If I Were the Creator of ‘The Bear,’ I Wouldn’t Highlight What It Has in Common With ‘Groundhog Day’

Warning: contains spoilers from Season Four of The Bear.

Recently, Joy Press of Vanity Fair interviewed John Landgraf, the Chairman of FX Networks. Landgraf has been an executive at the network for over 20 years, in which capacity he’s helped bring inarguably prestigious and impressively diverse shows to air — Shōgun to Atlanta to The Americans to Archer to The Bear, the fourth season of which dropped earlier this week. Though the show has been one of “FX on Hulu”’s biggest critical hits, some viewers (including me) felt like last season just spun its wheels, leaving most of its storylines unresolved in the finale. 

When Press asks Landgraf about this, she writes, he “bristles” at the critique before responding, “This is a show about codependency and stuckness and the kinds of substitute obsessions and addictions that people have. … I understand that watching someone not move forward is a lot less exhilarating than watching somebody make breakthrough after breakthrough, but if you’re not willing to let it rip, you don’t get The Bear. I just am madly in love with the season that we’re working on right now, watching (creator Christopher Storer) grapple with the question of: How does growth occur? How do epiphanies happen?” 

We get a hint in the cold open of the Season Four premiere: Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) is asleep on his couch, clutching the section of the Chicago Tribune featuring the first major review of the show’s titular restaurant. The TV is on, playing Groundhog Day. Carmy wakes up in time to see Phil (Bill Murray) — a weatherman the movie has trapped in Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania, living Groundhog Day over and over again — ask a local, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” 

But does The Bear really need to incorporate a time loop story into its narrative? I already feel time looping when I watch.

The Bear is, partly, about a workplace, so some degree of repetition is (no pun intended) baked in: Most jobs require employees to do some of the same things from one day to the next. If Carmy thought that adding daily menu changes to his Season Three list of “Non-Negotiables” would stave off ennui, it hasn’t worked. We keep seeing the same fights: Cicero (Oliver Platt) is mad at Carmy for wasting money; Richie and Carmy are mad at each other for not having been able to prevent Mike (Jon Bernthal) from dying by suicide; Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) is mad at Carmy for making decisions without her. Carmy has to keep hearing the same affirmations: he’s talented, he’s loved, he’s important to his colleagues. We even hear the same needle drops: different versions of St. Vincent’s “Slow Disco,” Eddie Vedder’s cover of “Save It for Later,” The Ronettes’ “Baby I Love You.” Michael Stipe hasn’t heard “Strange Currencies” as much as viewers of The Bear have.

These needle drops (and many others) play over montages, another motif The Bear has grown overly dependent on. Perhaps in the first one or even two seasons, we needed to see the process of creating, iterating on and finally perfecting a dish. Intercutting montages of such food prep with shots of red-lettered spreadsheets and anxious investors made a strong point about the tension between art and commerce the first, let’s say, dozen times the show did it. Now I feel it’s safe to say we all get it. 

The reason a training montage works in a movie is to compress the timeline. We don’t have time to watch every beat as our protagonist progresses from rank amateur to confident master, so we see a few bad karate kicks, then a few that are okay, then the one that kicks the head off the training dummy. Groundhog Day plays with the (careworn yet necessary) cliché of the training montage by building the whole movie out of it, and showing that progress doesn’t actually follow a straight line. On some of his Groundhog Days, Phil figures out something important that he carries over to the next; on others, he drops a toaster in the tub with him and wakes up the next day anyway. He iterates on and finally perfects his day in Punxsatawney, setting himself free.

This seems to have penetrated through Carmy’s sleep in front of the TV, and we know he’s trying to get better in Season Four because we keep being told that he is. “I wasn’t good enough, and I need to be better,” he tells Sydney in the premiere. “I’m trying to be better,” he repeats, later in the same scene. Episode Two: Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) tells Carmy why he dropped out of culinary school when Carmy enrolled him, and how it felt when no one checked on him; Carmy says he could have done better, and that he’s sorry. Episode Seven: Sydney tells Carmy’s mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) that Carmy wants things to be better than they are, himself included. In Episode Nine, Carmy has to see himself in the distorted mirror that is his mother, as she tells him she’s gotten sober, and adds, “I’m trying to make things better.” 

Ultimately, Carmy’s epiphany is that he has to stop being stuck in one place, every day exactly the same, and leave The Bear. Whereas Groundhog Day’s Phil had to make probably a hundred individual decisions, through A/B testing, to break his pattern, Carmy’s made… one. Yet we only spend around 90 minutes with Phil; watching Carmy get here has, all told, taken the better part of a day.

Groundhog Day is a great movie, loaded with Chicago excellence from director and co-writer Harold Ramis on down. It reminds us that perfection is a process, and that failure isn’t just inevitable but essential. It’s an allegory of, as Landgraf put it to Vanity Fair, the “stuckness” we may all feel from time to time. If the movie is being used as an intertext here to make it very clear Season Three’s wheel-spinning was intentional… good one? But maybe now Storer can spin his wheels like he’s trying to drive himself and a screaming groundhog off a cliff and step on it.