So I'm at an Italian restaurant the other day. Rare occurrence for me at the best of times. There's no Italian food worth having in Peterborough, after all. Believe me, I've checked.

There's actually scarce food worth having in Peterborough, despite what the tourism board would tell you. Drive two hours southeast and you'll see what I mean. Kingston, Ontario has a number of restaurants of a level of quality disproportionate to its somewhat average size with which nothing in Peterborough can really compare.

I grew up in Ottawa, but I think of Kingston as the food mecca of Southern Ontario. Maybe it's just that my grandparents lived near Kingston for most of my life and my grandparents have always had money, so the quality of food I ate in restaurants there was always somewhat better than that of the greasy-spoon diners of my hometown.

Not that I've got anything against diners, another thing Peterborough desperately lacks. I like diner fare; love it, even, more than your average up-scale establishment at the best of the times. I’ll take Ottawa’s Elgin Street Diner over any of the places near my parents’ house that call their food “cuisine.”

Still, a good Italian place with mixed drinks and proper $35 entrees is a hell of a thing. A good Italian place may well, on occasion, be better than a garbage plate of poutine, but at the end of the day that’s not really the diner’s fault. The two don't even compare.

So I’m at this Italian restaurant with my family, drinking a Dark ‘n Stormy while waiting for a $32 plate of gnocchi, and I utter the phrase that I’m sure many a white person with even a middling attunement to popular culture has said at least once in the last three years: “You know, this is kind of like The Bear.”

On the one hand, I recognize this is a horrifically cringeworthy thing to say. On the other hand, I am at least a little bit drunk (they make those Dark ‘n Stormies strong). On the third hand, The Bear begs to be talked about, and since my family refused to entertain me, I will monopolize your attention to do exactly that.

I suppose we start with food, because that’s what the show’s about, isn’t it? That’s why I started this piece in an Italian restaurant: it’s framing; a kind of symmetry between my account and the shadow on the cave wall.

Let’s put that under a heat lamp for a moment, because I’m getting to it, but cooking is a slow and deliberate process and this whole thing needs just a couple hundred words to marinate. Bear with me.

Ever since I was very little, I have been an incorrigibly picky eater. I ate basically only two food groups: bread and cheese. One condiment: ketchup. Sum total one vegetable: carrots. Nothing spicy, nothing bitter, just bread and cheese; Kraft Dinner, grilled cheese, and as many other ways as you could recombine those constituent parts.

I didn’t eat vegetables, didn’t eat red meat, barely ate fruit, and only really took to chicken nuggets well after I was already reading at a grade four level in the first grade. You might assume that as a picky eater, I’d never really have an interest in cooking. You’d be wrong.

If there’s one thing which I have learned from multi-starred, destination, small-plate restaurants and local greasy spoons alike, it’s that if you’re going to stick to just one thing, you had better be fucking good at it. 

Cooking is, therefore, something I am good at. It is something I am good at out of the necessity of having so thoroughly pigeonholed myself into an admittedly diminutive palate. I eat a fairly consistent repertoire of primarily carb-and-cheese-product-based meals. It behooves me, as such, to master the art of preparing these.

Being charitable, it is perhaps the best of my few marketable interpersonal skills.

I spent a lot of time cooking and baking with my mother growing up. In many ways, this presented me an advantage over other raised-as-male university undergraduates when it came to establishing myself inside a social circle. 

The first thing I did to ingratiate myself to my floormates in the Gzowski College Annex in the September of mine moving in was to make a fuck-large sheetpan of apple crisp for them using some of my roommates’ old weed butter.

The coconut oil had gone rancid, so it didn’t actually manage to get them high (this might equally have something to do with the amount of pot my floormates imbibed) but they reported that in no uncertain terms the dessert was culinarily excellent.

Between such gifts presented on the occasion of residence neighbours’ birthdays or mine having leftovers of which to dispose of, and the routine noise complaints our apartment received from my roommate and I kneading sourdough, cooking became sort of My Thing for a time. While other people walked 30 minutes to the Gzowski College Dining Hall, this bitch made shit. 

