I’ve been thinking about the issue of contrivance in fiction, how it works as the everyday fabric but can be used also as a point of critique. This is to say, for starters, what does it mean for a piece of work (book, TV show, play etc) to be critiqued as contrived (as in “Oh that was such a contrived scene…”)?
It’s tricker than it seems because it’s in the very nature of something fictional to be, on a very basic level, inherently contrived. Fiction is fiction. Whether it’s happening between two robots on a faraway planet, or under our nose, it’s not real, though it might feel so, even if it is accurately based on the truth (not going to get into autofiction here).
To use a good concrete example, I’m thinking of the three seasons of the popular streaming show The Bear. In particular, their respective finalés. It goes without saying that if you haven’t seen The Bear and have been meaning to, you might want to skip this (and if you haven’t seen The Bear, I heartily recommend it). Also worth noting that I’m only focusing on the finalés. Season Two, for example, might have (for me) the weaker ending, but I found it generally more satisfying than Season Three.
At the end of Season One, our chef protagonist discovers, amidst the chaos of running a busy family-owned sandwich shop facing imminent bankruptcy (and someone nearly going to jail for manslaughter), not to mention his own bouts of post-traumatic anxiety, that the chef’s dead brother (and former owner) had hidden around $300,000 in tomato sauce cans, communicated to the chef in a cryptic suicide letter. The restaurant is not only saved, but plans are laid for a high-end version. Was it a stretch? On paper, absolutely. And yet I didn’t really mind because somehow it seemed deserved. Perhaps it’s because–a credit to the writing on the show–it pulls together some very tender emotional threads, consistent with the other episodes, as the chef contends with the mystery that his brother was to him, and the hole of grief he feels around losing him in the midst of the chaos around him.
Season Two ends with the opening launch of the renovated incarnation of the restaurant, as the chef contends with small margins and high expectations while balancing a budding romantic relationship with a family friend. Everything is riding on opening night and the chef, in mid-service, winds up locked in the walk-in freezer when the handle breaks off on the other side. Alas, he cannot carefully control the chaos happening outside and has a meltdown, while his cousin on the other side of the door is comparing the chef’s neuroticisms to his mother’s, who had literally driven her car into their family home the other night. It’s funny, because on paper there’s clearly less outward contrivance in this finalé than Season One…and yet it didn’t work as well.
So what does this mean? I suppose it’s when something goes from the natural contrivance of fiction into an area that doesn’t feel deserved, either by flaws of logic, lack of genuineness or consistency with the whole. When it doesn’t “work” I suppose it doesn’t give me reason (or enough reasons) to believe that it’s a natural part of the landscape, no matter how far it may bend credulity (see Season One). It respects the limits of the world it resides within. Or another way of putting it: if I feel a bump in the road, convince me that it’s part of the ride. The more bumps, the more convincing I might require.
Certainly one of the things with the finalé of Season Two that doesn’t work, albeit on a very technical level, is the unbelievability of the chef getting locked in the freezer in the first place. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant (hello) knows that walk-in freezers have a release button on the inside that opens the door precisely because of such situations. It also lacks the comparatively symphonic threading together of Season One. Despite spreading the spotlight throughout the season to other characters, it comes back to the chef and his obsessive (likely traumatized) behaviour, his relationship with himself, his split responsibilities to his restaurant and to his girlfriend who is sitting at a table while all this is happening, waiting for him to acknowledge her. What bugged me mostly consisted of the chef squaring off with his cousin. What was this trying to achieve, I wondered? It felt like a too-convenient device to force a confrontation, where the cousin literally calls-out the chef’s unresolved inner challenges. Maybe because it was kinda lazy, given the confidence of the show overall? It’s a little too on-the-nose, even didactic, compared to the show-don’t-tell way in which Season One handled things. Am I saying it was bad? No, it just uses a plot-device that feels stolen from an 80s sitcom.
Where do they go from here? Well, Season Three manages to be the least capital-D dramatic of the three, but that might have to do with the reality of the overall arc of the series. They’re establishing themselves now. To grab terminology from group dynamics, The Bear went from storming (Season One), to norming (Season Two), and then performing (Season Three). In Season Two they launched the new restaurant without it burning down. In Season Three the pressure seems to be more existential, namely figuring out how to chase a Michelin star without skimping on the chef’s exacting standards, while needing to maximize table turnover in order to break even. The chef’s story is less centred overall, but the finalé features him–already experiencing anxiety attacks as he anticipates the first critical reviews of the restaurant to be filed–having a post-traumatic episode as he comes face-to-face with the chef he trained under, who cruelly undermined his self-worth–all while attending the closing of another mentor’s establishment.
I don’t have any big issues with the direction of Season Three; creating an emergency for the sake of having, say, Season One’s manic energy would seem somehow disingenuous here. I think it’s a sign of confidence if a show can shift gears without resorting to tricks. If anything felt off, it was the repeated depiction of the chef’s meltdown, his manic inner thoughts projecting themselves onto his world. After a while they didn’t serve to deepen or develop our understanding of what the chef was experiencing. Okay, meltdown, got it. Where does this wind up on the contrivance scale? Contrived? Stylistically perhaps, but not in terms of plot or story.
Anyhow, thank you for joining me on this thought exercise!
