The Bear Does What The Idol Couldn't

Over the course of The Idol's five-episode first (and potentially only) season, critics compared it to all sorts of other stories — typically with similar satirical aims or thematic underpinnings, but executed better than this one. Many have noted the ways Sam Levinson and Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye's HBO series recalls the erotic thrillers of filmmakers like Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven, and its cynical depiction of the celebrity industrial complex has drawn comparisons to recent shows like I Hate Suzie and The Other Two. But as I watched the unsatisfying season finale of The Idol, I kept coming back to another season finale I'd watched that week: the conclusion to Season 2 of FX's The Bear.

The two shows may have little in common in genre, tone, or scope, but they share a key ongoing theme: the relationship between pain and greatness. Both protagonists put themselves through hell to get to the top of their field, compromising everything to be the very best. Of course, cooking is a different sort of art from music, and chef Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto's (Jeremy Allen White) goals are not the same as pop star Jocelyn's (Lily-Rose Depp). Jocelyn is concerned with fame, money, and being widely remembered for her talent; even during a lull in her career, she can still churn out bland hits, but now she wants to achieve something lasting. Carmy, on the other hand, wants his new restaurant to be perfect — though it's unclear whether that accomplishment would really fulfill him for long. Jocelyn craves a personal artistic legacy, while ambition for Carmy often means keeping his family fed and making them proud. A perfect meal may not live as long as a perfect song, but that doesn't make it any less meaningful — and fittingly, it's The Bear's intense focus on personal stakes that makes it the better series.

So many of Carmy and Jocelyn's motivations stem from the same place, as does their pain; grief is central to both shows and is responsible for many of their most poignant moments. The Bear particularly excels at depicting the stubborn persistence of the ghosts from our past. In White's showstopping Al-Anon monologue in the first season finale, Carmy finally verbalizes what exactly his late older brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) meant to him: He got him into cooking in the first place but later refused to let Carmy work at The Beef, which only spurred him to improve. Cooking lets Carmy "communicate through creativity" — and now, following Mikey's suicide, fixing up the restaurant is the closest he can get to repairing their relationship. Season 1 ended with Carmy smiling after cooking for his work family, his restaurant dreams finally validated by his brother from beyond the grave.

Using food to bring people together may be what makes Carmy happy, at least in theory, but Season 2 reminds viewers that he has far too much baggage to ever have a truly uncomplicated relationship with food. He can channel Mikey's memory into the menu for his new venture — channeling trauma into art, as Tedros phrases it in The Idol — but the association creates as much pressure as it does inspiration. Carmy will only be able to conquer his toxic perfectionism if he sets his sights lower — if he stops thinking of every failure as an unintended slight against the family members who aren't in his life any longer.

One of the canniest choices the second season makes is presenting Carmy with a legitimately difficult choice, without a clear answer: Should he pursue a real, healthy human relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon) or set aside everything to make his creative project flawless? When he gets locked in the freezer during the first night of service at The Bear, it's his fault, a mistake resulting from his divided attention — but is perfection really worth sacrificing those meaningful connections?

In Carmy's head, the answer is yes. "No amount of good is worth how terrible this feels," he monologues, not realizing his girlfriend hears him trivializing their relationship. "It's just a complete waste of f---ing time." It's a devastating moment — frustrating, because his takeaway is clearly misguided, but also surprisingly understandable, because he did let everyone at the restaurant down, most of all himself. He's missing what should be one of the most fulfilling evenings of his life because he tried to be… a normal person. Maybe this place only exists because of the long, painful history that brought Carmy here — suffering converted to creation — but that same history is what prevents him from enjoying it.

The relationship between Carmy's pain and his genius is foregrounded throughout the show and is crucial to investing the audience in his story, and we see the direct consequences of his failure to reconcile the two. It plays out with an emotional immediacy that The Idol lacks, outside a handful of moments. It's a shame, because Levinson's other HBO series, Euphoria, has shown that the creator is capable of delivering emotional truths when he wants to — particularly in the Euphoria stories focused on Rue (Zendaya). In arguably the best episode of that show, the between-seasons special entitled "Trouble Don't Last Always," Levinson tones down his usual stylistic tricks. It's a low-key hour, dominated by a conversation in a diner between a suicidal Rue, who has recently relapsed, and her sponsor (Colman Domingo). The discussion holds real emotional weight; it feels like an evening Rue will remember for the rest of her life, even if it takes her another season of rock-bottoms before she gets clean.

