Over the course of its first three seasons, the Hulu show The Bear has won 21 Emmy Awards, including an award for Outstanding Comedy Series, for its first season. Ever since then, a debate has raged among TV lovers about whether The Bear should be nominated in the comedy category at all, given that it’s about an workaholic chef (Jeremy Allen White) working through grief, depression, and trauma.
With one more season of The Bear left, it’s a great time to revisit that debate before The Bear makes its final bow.
The case for The Bear as a drama
Fear, loathing, and Michelin stars
Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto is a mess when we meet him at the start of the show. He’s been chewed up and spit out by elite culinary institutions, which has left him with severe control issues, an unhealthy obsession with perfection, and panic attacks. He’s also traumatized by the suicide of his older brother Michael (Jon Bernthal), and returns to his hometown of Chicago to takeover Michael’s restaurant The Beef, which he intends to make over into a world-class restaurant called The Bear.
Generally speaking, the tone of The Bear is fairly grim. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of levity — even lots of them — but it generally follows the lead of the main character, and the main character is not well. It’s definitely more downbeat than your average comedy show.
And there are also many moments that will rip your heart out; arguably, those are the ones that fans think of first. They think of young chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) breaking down at work as exhaustion, pressure, and worry over her father’s health catch up to her. They think of Berzatto family matriarch Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) tearfully admitting her regrets Michael’s traumatic birth, or driving her car through the wall during Christmas dinner.
There are optimistic moments, too, like when Carmy gives the ownership jacket to Sydney and acknowledges that she’s the future of the restaurant, but little you could call a “joke.”
The case for The Bear as a comedy
It’s funny, but is it ha-ha funny?
Having said all that, it’s not as The Bear doesn’t have any funny moments. There aren’t a ton of punchlines, but there are lots of funny situations. Highlights include:
- Carmy and his “cousin” Ritchie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) have a fight with a giant blow-up hot dog in between them.
- In the first episode, Carmy is looking at Sydney’s resume and thinks that UPS is a culinary institute, showing how immersed he is in this world, maybe to the point where it’s unhealthy.
- Carmy and Richie accidentally give Xanex to a bunch of kids at a birthday party, but their Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) actually prefers it that way. Quieter.
- In the fifth episode of Season 1, a toilet explodes just before the lunch rush. It doesn’t get more classic comedy than toilet jokes.
Admittedly, a lot of the humor on The Bear has a dark tint to it, like a running bit where people are surprised that Carmy is alive and he has to explain that, actually, it was his brother Michael that took his own life. But isn’t a dark comedy still a comedy?
Is The Bear a drama with comedy in it?
Or the other way around?
It may have to do with the ratio of comedy to drama. There are plenty of individual episodes in outright comedy shows that are moving and powerful, but they’re the exceptions, not the rule. For example, Futurama is a goofy, animated sci-fi show with a wise-cracking robot, but the episode where the dog dies will undo you.
The question is whether the comedy in The Bear is there to give us a reprieve from the dramatic bits, or if the drama is there to break up all the jokes. I’d argue that it’s closer to the former. We’re invested in seeing whether Carmy can overcome his own self-sabotaging instincts and actually find a way to be happy, and that journey has been painful. I know I don’t really watch The Bear expecting to laugh, although I’m glad when it happens.
Disney+ has 35 seasons of the best TV ever made, and none of them are from Disney
Every streamer wants a legacy sitcom in its library. Disney+ got the best one.
How do you solve a problem like The Bear?
That said, there’s no right answer to this. And The Bear isn’t the only show that’s hard to categorize. The year it won the award for Outstanding Comedy Series at the Emmys, The Bear was competing with Barry, a violent show about an ex-assassin (Bill Hader) trying to better himself through acting, although he still occasionally lapses into murder. Succession is one of the best series on HBO and is widely considered a drama, despite frequently being laugh-out-loud funny.
How do you make sense of shows like that? Absent creating whole new awards categories for dramadies, you have to do it on a case-by-case basis, and the awards bodies are managing as best they can.
The final season of The Bear drops on Hulu on June 25, 2026. All eight episodes will be available at once. Hopefully they’ll be so good that no one will care about categorizing them.
- Release Date
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2022 – 2026-00-00
- Network
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Hulu
- Showrunner
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Christopher Storer
- Directors
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Ramy Youssef
- Writers
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Catherine Schetina, Alex Russell, Karen Joseph Adcock, Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, Stacy Osei-Kuffour
