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‘The Bear’ and a chaotic vision of work

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Company leaders are resorting to desperate measures to lure employees back to the office, my colleague Emma Goldberg recently reported. “It’s been scattered plans for three years to return to personal work — summoning people, without really meaning it, everyone pretty much worked wherever they wanted,” she wrote. “Now, for the umpteenth time, companies are ready to get serious.”

As Salesforce recently announced, will incentives such as $10 charitable donations for every day employees show up prove to be powerful enough bait? Perhaps an office pickleball pitch, or a desk-delivered sauvignon blanc from the roving bar cart? One idea I haven’t seen yet is to offer screenings of “The Bear” series, the second season of which was released on Hulu in June.

The show is about Carmy, a James Beard award-winning chef who returns to run his family’s sandwich shop, The Original Beef of Chicagoland, after his brother’s suicide. He finds a company deep in debt, a grieving staff getting in the way, a kitchen in ruins. When it debuted last year, “The Bear” was praised for its authenticity, for depicting the chaos of a real restaurant kitchen. “The work here is furious, violent and relentless,” James Poniewozik wrote in De Tijd. “Flames read the sides of pans, pots clank like artillery, slabs of beef are dragged and hoisted up like casualties. Hands are burned, fingers are cut; the pace of the preparations turns the kitchen staff into sweating, screaming bodies, meat cooking meat. Hardly a convincing case for personal work.

But watching the new season, I found myself focusing less on the terrifying chaos (which there is plenty!) as Carmy and the gang scrape together money, knock down walls, hire staff, repair mold, and develop new dishes to transform The Beef into The Bear, their new luxury dining concept. I was more interested in the fantasy of collaboration that the show depicts, of a group of cantankerous misfits reluctantly working together toward a common goal.

Each episode of “The Bear” is short; some arrive within 30 minutes. But the amount of action packed into each show is staggering – how does this show manage to create so much drama, to develop such fully realized characters in such a small space? My days at the office aren’t nearly as hectic, but I’m also amazed at how full a day of personal work seems compared to the tedious predictability of remote work. As much as I cherish the commute-free flexibility of working from home, there’s not much action in the dusty sunlight of a 2pm living room.

Please don’t get me wrong: “The Bear” is still committed to a representation of “work as a sort of barely contained struggle,” as James put it. But the music video-style montages of the characters taking pride in their duties, toiling toward a common goal, make for a romantic vision of teamwork. Compare this to ‘Severance’, another recent work drama. That show portrays office work as an antiseptic nightmare, where the price of work-life balance is a literal subjugation of your true self. Season 2 of “Severance” is postponed due to the writers’ strike. In the meantime, “The Bear” offers us another version of the working drama, a scenario that is complicated, anarchic and, for all its dysfunction, quite rewarding at times.

  • “The Bear” catches the panic of modern work.

  • The show “suggests there’s a better way to play this game,” James Poniewozik wrote in his looking back at the new season. “You can win without being toxic; you can be a genius without being an asshole.

  • Tejal Rao wrote that “it exudes an unexpected optimism about the restaurant industry and the people who run it.”

  • Any choice from Wirecutter spotted in Carmy’s kitchen.

Instead of saving the world, the quest to build artificial general intelligence will only make things worsewrites Evgeny Morozov.

Here are columns of it Nick Christopher on the British monarchy And Ross Douthat on Chief Justice John Roberts.

Sunday’s question: Will the Wagner group’s mutiny bring down President Vladimir Putin?

While Putin’s government remains afloat, “cracks in the perception of power, often following military setbacks, can quickly emerge lead to a real collapse of powerwrites Jonah Goldberg in The Los Angeles Times. But Russians support Putin because of “a very genuine fear of war coming on their porch,” a belief Wagner only validatedwrites Leonid Ragozin for Al Jazeera.

lives lived: Peg Yorkin was a feminist activist who helped bring the abortion pill to the United States. She died at the age of 96.

Since her breakthrough with her Emmy award winning television series ‘Fleabag’, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has co-written the James Bond movie ‘No Time to Die’ and is now starring in the new ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’. .” I talked to her about the potential pitfalls of moving from smaller, more personal projects to larger franchises.

Going from “Fleabag” to James Bond and “Indiana Jones” is not the most logical step. What do you think the people behind those projects see you bring to them? With Bond, there’s something borderline about that character, and the same goes for Indy. There is something dangerous at the core of these characters. So it was less of, “I want to do this big movie,” and more of, “I want to play in the sandbox with these villains.” That’s one way to look at it.

Is there another way? Well, I’ve had these conversations with myself. I try not to think about it too much.

For these purposes, overthinking is good.

Knowing that someone from one of these huge franchises watched “Fleabag” and said, “What happens when we put this of this?” — That intrigued me. When I spoke [“Indiana Jones” co-producer] Kathy [Kennedy] early on she was like, “This is about getting older. This is about regret.” I can look at that and say, “That’s similar to some of the stuff I’ve made.”

I’m curious about the actual practical balance between those dramatic ideas and the day-to-day making of the film.

Those deeper things are essential to me. What’s not to say that one day I won’t wear a cape and jump off the back of a plane saying, “This is all about saving animals!”

Read more of the interview here.

25 years later: Bridgette Jones deserved betterespecially in her professional life, writes Elisabeth Egan.

Our editorial picks: ‘Be Mine’, a novel about a man who takes his terminally ill son on a road trip to Mt. Rushmore, and eight other books.

Times bestsellers: NBA star Chris Paul’s memoir of basketball and family tragedy, ‘Sixty-One’, debuts on the hardcover non-fiction list.

Current three great documentariesincluding one on the methods of Pablo Picasso.

Listen back on vinyl with these tips from The Times pop music critic.

Choose the best sleeping mat for camping.

To see “Hamlet,’ of the public theatre production in Central Park.

  • Wimbledon starts tomorrow.

  • Independence Day is Tuesday. US financial markets will close early tomorrow and remain closed on Tuesday.

  • Monthly US employment data will be released Friday.

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