No, The Bear Didn’t Copy The Pitt

Light spoilers ahead for the fifth and final season of The Bear.

The first seven episodes of The Bear’s final eight-episode season appear to have a mighty familiar TV structure. Beginning early in the day and continuing through the end of dinner service, The Bear uses the bulk of its fifth season to tell the story of a single shift at the restaurant. The most obvious comparison is to The Pitt, the biggest and most recent show to do a “one season spans a single day” storytelling model, and a show which, like The Bear, everyone has always been very normal and relaxed about.

“They’ve turned The Bear into The Pitt!” is an easily comprehensible shorthand complaint, and it’s not wrong, exactly. Yes, there are similarities between two workplace series where a season takes place over a compressed period of time. But The Bear uses its one-season shift in its own distinctly Bear-shaped ways. It is less beholden to the constraints of its structural gambit, and there’s an inherent sense of escalation over the course of a day that’s different from the typical workflow on The Pitt. The final season is not a rip-off of that one very popular recent example of compressed time on TV; it’s just The Bear understanding how to return to its most exciting roots.

First, some TV context: The Pitt did not invent “one season takes place in real time” or “one season takes place over a compressed period” as narrative devices. 24 is the most direct comparison, especially the first season, which spent the most concerted energy attempting to stay true to its titular device. But this has happened enough that “all of this takes place on one day” is a familiar TV trope. The last season of How I Met Your Mother takes place over a single weekend. Hijack on Apple TV is all one big day of a plane being hijacked (and then a train getting hijacked in season two). A single day was also the conceit of the Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp limited series, as well as the comedy-mystery series The Afterparty. There was an ABC series called Big Day in which the whole season takes place on a couple’s wedding day, and the list gets even longer when you stretch that limited time period to be three or four days or a single week. (Hello, White Lotus!) By setting most of its final season over one day, The Bear is participating in a well-established TV format that’s been used in thrillers and sitcoms alike. This is not copying, and it’s not new, and it’s neither wildly innovative nor obnoxiously rote. It’s just a choice to deploy a pretty effective, familiar storytelling strategy for a show about people who spend a lot of time together.

There are also a few important distinctions between the last season of The Bear and The Pitt- or 24-style seasons — most especially that The Bear’s single shift does not take place in real time. The day is full of cuts and gaps, some of them for practicality’s sake (we don’t need to wait a full 90 minutes or however long it probably takes Donna to pack up a baby and drive downtown), and some to help ratchet up the tension in those early episodes. The rain and the plumbing disasters and the reservation-system crises and Richie’s inability to cancel anyone’s dinner all come right on top of one another, illustrating how frightening and overwhelming the day has become. Carmy starts chopping onions; we don’t need to watch him chop the whole batch to get the sense of him trying to take on a different role in the kitchen. Marcus yells at Luca about picking up raspberries, and presumably no one on the writing staff then sat down to chart out exactly how long it would take to get those raspberries and make it back to the restaurant before Luca and Marcus resume their fight. The season emphasizes emotional constriction and physical limits, not literal clock time.

The looming awareness of dinner service also gives this season of The Bear a different energy signature than a show like The Pitt. The whole point of The Pitt’s one-shift model is that no one in the ER can predict what kind of day this will be or whether the end of the shift will look anything like the beginning — every new event is an unforeseen development. On The Bear, it’s more like an elaborate stage production with every hour leading up to the moment the curtain will finally rise. The structure is precisely the opposite from The Pitt, in fact; instead of an unknown future, the problem on The Bear is that everyone knows exactly what’s coming. The door will open, dinner service will begin, everyone will need to hit their marks, and the show has to go on. This, more than the single-shift concept, is the dominant experience of The Bear’s last season: inevitability, not surprise. This shape allows the season to mirror the metafictional audience expectations, wrenching it out from the frustrating self-absorption it fell into for seasons three and four so that it can be a better reflection of the viewers’ experience. There have been hours and hours of build-up. The characters have undergone many challenges and trials. Now, at the end, there will be one last big performance, and the only remaining question is whether the Bear and The Bear will be able to pull it all off.

As much as anything else, the final season’s structural device is The Bear remixing itself, a return to the world of its one-shot episode “Review,” the single terrifying lunch shift when the staff realizes their to-go orders were turned on and need to feed dozens and dozens more people than they had planned. This season expands that idea into a whole day, sweetens it, and allows it to resolve with triumph rather than exhaustion and collapse. The Bear may be adopting a device used by The Pitt (and many others), but its most potent reference point is its own early history.