The Bear and the Lasso
Last night at Annie and Gus's weekly fam-dinner, we had a killer meal and watched the Season 2, Episode 6 of The Bear - and a few things struck me hard.
First: It's the best damn thing on television since Ted Lasso, and; second, it's the best companion show for Ted Lasso one could possibly imagine.
I know, I know, I know. At first blush, the shows couldn't be more different, but in some ways, they're the exact same narrative, just blown inside out. Both shows are about how trauma profoundly warps "normal" people all the time. Both shows have as their backdrop the pre-action suicide of someone who, by all visible measures - to their family and friends, anyway - had the world by the balls. In Ted Lasso, it was his dad, who we never meet. In The Bear, it's the older brother, Michael, who we just really met in the FUCKED-UP Christmas special we just watched last night.
Ted Lasso is, for lack of a better way to phrase it, a "modern" take on issues of mental health, repression, rage, misplaced anger, and the eventual failure of coping mechanisms that don't drive down to the root of the instigating trauma. It is a community-positive, forward-leaning, get-yourself-in-therapy celebration of the human capacity to heal and thrive through honesty, love, friend-compassion, and self-patience.
The Bear, on the other hand, may be the most Gen-X, rage-Boomer show ever made. It revels in the older cultural norms of suck-it-up-buttercup, white-knuckled repression of trauma with a healthy dose of self-medication and temporary anesthetization of the pain with drugs, alcohol, and a damn-the-torpedoes, we're-all-doomed-anyway esprit de corps. Though clearly, all the characters who survive are growing toward an understanding that shit has to change.
But, I've gotta say: I love them both: The shows AND the way they deal with trauma.
While my family was WAY more functional than the Berzatto clan, I was raised in a friends' milieu of hard-drinking, fuck-the-long-term-consequences, don't-be-such-a-pussy mentality. That was, in so many ways, the diamond core of what it meant to grow up when and where I did. And even though those long-term consequences very nearly put me in an early grave, there are times when I miss the fuck out of it. I miss the fangs-out, guard-up-loving violence of it all in this far more tender, trigger-warning age. While I definitely see the value of Ted Lasso positivity, and the support of a more loving community, I will always have a place in my heart for the older and more beastly times of my youth.
Our youth.
But, wow. I'll also say, thank GOD I get to WATCH that world for an hour, once a week, rather than living it twenty-four seven. We Gen-Xers pride ourselves on the feral nature of our upbringing, the sharp elbows and fuck-you attitude that forged us, but now that I'm a sober 56-year-old man, I really do prefer - far and away - the gentility of rooting for those upstart Richmond Greyhounds than I would sitting through another drunken, violent, utterly insane Seven Fishes dinner with Carmen and the Cousins.
Yikes.
I suppose those of us who lived through the bad old days are blessed to have the memories from those times, AND the skills now available to deal with the trauma those memories caused. Best of both worlds, really.
Anyway, if you're NOT watching The Bear, get the fuck on it now, you bunch of humps. What the fuck is wrong witcha?
Jeez.
(Oh, and far more seriously: Love to you all.)
