A show about a charismatic chef? Who would watch that? Those are two questions formerly asked by studio executives far more than most will ever realize.
Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in how often often the highest of high-end chefs refer to themselves as "cooks." Let’s just say that the self-deprecation isn’t just a vehicle to get laughs.
It’s much more notably a comment on how things used to be. In the past, chefs were not chefs. They were cooks, and they were cooks because people who served others from a kitchen were formerly thought to have relatively dead-end jobs that rendered them unworthy of euphemisms. How things change.
Hulu’s “The Bear” vivifies this truth. No doubt the backstory to the making of a show about a kitchen at a high-end restaurant is littered with all sorts of executives superciliously turning down a show about a chef, but that’s just the Hollywood norm. No one knows anything, and that’s not a dig at Hollywood. What’s great rarely seems great at the time: F/X turned down “Breaking Bad” for “Dirt,” the various television networks turned down “The Sopranos” before HBO took a chance, but then HBO turned down “Mad Men.” No one knows anything because the future is opaque.
Still, a show about a chef? If the creators of “The Bear” had a few doors slammed on them ahead of something that debuted in 2022, imagine what they would have been up against if they’d brought the concept to the proverbial “suits” in 1982, 1992, or even 2012. Talk about a tough sell, and almost certainly an unsuccessful one.
So what changed? It’s about specialization. The more that Americans divide up work with growing numbers of individuals and machines around the world, the more that work becomes an expression of what’s unique about us individually, and by extension, what most accentuates our intelligence. And when people are doing what they’re good at doing, their productivity naturally soars.
Restaurants are part of this exciting advance. Much more than places to eat, their kitchens are increasingly populated with people who’ve found their calling, and in finding it, reveal a charisma that was suffocated by the relatively limited work options of the past. This can be found once again in chefs of modern vintage who describe themselves as cooks. They used to be cooks until the genius of specialization lifted the quality of their work in the way it does all work forms elevated (yes, always elevated) by globalization.
Nowadays there aren’t just chefs doing remarkable things in kitchens, there are pastry chefs, coffee concierges, food stylists, and all kinds of other specialized individuals leading the limitless needs of other specialized individuals when it comes to eating. “The Bear” made sense in 2022, and makes sense amid the release of Season 4 in 2025 precisely because there are a growing number of “Carmys” in 2025 quite unlike 1985, 1995, and 2005.
What does it tell us about the future? As argued in my 2018 book The End of Work, it signals that “cook” is not the last profession that will attain new, higher-end descriptors. Other work forms that people admit to somewhat sheepishly will similarly take on exciting connotations. The bet here is that we’re not too far away shows that vivify the growing genius of the individuals at the grill in fast food restaurants.
Outlandish? No, just a July 4th comment on the great country we live in. Everyone can increasingly be great.
