The Bear: New (stereotypical) representations of Italian Americans in contemporary television series

Abstract

This article investigates the representations of Italian Americans in the successful TV series The Bear (2022 –), following Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J. Gravano’s innovative critical framework according to which the field of Italian American cinema, TV, and media studies needs to go beyond the strict notion of ethnicity and be, instead, reconsidered as an intersectional area including issues as class, gender, sexuality, power, and production. The Bear portrays Carmen (‘Carmy’) Berzatto, a young top chef who returns to his hometown of Chicago to take over his family’s Italian sandwich shop and who is living through an emotional breakdown because of his brother’s death. The series received great praise for its ground-breaking narration style and nonconformist characters. Still, while the narrative arc of the series does not focus on the Italian roots of the protagonist and his family, many of the climatic moments recurrently exploit the commonplace repertoire of Italian American type: loud, quickly bursting in fits of rage, family-obsessed, food enthusiast, somehow involved in dirty business. This analysis will explore how, in this contemporary depiction of Italian Americans, the author paradoxically departs while also relying on the stereotypical dominant cliché usually employed for these characters. As a result, a transition narration emerges, portraying figures precariously balancing between innovation and conservatism. With a discursive approach, this study will examine how The Bear follows this contradictory pattern, seemingly dismissing crystalized representational myths of Italian descent in the USA and simultaneously validating them.