The Bear Is the Best Kind of Workplace Romance
This article was originally published on June 26, 2023. We’re taking it out of the freezer and serving it again ahead of The Bear’s third season on Hulu.
In season two of The Bear, Carmy and Sydney do everything bickering couples do. They accuse each other of keeping secrets and get jealous of time spent with other people. They miscommunicate and make decisions without consulting the other person. Yet the closest they get to a physical relationship is saying “I’m sorry” in ASL, each rubbing their heart with their right fist to signify an apology. And all of it — the collaboration and competition, friction and fondness, acrimony and empathy — is better than any kiss could have been. Sorry, Carmy and Syd shippers, but they were never going to be our new Janine and Gregory. (The Bear’s creator has said as much.) They’re our new Don and Peggy.
Workplace romances, though very much not a good idea in reality, can be damn fun to watch onscreen. But once characters pair off, all their previous narrative possibilities become constrained to two avenues — either the relationship will work out or it won’t. Sometimes more fertile ground, from character-development and plotting perspectives, is found in the platonic work partnership: How do people protect their self-interest in a place where they’re evaluated and critiqued? What can you build or create with another person that you could never do alone? The Bear puts its own spin on this by maintaining the work-based friction between Carmy and Syd and giving each a possible paramour who complicates their commitment to the new restaurant. When Carmy starts slipping up, his relationship with Claire might be to blame. When Sydney replies to Marcus’s gentle ask-out with a stammering “fuck” medley, her anxiety could stem from fear of losing the person who’s become her closest confidante in the workplace. (To continue the Mad Men comparison, is Marcus Syd’s Stan Rizzo? Discuss!)
Questions about the balance between teamwork and self-worth are especially fruitful in fields where a job is not just a 9-to-5 but what you love and can’t live without. In Mad Men, the relationship between Don and Peggy felt like the show’s most meaningful both because it rejected the fickleness of romance and because they pushed each other to extremes of good and bad in ways that had nothing to do with physical attraction. There were no ulterior motives to their fights or agreements past the work, and each season incorporated a professional challenge for Don and Peggy to illustrate how they deeply understood, appreciated, and sometimes couldn’t stand each other. So many of the series’ most iconic lines were born from them baring their hearts (“This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened”; “I worry about a lot of things, but I don’t worry about you”) or arguing about their value (“I will spend the rest of my life trying to hire you”; “That’s what the money is for!”) because ultimately that’s what Mad Men was about: pouring yourself into a profession that values your creativity while ensuring your anonymity. The ads Don and Peggy wrote don’t have bylines, and sometimes they were the only ones aware of how hard the other toiled, but those late nights never progressed past clasped hands or a Frank Sinatra–accompanied slow dance. The mutual respect Don and Peggy developed for each other as a result of their platonic relationship ultimately aided in their professional and personal advancement: Don’s humility, Peggy’s confidence. Through the pair, Mad Men foregrounded the profundity that can be found not just in love but also in shared labor.
On The Bear, the Carmy and Sydney relationship simmers toward a similar boil of messy conflict and honest vulnerability. Like Don, Carmy is the established success with undeniable talent and a deeply fucked-up personal life; like Peggy, Syd is the upstart with excellent ideas, a refusal to diminish herself, and a parent who doesn’t understand her devotion to her job. Those tensions were introduced in season one when Carmy and Syd clashed over her risotto-and-short-rib dish, and they drive the plot of season two as Carmy and Syd make strides forward but fail to get on the same page about what the Bear requires from each of them.
In the premiere, “Beef,” their back-and-forth about whether a Michelin star is necessary for their success is a sign of early conflict, but in “Pasta,” Carmy admits his inability to experience joy without dread, Syd maintains her desire to be one of the best, and they accept each other’s difference of opinion. Carmy ghosting Syd after suggesting they go on a food-tasting trip throughout Chicago in “Sundae” stokes her worry that she can’t rely on him, but their mutual vision for Marcus’s growth in “Honeydew” reflects the pride they feel in their colleague’s maturation. Ultimately, Syd’s need to prove herself and tendency to get lost in her own thoughts, combined with Carmy’s split attention, add up to complementary self-sabotage. Change doesn’t come easy, and The Bear doesn’t pretend it does. The back half of the season, as Carmy and Syd build out the restaurant’s menu, emphasizes how they, from moment to moment, agree and disagree with each other in search of the best expression of their creative efforts. And Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri have a fluid chemistry that moves easily between uncertainty and esteem, with a five-minute-long oner in penultimate episode “Omelette” serving as their most significant scene of the series so far.
This encounter, which sees Carmy and Syd collaborate to fix a wobbly table in the half-hour before opening for a friends-and-family preview night, is Don and Peggy coming up with the “What did you bring me, Daddy?” tagline for the Mohawk account, Don and Peggy drinking together in his office after their blow-up fight, Don kissing Peggy’s hand in apology, Peggy convincing Don to come home from California. It’s Carmy and Syd recognizing in each other what they lack while acknowledging what they share and promising to honor it. As The Bear creator Christopher Storer’s camera pushes closer to Carmy and Syd, it captures the characters in their clearest moment of fellowship — more so than the dishes they developed and taste-tested, more so than the flatware they chose. This is a repair they need the other person for; their repeated “You make me better at this” and Carmy’s insistence to Syd that “We’ll work on it” if anything goes wrong are vows to sustain and nurture their partnership.
Yes, things go to shit in finale “The Bear.” The fridge Carmy and Syd bickered about fixing all season breaks, locking a frenzied Carmy inside. Syd initially can’t keep up with the order tickets, which she reads as all saying FUCK. Claire walks away after overhearing Carmy’s bitter rant about mistakenly thinking he could balance work and a relationship; Marcus yells at Syd because he perceives her icing him out after he asked her on a date. Neither romantic connection is in a particularly good place, and Carmy and Syd’s physical distance is an obstacle, too. But a night when Carmy gets lost in self-loathing and Syd has to complete the work is again similar to a common Mad Men construct. How many times did Don disappear only for Peggy to pick up the slack?
Think of Mad Men’s season-seven episode “Waterloo,” in which Don comes back to the agency after a lengthy suspension and now reports to Peggy. He blows off the taglines she requests and leaves the office for hours at a time. Their relationship began as mentor and mentee, transitioned into co-workers and then competitors, and is now upended into boss and underling, a hierarchy Don doesn’t like very much. But in a meeting with potential nationwide client Burger Chef, Don hands the pitch off to Peggy, letting her deliver the concept they developed together in her own way. He knows, in that moment, that she can do it better than he can and that she’s earned the opportunity to try. In The Bear, Carmy’s “We’ll work on it” feels like a manifesto for a potential third season, with that “it” standing in for so much: the restaurant, their partnership, their passion for the work. There’s a fragile trust there, the same kind of trust Carmy and Syd are growing into with each other — and The Bear doesn’t require a romance to let it rip.