It became a running joke in my 5:00 PM Intro to World Literature seminar that I would almost always be throwing pizza dough, dicing vegetables, or filling pierogies in my window of the Zoom gallery while rattling off my opinion about Heart of Darkness. Each week my professor would ask what I was making, and I would indulge him, and my friend tuning in from his home in Japan, where it was 5:00 AM, would vociferously complain that it was late enough in the day that I was visibly drinking a beer in class.

Ahh, those were the days.

I still use this trick, by the way. I was at a party this summer, to which I was the only one who brought food, and I was stopped by a twink on my way out to ask if I was “the one who brought the macaroni salad,” because “oh my God, it was so fucking good.”

There’s probably better things to be remembered as than the person who brought macaroni salad to a party, but for lack of being the person who brings drugs you can reliably be the one who brings food.

For all its banality to me, I’ll grant that there are few things more impressive to a potential friend or sexual partner than being able to cook. Certainly depending on the kind of sex in which you engage, a baseline degree of discipline and knife safety is always an asset, but more than anything, cooking is the sort of thing which serves as a type of social glue, and as lubricant for other ancillary social functions.

At any of the various times in my life when I’ve maintained a profile on one or more of the myriad alternatives to LinkedIn for sexual intimacy, I have almost always listed “cooking” as one of the “hobbies,” “passions,” or “secret talents” on my virtual resume.

My cooking doesn’t really get me casual sex. You can’t just stick a casserole in someone’s face and expect them to want to bump uglies. Cooking may or may not score me dates, but when I do score dates, cooking helps me, well, score.

I’m not saying that to be crass—I genuinely believe that people’s estimations of me generally improve upon tasting something that I’ve made. Believe it or not, dating sims did not come up with this mechanic out of nowhere!

I view sex and cooking as extensions of the same sort of intuitive processes. 

At the risk of sounding exactly as self-important as I already fear I do in writing the above, I’d not so quickly besmirch my cooking by calling it anything so crass as solely a means by which to obtain sex. 

Cooking, to me, is a sort of artistic practice. It is methodical, but it is also madcap. When I cook, I like to clear out everything in my immediate surroundings, put on the longest album I have close to hand, and invest myself fully in the process with little regard for strict timelines.

The things that make me a generally good cook are also, I believe, things that peer review has indicated to me make me good at sex. I am slow and rigourous in my execution, yet wholly inclined to and enthused by the prospect of improvisation.

My philosophy not only makes room for, but indeed favours intuition. Any rube can follow a HelloFresh walkthrough on how to make a reasonably workmanlike beschamel, though it takes a truly inspired individual to season it into something more than just floury warm milk.

What’s important to both good cooking and good sex are understanding, and process.

In this sense, The Bear is a revelation.

Not, mind, because it reveals the heretofore invisible intricacies of how food service “really is.” I've dated line cooks in my time. I know how food service “really” is, and it’s not especially interesting.

I mean sure, The Bear is “grounded” and “real.” Maybe it “feels like you’re really in the kitchen.” Granted, the dialogue comes off as “raw,” with the cast practically yelling over each other at times. It truly boggles the mind how one would even begin to write a show in that way. 

But for all that people took to calling everyone “Chef” after the airing of this show and started using sloppy versions of the ASL for “sorry,” the particularities of the food service industry—whether honest or manufactured—have never been the most compelling angle of the show. It seems to me a fundamental case of missing the trees for the forest, as it were, as if the point of Clerks were ever to see what it’s “really like” to work retail.

So what is The Bear then? Well it’s an FX show about a chef—Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White—who has inherited a restaurant from his dead brother (John Bernthal). Carmy is a celebrity chef now relegated to the decidely-uncelebrated station of said restaurant, the Original Beef of Chicagoland, and the show mostly concerns the day-to-day operations of this regular dive.

Of course, what The Bear is about has little to do with what The Bear is—prestige television, high drama, a comedy without any jokes. But if The Bear is a show “about” anything besides it is most certainly not of the actuality of back-of-house. 

Sure it’s authentic, but its authenticity comes second to its obsession with process.

Process defines The Bear. It’s evident even in the pilot’s title—“System.” The Bear is a piece of television about people who are obsessed with the process of cooking transparently made by people who are obsessevive about the craft of producing television.

