the secret sauce that makes The Bear a cut above it's competition and is on its way to becoming one of the great shows in television history.
As of the finale of season 2, The Bear is not a show about running a restaurant. The prospect of Michelin stars and the travails of the characters in their pursuit of that achievement or their resistance to that pursuit, isn't about seeing our characters succeed or fail. As in real life, success is the real McGuffin. The Bear is ultimately about the degree to which we run from or embrace the full experience of being human, with all the joys, frustration, heartbreak and fear that comes with it. It's only interested in the "how to" of success in the degree it effects that journey and that experience.
"Success" is the most socially acceptable excuse Americans have for trying to run from, hide from or fight our own basic humanity. In essence, that is the greatest delusion to come from the American Dream. Success, we're constantly told, is the end of the road. It's where our dreams come true. It's where we stop having to experience the most confusing and painful realities of our humanity. It's where we become and proof that we are more than human. We routinely make trades in the name of "success" that would be unthinkable under any other circumstance. Every care professional on the planet will tell anyone who will listen that when someone is at the end of life, "I should have worked more and I wish I was more successful" are never the regrets, yet we build this drive, motivation and concept into the center of our lives.
Carm has been to the mountaintop. He has worked in the world's greatest restaurants, and he knows how to perform at that level. He is recognized in the industry as not just being able to do it, but to do it well, at the highest level. He also knows the costs, and isn't completely sure he's still willing to pay them. He also knows Syd doesn't understand that, and the only thing that's going to enable her to understand the reality of it is making the climb. He sees that she is capable of it. He knows what it is to have that mean what it does to her, because it meant the same to her for him when he was making the climb. He's also in the process of being confronted with why it meant to him what it did, what the motivations to do it were based in, and what indulging those has meant for him as a person, and for his life and well being. Carm is broken in ways he's only begun to scratch the surface of understanding, and part of how he gets to be that way, is the pursuit and achievement of success.
As viewers, we may not know what it's like to have Carm's level of success. We may not know what it's like to be internationally recognized as among the best in a high pressure, high status industry. We know what it's like to be Syd and want to be that. We know what it's like to be Marcus and be confronted with circumstances which open up our ideas of what we might be capable of, and what we might dream of, having them rub up against our ideas of who we are, in ways that aren't always comfortable. We know what it's like to be Richie and encounter situations which call to us to have to expand our view of ourselves and life so that we might succeed, for ourselves and the people we care about, while also being unable to wrap our heads around what we have to do to even just have the shot. Many of us also know what it's like to be Carm, in watching someone chase something they don't fully understand, because we've been there. We've made the sacrifices to get where they think they want to go, and to understand the only real choice we have is to either help them or get out of their way, because we have experienced the kinds of emotional and psychological needs that drove us there.
The Bear is not just a show about success, and what it takes to get there. It's not holding up success as being inherently worth achieving. It's about what success and our concepts of it mean in our lives and the way we use it as a reason, an excuse, a motivation to run from or embrace the most human experiences and parts of ourselves we struggle with. I can't think of anything on television that has truly attempted to do this with characters who are essentially just regular, everyday, average people, doing something that isn't world shaking, shattering or altering. The Bear is humble in the scope of its circumstances and situations, the size of the world the characters live in, but is inspiring in its ambition and dedication to the authenticity and scope of those characters emotional and psychological lives in a way television and film rarely are.
Even Halt And Catch Fire, which dealt with many of these same themes, by using the timeline around the digital revolution, elevates the stakes. From the beginning, we know those characters have the opportunity to become part of the thing that is about to change the world, the introduction of the home computer and then the internet. The questions become, "Will they be able to do everything, professionally, personally and emotionally that allows them to do that or will they not, and what does that mean for each of them? Are they going to become part of that early movement of tech entrepreneurs who are central to changing the world or aren't they?" What makes it a great show is how much nuance, complexity and respect for the fullness of human existence it brings to that question and scenario, but it's still a very elevated, high stakes question.
The world does not change if a restaurant fails or succeeds. The industry itself doesn't even change, but the world of these characters changes based on that question, and the characters themselves change in the pursuit of answering the question and will be changed once it is answered. The trick is, they're not changed in any of the ways they really expect, and in some cases, in ways they don't want to be.
The Bear, and all of its creators, behind and in front of the camera, are clearly in love with the complexity of human beings and how we experience what life is in the 21st century. If anything, the great beauty of what The Bear is doing, is the flip side to the coin to Succession. There is only one escape from life, which is to say there is only one escape from being human, and everything we do to try to escape it just makes us more achingly human. Possibly the best thing about Succession was the constant focus on the degree to which our illusions and fantasies about the wealthy and powerful are just that, illusions and fantasies. The only thing special about them is their wealth and the degree to which they are influenced by and groomed to accrue, and are obsessed with power. The characters in Succession are cringe inducing because despite their wealth, power and education, they are without exception, achingly human.
