In the rulebook of life, it is said that two things are clear: death and taxes. But this unspoken sentiment omits one major factor – the credibility of a Rotten Tomatoes percentage. A reliable counsel in how we determine whether to lend our eyes to a film or television show, it’s notoriously difficult to score high, and the chances of finding a rotten as opposed to a ripe tomato are frequent. But not for Christopher Storer’s The Bear, a fast-paced and uncanny depiction of running a family-owned restaurant in Chicago and the many spillages along the way.
The Bear earns a behemoth 99% on the reviewing platform for its visceral tableau of the grit, growth, and well, germs that get in the way of running a successful culinary business. To score so highly seems the equivalent of earning three Michelin stars. And much like a restaurant that breathes the pressure of feeding its guests, the unexpected success of the FX-produced show has brought with it its own kind of reputational consistency, as the third season is set to take to screens this summer. “It’s like a shadow that grows,” shares the Los-Angeles born and bred actor Lionel Boyce, who plays the aspiring patisserie chef, Marcus, in the seminal hit comedy-drama, as he looks back on the first two seasons. “There’s a pressure to deliver, but it’s never necessarily rooted in reality. The pressure is thinking about other people’s expectations and thinking about things that you can’t control.” So, he sharpens his tools – and mind – by concentrating on the comradeship inside the kitchen on set in the Windy City. “We can’t think about anything beyond making the show. It’s been a great lesson – you’re not necessarily looking left and right, but moving forward.”
It’s the month leading up to the third season when we speak. Hulu has just released the first teaser trailer, a painfully short clip of actor Jeremy Allen White, the show’s lead, once again looking emphatically stressed (no spoiler there), as he opens a bag of his finest chef ’s knives onto the unit of a sparse looking kitchen. While the internet is doing what it does best, boiling over this clip with every possible hypothesis, Lionel and I, meanwhile, are trying to work out the UK equivalent to Nerds Rope candy. I offer the solution of Millions, but I’m not sure it’s right. “I love the piggies, though,” he laughs. The piggies? I have to think. Percy Pig, of course.
I’ve yet to encounter someone who has watched the show and had a bad word to say about it – let alone Lionel’s hypnotic, stand-out performance. Believe me, I’ve really asked around. You could call that success alone, but the true recipe behind The Bear’s applause (the Hulu series earned 853 million viewing minutes across its 18 episodes for the week of June 19-25 2023, more than twice its top viewing minutes last year for season one) comes down to the team of cooks involved, from Jeremy Allen White [playing Carmy], to Ayo Edebiri [playing Sydney], Ebon Moss-Bachrach [playing Richie] and, of course, Lionel. “You learn so much for each individual person,” he shares. “No one has an ego, and we’re all here to make something under the premise that you don’t have to put yourself through pain and agony to create something great.” Evidently many cooks do not spoil the broth in The Bear, and it was early during his schooling years that he discovered his appetite for performance, citing the indie-comedy, Napoleon Dynamite as a film that had an impact on him and its abstract humour. That said, “I never grew up looking at the TV thinking ‘I want to do that,’ but I found it was the only thing that made sense to me. I cared about it more than anything else I’d done. The task was to figure out how to maintain this for the rest of my life.”