This is not the kind of show you make by accident. It’s loud, indulgent, and dripping in confidence. What quality it possesses is less, in my mind, a representation of the faithfulness with which it replicates the experience of working in a kitchen than it is the sincere expression of the mania of those making the show. In many ways, it's a fair analogy for this column. 

Put that on simmer for the time being.

I’ve seen people criticize that The Bear is less about cooking than it is about vibes, and I think in the abstract, that’s a fair point to make. If you came in for a show about cooking, you’re not going to have a good time; a show about cooking is not a thing—or at least the only thing—which The Bear is interested in being.

This is the sort of criticism which I see people like my dad making: that The Bear is nothing but sound and fury, a half-hour of people screaming at each other threadbare on plot but strung together in such a way as to make it look expensive. And to some extent he’s right; the show’s pilot may be colour graded and edited like prestige TV, but in effect, it’s little more than a vignette of a moment somewhere downstream of the show’s actual inciting incident (the suicide of Carmy’s brother Mikey), and the beginning of its developing into something.

It’s not a hero’s journey; not interested in conventional beginning-climax-denoument. The Bear tosses its viewer straight into the deep end, snapping from one great match-edit into another hellish day on the clock at its main character’s shitty restaurant. It has no interest in explaining how he got there or why everyone hates him. The script just keeps ticking in the hopes that those dolly zooms and fancy edits will distract you long enough to not question the thing it's trying to sell you.

We hear a lot about how brilliant Carmy is, but do we actually see him deliver on that? We see signifiers of his brilliance in the cookbooks and recipes he keeps from his time working in fine-dining, but the only time in season one we actually see Carmy at work in a “real” kitchen is when he’s being berated by his former CDC (played by Joel McHale).

In the abstract, this is dangerously close to the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. Hell, the first episode literally introduces a character (Eyo Edibiri as Sydney) to say aloud for the audience’s benefit: “Wow, you’re Carmen Berzatto, the most special, most talented chef to ever chef!”

This is where the accusation of excessive vibery flounders for me, however. For as vibe-heavy as The Bear is with its tattooed, chain-smoking leading man who’d seem just as comfortable at a cafe wearing Carhartt and reading feminist literature as he is in the kitchen, its vibey signifiers are incidental to the underpinning logic of everything.

Pay careful attention and The Bear is actually supremely invested in showing rather than telling. In the first episode pâtissier Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is having trouble with a batch of sandwich buns which keep coming out crumbly. In the middle of a ten-second aside, Carmy tells him to cover a sheet pan with water and put it on the bottom rack of the oven while he makes the next batch. Then the rest of the episode happens.

Right at the end of everything, after Carmy and cousin Ritchie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) break up a fight started by rowdy fighting game players outside the restaurant, Marcus shows Carmy his new batch of bread.

It’s perfect. Carmy nods stoic approval, and asks for a batch of parm bread.

Marcus nods. “Heard, chef.”

It’s not my fault if you can’t recognize how goddamn fucking brilliant this writing is—and by God is it ever. I recognize that some people will already have tuned out by this 20-odd minute mark, and still more will have by the end of a season whose dividends come in more or less such diminishing increments (I know my dad did), but for me, these fleeting moments are worth all the visceral discomfort to which watching this show submits my sympathetic nervous system.

In some ways, it's hard to see the show’s first season as anything more than an extended trailer, or an exercise in getting its pieces in the right place. It’s gripping, sure, to the extent that four hours of people yelling at each other shot in lavishly-composited high-definition can, but that alone does not make it good.

What makes it good, or at the very least worthwhile, is the fact that it never stops building on this foundation. Season 2 explodes the view of the kitchen, devoting episodes at a time to hone in on the development of a single character. 

These episodes—Marcus’ spotlight “Honeydew,” Richie’s “Forks,” Tina’s Season 3 joint “Napkins,” and “Ice Chips,” which focused on Carmy’s mother and sister, are all among the most critically beloved of the series. By the ends of these episodes, each of their focal characters have become fundamentally different people.