Carm and the cast of The Bear are not people obsessed with power or wealth. There's a level of obsession with status and recognition, but even that is not going to be the kind of status and recognition that's going to give them the ability to alter the shape of the nation's political, economic, social or cultural life. Could they have some lasting effect on the restaurant industry by being an example of one kind or another? Possibly, but also not likely, and not at all what any of the characters are interested in. Syd has some recognition of what it would mean for a Black woman to be in that rarified position, but that's not even a central motivation. Her motivation is about her, and what she believes it will do for her, in how she is seen and in how she sees herself, whether or not she is fully cognizant of that. The overwhelming majority of the country will never know their names, their decisions will likely only ever effect the lives of the people directly in their small circle of influence within the restaurant and their personal lives. They are, in the larger picture, average, everyday people, and the obsession with this status and recognition may be a calling that they believe is going to elevate them beyond that, but as we are confronted with throughout both seasons, even that is achingly human.
In America, in most of the Western world at least, success is the way people reach the ability to be perceived as more than human. What Succession and The Bear have in common, and what The Bear is ultimately unique in doing, is showing the degree to which there is no escape from being human, successful or otherwise. This has been a staple of narrative storytelling about the wealthy and powerful for centuries. Succession is rightly referred to as Shakespearean, for this reason. It has been much more unusual for that to be applied the dreams of success and prestige that are sewn into the fabric of American life for people who aren't born wealthy or haven't achieved some kind of success in the world of whatever story they're telling. We rarely see stories about average people told through the lens of the lure of success, be it wealth, power, status or otherwise, as an attempt to escape their own basic humanity, in the fullness and complexity of what that means. The underdog story and the rags to riches success story are staples of American culture.
Even Station Eleven, which is focused on and centered around a similar foundational love of the experience of being human and human beings, is dealing in heightened stakes and conditions. It's post apocalyptic. They have survived what is almost unthinkable, and the world they exist in is really an excuse to talk about many of these same ideas. Like The Bear, it is beautiful in it's portrayal of what it means to be human, from the best of what we are to the worst, but it reaches into the fantastical to achieve it. We have yet to experience a genuine post apocalypse, even as it often feels like we're on the road there. The Bear may be one of the only things I've ever seen, in film or television, which takes the kinds of stakes and the kinds of drives the average, everyday people experience and live with, and devotes this level of care, attention and respect to them.
Carm's "cousin," Richie, who has at points bordered on caricature, is at the same time a much more complex character. We've seen caricatures of men like Richie thousands of times. He borders on caricature, because that's how he understands himself and his place in the world, like the many millions of men he is very much modeled after. The aspects of who Richie is that bring him up to that line of caricature, are his reaction to that. It's not the creative team behind the show looking down on Richie, even as he can be a void of assholery. Richie is chasing a thing he doesn't even fully understand, a thing he hasn't ever fully considered in any meaningful way, and that's why he is who he is. Paradoxically, he can only even approach becoming the thing he wants to be by expanding his view on himself and the world around him to the point where he's no longer chasing that same thing. What he thought he was chasing has changed, resulting in Richie being changed.
The Bear manages to be about work/labor, creativity, success and failure, family, personal relationships, personal history, the emotional and psychological reality of all these things, all at the same time. It encompasses the most foundational and important parts of life in a way very, very few works of fiction even attempt to, and it does so at the highest level of quality.
AI can't now, and never will be able to do this, because even if AI should reach sentience at some point, if it at some point reaches genuine autonomy, it will never exist as human. It may be able to present some close similitude, some level of mimicry which can at moments fool us, but it will never be able to do what the two combined seasons of The Bear have achieved, and express authentically and honestly the experience of being human in the midst of the most formative and important aspects of our lives and the degree to which we are simultaneously shaping our lives and shaped by life. At the least, it will never experience the feeling of being at the intersection of history, legacy and the immediacy of this moment, all of those acting simultaneously in competition and in consort, in the way human beings do and it will never truly know what it is to live in that existence.
Truly great storytelling transcends formula. There are pieces of formula we recognize in The Bear. It transcends that formula though, because it is not about the formula, it is about the thing the formula enables, and knowing that the ineffable and intangible are as much a part of human experience as the systems and formulas are. AI can recognize formula, patterns and standards, and it will no doubt get better at recognizing the thousands of deviations which exist and can be "successful." It will be able to create diversions, in the same way studios follow financial and audience metrics to identify patterns and create diversions that achieve success.
AI will never understand what part the ineffable and intangible play in great storytelling. It will never understand why three sentences which seem to have absolutely no connection to one another might be the exact thing that tells the audience who a character is, and why what a character doesn't say or do through a whole story is also important to telling the audience who that character is. It may understand that at times, a character should talk around a thing, not directly addressing it, but it will never understand the three things the audience understands about that character as a result. AI will never understand the conversation between Peter and Donna in the series finale, and how that informs the conversation he then has with Natalie. It will certainly never produce the performances any of the actors on The Bear give throughout the series so far.
The creators of The Bear have achieved something genuinely exceptional, genuinely rare by embracing just how unexceptional we all are, how all of our efforts to be exceptional and special, and how our motivations for trying to be are just more examples of how unexceptional and not special we really are. There is no way for any of us to be more or less than human. The Bear is achingly aware that all of our edifices, our systems and standards, our fantasies and illusions which require us to be anything else are the source of all of our pain, all of our discontent and that all of our failures come from the idea that we somehow can be more than human. They've demonstrated that real success, genuine success, the things that human well being are made of, are about embracing the degree to which that is true. It is not a perfect show, but this aspiration and the level of quality they do achieve in reaching for it, is exceptional and rare. The Bear is to television what truly great literature is to books, and that is something AI will never understand.