But too often, Levinson gets in his own way, forgoing that directness. In The Idol, his direction is restless, cutting erratically between different conversations and events instead of letting them breathe and play out organically. That tic is present even in the strongest scene of the show: Jocelyn's meltdown in Episode 2, "Double Fantasy." It's not quite as stylistically pared down as the Euphoria diner episode, but it presents us with Jocelyn at her rawest and most emotional — first squandering her large music-video budget on take after take, then pleading for her late mother on stage, slipping briefly into a reality where she's still around. We see her as the child she still ultimately is, and it's heartbreaking to watch, especially when she murmurs, "I've never done this without her before."

It's a trauma response that, in retrospect, doesn't feel far from Carmy's reactions to anxiety and grief: pouring himself more and more into work until he snaps into angry, relentlessly self-loathing panic. The Bear is as much an ensemble show as The Idol is, spending two whole episodes with minimal Carmy, but it largely remains locked in his perspective, showing us his dreams and even devoting an hour to his memory of a nightmarishly chaotic Christmas dinner. And when he melts down, we see what he's seeing: a hallucination of his abusive boss from New York (Joel McHale) showing up at his new restaurant, or a Fleabag-esque subliminal blip of the fire he almost let consume The Beef at the end of Season 1.

Jocelyn's arc doesn't work as well, largely because after "Double Fantasy," The Idol stops exploring her perspective in depth, pivoting to her queasy love story with Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye). (Perhaps that shift shouldn't be surprising; reportedly, part of the reason previous director Amy Seimetz left The Idol was that Tesfaye felt her version was "leaning too much into a 'female perspective.'") From there, the memory of Joss's mother is only really used to evoke the open secret of her years-long abuse via hairbrush. That visceral physical pain becomes a tool for music inspo, with Tedros wielding the hairbrush and explicitly telling Joss to turn her trauma into art.

But by the end of the finale, even that bit of painful backstory is thrown up in the air; the show implies that Jocelyn fabricated the story about her mother's abuse, which raises both logistical and thematic questions the show can't answer. It's a twist that undercuts the show's clearest, most perversely logical example of the agony-to-art pipeline. Then again, for all that The Idol discusses the subject, it rarely shows what that process looks like, outside of some random shock-collar torture and choking during sex. And the supposedly sexy, brilliant new material Joss creates with Tedros' help doesn't sound much different from her supposedly bland earlier work.

Jocelyn's ultimate choice to keep Tedros around should represent a final encapsulation of what The Idol is trying to say. Nobody really treats Jocelyn like a human being, so it makes sense that she would take control and utilize her team the way she sees fit. But the show can't decide whether her choice represents a cynical, spiritually self-defeating sacrifice of her autonomy — taking back a serial abuser and shaming his prior victims instead of letting her friends and managers help her — or a strangely empowering Uno-reverse-card act of manipulative girlbossery. That ambiguity could be productive, but instead it just feels messy and limp — and the closing moments lack the grounded, heart-sinking feeling of Carmy's freezer breakdown regression.

By the end of these two very different seasons of TV, each protagonist has learned precisely the wrong lesson — a lesson that may benefit their work, and bring widespread recognition, but that likely won't promise lasting happiness. Both are too weighed down by the expectations of other people: the staff who respect but also doubt them, the fans and patrons consuming whatever they put out, and, perhaps most of all, the looming shadow of the family members they spent so many years desperately trying to please (including, in both cases, high-strung mothers). But while one story sees its characters clearly and makes space for the complexity of their desires, the other loses sight of the humans on screen and is more concerned with what they represent. Only one, in the end, glimpses greatness.

Seasons 1 and 2 of The Bear are now streaming on Hulu.

Season 1 of The Idol is now streaming on Max.