This is what I mean when I say The Bear is about process: you could make a show about people making expensive food, or you could make a show about people learning the mechanics of how to make good food. I’ll tell you which one I’d rather watch: it’s the one that I did.

At the risk of saying anything as up showrunner Christopher Storer’s ass as “the food is a metaphor,” it’s noteworthy how the intricacies of the diegetic process of cooking mirror the cast’s development—both as people within the diegesis of the show and as characters in its critical appraisal—and the show’s writing and production on the whole.

Season 1’s seventh episode, “Review,” drew a fair amount of effusive praise from critics for the fact that it contains an 18-minute long take, no small accomplishment for any production. It’s probably revelatory of something about the production team of The Bear that they made the decision to block the episode this way only about three weeks out from shooting. That’s not a thing normal production crews do, but then, The Bear is hardly a normal show.

That’s really the tension at the heart of things: part of the brilliance of The Bear is that it seems perpetually seated on the absolute brink of narrative collapse. When it feels as though it’s pushing right up against the bleeding edge of what television is able to do, such as in Season 2’s “Fishes,” the show seems very nearly poised to devour itself. 

Its obsession with process is a fundamentally self-destructive impulse, constantly threatening to overshadow the storytelling for the sake of eking out just one more ounce of cleverness; making sure one more episode gets that coveted status of Its Own Wikipedia Page.

Because that’s the thing about process: you can be so good at something that it becomes almost bad for you. One of the great tensions of The Bear’s second season is that Carmy neglects his own happiness and wellbeing for the sake of the restaurant, feeling as he does that its success is a requisite to feel like he’s made meaning from his brother’s death.

When I moved out of home in 2020, I was immediately confronted by one irrefutable fact: feeding yourself is really fucking hard. This might seem obvious, I'm sure, but it was a rude awakening for me nonetheless. 

Annex living was not kind to eighteen-year-old agoraphobes. Entitled though it makes me sound, hauling my provisions home on the bus from NoFrills made me miserable, and any amount of culinary ability fast becomes meaningless when you can’t find the will to feed yourself.

Part of it was the fact that I had no job, was living in the suburban wastes of a city strange to mein the middle of a pandemic, kilometres from the nearest store which sold anything resembling worthwhile food. Part of it was that I was letting my undergraduate degree eat me alive.

I made some of the best work I will ever produce in the eight months I spent in Trent University residence. I wrote papers that kicked so much ass I could’ve turned them in as a Master’s student. I designed and produced a fucking 10,000-word, 40-page zine, solo, fully-cited, using mixed-media bricolage, in the span of two weeks. I wrote two novels. I wrote a stage play. I decorated my entire room with craft paper and garbage. I went through a half-dozen canvases and two boxes of copy paper. At the end of it all, I applied to Arthur.

What little I ate in those eight months consisted largely of two 16oz cups of coffee each morning, a cigarette (or two), a Monster Energy at around 2:00 in the afternoon, and some quick-and-dirty supper meal if I felt up to it.

I felt like I was dying, and to be fair, on some level I probably was.

I measured my waist obsessively. Counted my ribs in my mirror. Routinely eschewed meals in frustration over my stubbornly changing body. Wound up more than once doubled-over throwing up into my bathtub, or nearly passed out on the tile of the bathroom floor.

In retrospect I had to ask myself whether any of it had been worth it. I’d received outstanding commendations from my professors, and that academic validation was something I emotionally thrived on, but in all other respects I felt routinely and completely gutted.

My highs were fleeting and my troughs craterously low. What my peers didn’t see the other six days a week when I was performatively kneading pizza dough in front of my webcam were the nights I was hunched over the kitchen counter watching Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and eating Kraft Dinner out of the pot—on the nights I ate anything at all.

Carmy’s low comes in a scene where he becomes trapped in the Bear’s walk-in freezer—literally consumed by his own creation. As he begins to break down he rails against what he perceives to be his failing: That he’s compromised his own genius for the sake of a pleasant life; that he’s put having a girlfriend over being the best chef in Chicago.

It’s at once patently absurd and deeply relatable. We are meant to feel contempt for Carmy, for his willingness to shred others’ goodwill for the sake of his own ego, and yet, in a sort of perverse way, he is right.

