'The Bear' Would Have Been a Better Show Without the Faks
I will not miss them
The Bear is back for its fifth and final season, which I reviewed for TheWrap. I thought it was an improvement over the previous two seasons thanks to its renewed focus – it takes place over the course of a single, particularly high-pressure day at the Bear, which means there isn’t time or space for the show to get lost in its own sauce. However, it still has many of the same problems it has always had. And to me, the most annoying problem is the Fak brothers. I’m glad the show is over so that I’m rid of them forever.
Tongue-in-cheekily, I have long said that the reason The Bear isn’t a comedy is not because it’s dramatic — it’s a dramedy, which means it has elements of drama and comedy; this isn’t hard to understand — it’s because it isn’t funny. There’s stuff in the show that’s supposed to be purely for laughs, and it’s almost always painfully unfunny, because it inevitably includes the Fak brothers. I am not the first person to make this observation, but The Bear is basically a dysfunctional family drama interspersed with a few scenes per episode of zany Fak antics. They are comic relief characters who are neither comic nor a relief. My blood pressure goes up when they appear. I’m like “go back to the stressful stuff, I can’t take these guys.”
Neil and Ted Fak are employees of the Bear played by Matty Matheson1 and Ricky Staffieri. Neil used to be the handyman and now is a waiter, and Ted took over the handyman job. Neil was on the show starting in Season 1, and Ted first appeared in Season 2 and became a regular presence in Season 3. They are childhood friends of the Berzattos, which grants them “cousin” status. The main thing about them is that they are ambiguously mentally challenged. They are grown men who have the intellectual and emotional capacity of children, and the show is kind of vague on how much of that is by choice on their part. The women on the show talk to the Faks like they’re all their mommy. They end every sentence they say to them with “sweetie” or “my love” or whatever. It’s disgusting, and speaks to the biggest problem with the Faks, and the show’s humor in general, which is that it mistakes being intentionally annoying with being funny. If you didn’t think the Faks doing “caw caw” birdcalls at each other so they know where each other are in the restaurant was funny the first time, wait until they do it three more times.
They actively make the show stupider — when Neil finds out Carmy is quitting the Bear, he locks himself in the bathroom like a teenager having a tantrum, and Carmy has to stop working during this incredibly stressful shift to coax Neil out by telling him “We’re still gonna be pimps. We’re gonna be pimps forever.” The emotional realism of The Bear’s drama gets undercut by the sitcommy falsity of the Faks’ behavior and otherwise grounded characters’ reactions to it. The cognitive dissonance of alternating scenes that feel like therapy sessions and unfunny Brooklyn Nine-Nine outtakes works against the serious scenes. Instead of using comedy the way truly elite dramedies like Atlanta and Barry did — as a misdirect to make the dramatic moments more hard-hitting or surprising, or as catharsis after heavy moments — The Bear simply chooses to not integrate the comedy and drama, which makes the drama feel self-important and ponderous and the comedy feel intrusive.
It’s no coincidence that the most Fak action came in Season 3, the disastrous season that permanently changed how people feel about The Bear. That was the one where John Cena guest-starred as another Fak brother and the three of them repeated the word “haunt” like it was a catchphrase about 1500 times. There’s mercifully less Fak stuff in Season 5 than there was in Seasons 3 and 4, but there’s still too much. Any amount is too much. The Bear would have been at least 25% better without them.
My dislike of the Faks is nothing against chef-actor-producer-fashion designer Matheson himself, who seems like a cool guy. No one has done more to help big boys stay stylish than Matty, which is genuinely admirable. His clothes are nice.
Was The Bear ever as good as we thought?
Serious question.
John Cena as a Fak was a serious "this doesn't seem right" moment.