His relationship and comfort is coming in the way of his being the best. We see that plainly in The Bear’s text. The question is not whether Carmy is the best, because at this moment he is not. The question is whether “The Best” is even a thing worth being.

I've tried to write a novel every summer for the past five years. I've never finished one; at least not in any state fit for publication. Usually I give up somewhere between 2,000 and 35,000 words. I start to hate the idea, or I simply run out of steam. Sometimes it's not even my fault, just the product of an unfortunate confluence of circumstance and my own attention-deficient nature.

My first novel was about five teenagers driving west across post-apocalyptic Canada. The spread of a virus was making people go insane. It wasn't strictly my first novel, but it's the one I elected to mark as such. It felt like there was intention behind it. 

I started writing it in August 2019, but set it in 2016. It was meant to be some metaphor for creeping fascism. Writing west from Ottawa my cast got as far as Smith's Falls before I rewrote it entirely from scratch. I rewrote it again in 2020 when a real virus made my metaphor trite.

My next novel was about urban vampires solving mysteries in Montreal. I wrote 25,000 words of it in the summer of 2020 after re-reading Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase trilogy and The Hound of the Baskervilles. I rewrote 38,000 words of it in residence that fall. I'd all but scrapped it by December.

The next summer, I didn’t start writing right away. I was too busy being miserable and all but failing a summer class I’d paid $2,000 dollars to take. I was too busy, as it happened, with Arthur.

I wrote the bones of a historical time-travel novel which I hated, scrapped, and instead devoted the rest of the summer to writing a tabletop roleplaying campaign for my friends on Discord. I wound up running with the concept of a handful of teenagers with superpowers at a remote French boarding school, a concept I later cannibalized for a graduate-level class, of all things, which—overacheiver that I am—I took in third year. It nearly killed me.

In August 2023 I watched like twelve Bond movies back-to-back and spun it into an incoherent first draft based around the basic conceit of being something of a mash-up of a spy thriller and a riff on the manga Chainsaw Man. That I gutted and retooled multiple times until it was something more resembling cosmic horror and the protagonist had switched genders—though I suppose that happens to the best of us.

Last year I wrote a revisionist history of medieval Britain. It had dragons in it. You’ll never guess what I was reading at the time.

You might wonder why I’d here print these concepts knowing full well that you could steal them. The simple answer is that you could write any of these novels, yes, but you would never manage to write them like me.

Quality need not even enter this conversation. People have tried—and failed—to replicate the neurosis of my writing. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this the way that I am. Maybe that’s why this is as long as it is.

This summer, overacheiver that I am, I’m working on three novels. I’ll probably finish one of them. I don’t know which one yet, but I won’t tell you what it’s about because this time I might just publish it. My mom knows an agent who thinks I’d be good diversity rep. It’ll be a shame when she sees what the novel I’m writing is actually about.

I’m not sure any of these novels are good. In a hypothetical world where some of them are finished I’m not even sure they would be—good, that is. The point I’m trying to make is that I’m not sure that’s the point of writing them. I’ve read some Wallace in my time. If I were trying to write something good, I probably wouldn’t write at all.

In my first bio for Arthur I said that I write compulsively. I think that’s an apt assessment. Before anyone paid me to do it I still cranked out reams upon reams of writing every year. No doubt there’s probably some of it that somebody would’ve wanted to read. Arthur didn’t make me a great writer, it merely gave me the two things any great writer needs to be any good: a vessel and an audience. 

The rest, as they say, is her story.

I’m not sure my novels are any good because I’m not convinced anything I write is any good, honestly. I know statements like that are rich considering the quality of this prose, but I don’t mean it in the sense of self-deprecating bullshit.

I have made peace with a degree of indifference to the quality of my work. I write because I want to, or indeed because I have to, not because it needs to be any good.

Journalism is quick to kill a perfectionist streak. If you write for the sake of it being good every time you’ll either kill yourself or it will kill you. 

Don’t kill yourself, for the record. You won’t be able to write about it.

Which brings us to the walk-in freezer, that emblematic vessel of the self-righteous suicide which is exceptionalism. The question it poses is not whether Carmy is the best—in being so contained by it he is not—but rather whether The Best is a thing which it is worthwhile for him to be.

This is, in effect, the moment The Bear implodes. The walk-in freezer signals a collapse of the show’s own internal coherence, a tear in the fourth wall telegraphed by the show’s own heretofore exceptionalism. Because to ask a question about the merit of exceptionalism as a show like The Bear—a show made by people so vested in the crafts of storytelling, and cinematography, so reverent of the medium of television—is also to beg that same inquiry about its own place in the world.

Is The Bear worth it?

Season 3 is kind of an answer to that question. I mean, it’s not an answer in itself. Instead, Season 3 of The Bear forces the viewer to answer the question of whether The Bear is worth it to them. 

Compared to the monumental mid-season crescendos of Season 2’s standout episodes, Season 3 is much more subdued, preoccupied with the menialities of the dysfunctional day-to-day at the series’ titular establishment. The season got a lot of flak for being boring, and it can certainly be that, but I also think it’s an understandable response to the near-universal acclaim of the previous outing.

Season 2 of The Bear was “Important” television, and importance carries no small amount of weight. 

I’ve felt this in microcosm myself. Though I’m embarrassed to admit it, there have been more than a few times when I’ve gone to my own head.

In the fall of 2022 I was unsure whether I’d come back to Arthur. I was juggling a research job with taking course overload, and thought that leaving Arthur would be a necessary concession to avoid burnout. It wasn’t until my editor literally begged me to come back that I submitted a resume because—as ashamed as I am to admit it—that demand perfectly stoked my ego.

In retrospect, this unchecked egoism probably made me very difficult to work with. It certainly bled through into a certain type of writing—that was the year I started this column, after all. Moreover, the very thing I’d been worried about came to pass as I repeatedly flamed out that year.

And yet, for a while I felt vindicated: First by becoming editor in Spring of 2023, and then for being the sole nominee at Arthur for multiple student journalism awards that publishing year.

This only served to further bolster my egoism, but worse, it made me feel I had something to lose. I felt like everything I did had to be important, and I burned myself out almost every month trying to make everything I wrote feel monumental.

Worse still, the longer I spent as editor and the more recognized I was for my writing, the more paranoid I became that one of my staff writers would outshine what I do.

This is, of course, an absurdly bad mentality to have—in a mentoring position, no less—though I very much doubt I’m the only person to have ever been possessed of it. We’ve all been that guy in the walk-in freezer, screaming to no one in particular about how we are unappreciated in our time. Maybe that’s even true, but it ultimately doesn’t seem all that useful.

For what it’s worth, I like season three of The Bear—more even, I’m taken to understand, than most people—but liking something is not necessarily the same thing as finding value in it. I like poorly-translated manga slop about monster girls kissing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s as important to me as Titane.

Still, enjoyment is a type of value, if a different one to critical praise. Season 3 of The Bear is not as capital-G “Good” as its predecessor, but I very much like it all the same. My answer to whether or not The Bear is worth it is pretty simple: “yes.” 

Even when it’s not “Forks,” or “Fishes,” I appreciate that The Bear exists. I just like The Bear, and I’m happy that there’s more of it, even if it’s not quite as perfect as it might have been at one moment in time.

Because be for real: you can’t make a show that operates on the register of “Forks” all the time. Even if you did, it’d probably kill you.

This, I think, is the understanding that The Bear comes to in its third season, even if Carmy himself has yet to do so.

Perfection is a finite status, and it’s the tendency of all things to degrade. Even if you’re the best now, you aren’t going to be the best forever. Someday someone will supplant your place on some Wikipedia table or the Celeste leaderboard on Speedrun dot com.

Why kill yourself to clutch something to which you cannot hold onto indefinitely? I mean, sure, you can go the Foster Wallace route but I’ve got to think the satisfaction in that is limited.

I think it’s better to live in a world where we can appreciate that such things as Unknown Pleasures, House of Leaves, and yes, even The Bear exist without needing to feel inadequate simply because they do.

Because for as much as it sucks when someone’s better at something than you are, especially if it’s a thing you love doing, I’d like to think that a better person can take solace in the fact that you both enjoy doing them. Maybe that’s what love is.

In grad school we have this saying that “a good thesis is the one you defend.” It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to change the world, it just has to get the job done. I’ve turned over variations of this phrase in my head for most of my time in journalism.

“The best article is the one you finish” is the one I keep coming back to, one that—if we’re being honest—applies to most creative endeavours. 

This summer I’ve started writing short stories. It’s a medium with which I’m not entirely comfortable in all honesty, but what I’ve found is that I can actually get them done. They might not be as good as I imagine my various unfinished manuscripts could be, though I admit it’s nice to finish something for a change.

The converse of the mantra that the best product is a finished one is that the best article/novel/television show is the one you can finish. Maybe I’d write better things if I went back to subsisting off caffeinated beverages and processed cheese products, but I doubt I’d be able to keep writing that way for very long. That process simply isn’t sustainable to me, in the long term.

There’s an idea that suffering breeds great art, and that may well be true, but it can’t be true indefinitely. I’ve written some great things in some very dark times in my life, but given the option I doubt I’d choose to relive those things for sake of my craft.

If Season 2 of The Bear affirms that exceptionalism requires a sort of hollowing-out of the self, the show’s subsequent refusal to continue being Season 2 of itself read to me as a refutation of exceptionalism’s necessity to be appreciated. The Bear doesn’t have to be the best show on television to be worthwhile. 

Maybe I don’t have to be either.

The Bear returns for its fourth season in just over a week, and I must say that I’m very excited. 

Season 4 will see stars Ayo Edibiri and Lionel Boyce writing an episode for the first time. While Edibiri directed Season 3 episode (and personal favourite) “Napkins,” and both she and Boyce have prior experience behind the camera (Boyce with rap collective Odd Future’s sketch comedy show Loiter Squad and Edibiri on such hits a Big Mouth, The Eric Andre Show, and What We do in the Shadows), this marks part of a gradual change in The Bear, heretofore tightly controlled by showrunners Storer and Joanna Calo.

Boyce and Edibiri’s newfound level of involvement would seem to herald a flattening of the creative vision for what The Bear is in which the show’s direction is also being steered by its cast. Rather than the product of Calo and Storer’s exceptionalism—talented though they are—The Bear of current year is a collective effort.

The talent are taking over. That’s a very exciting thing and I think, in a way, it’s very Arthur.

Every Arthur editor was once an Edibiri or a Boyce—a prodigious talent on the periphery—and through hard work and determination, some of them become White.

To salvage the unfortunate turn of phrase above: professional writing and newsrooms, at their best, are a type of meritocracy. No one walks into a kitchen at eighteen as a chef de cuisine, just as no one walks into Arthur their first day as editor. Time and diligence can any great talent make. I came from nothing. Remember that you can, too.

Moreover, though we may not recognize it as such, excellence is a product of collective effort. The Bear has proven that it is not Storer’s, or Calo’s, or White’s alone. It is something bigger than that, the manifestation of a sort of collectivity—a sort of process—in which no one person is solely responsible for making it what it is.

In my last article, I described how I felt unburdened from having ceded the Co-Editor-in-Chief position, though I’d be remiss to not recognize the reason why. The responsibilities of editorship are not gone now that I’m moving on, merely resting on new shoulders.

Right now marks a period of great anticipation for me as I watch my successors prepare to excel in their own right. It’s easy for it to feed my vanity to the extent that I contributed to their current position, but I know enough to know I don’t want to be Joel McHale’s character in this metaphor.

Like The Bear, Arthur is not the product of merely one person. This paper has never been as small as just me. At the end of the day, a good boss or a star writer is only half the recipe. These things alone do not a dish make; there’s genuine talent bubbling up beneath me.

Even this column does not exist in a vacuum. I’m able to come back to Cinevangelism because David, Louanne, and Ian have been taking point doing great work on things of note in the community, doing the hard work of journalism while I write my missives about movies. Maybe what I’m doing isn’t important, per se, but I’m having one hell of a time doing it.

To wit; it's good to be back. Long live my flop era.