‘The Bear’: How Its Emmy-Nominated Dinner Episode Came to Feel Like ‘A Pot of Water That’s Coming to a Boil’
When editor Joanna Naugle first approached the “Fishes” episode of “The Bear,” she said she was given a specific note by series creator Christopher Storer and music supervisor Josh Senior: “It should feel like a pot of water that’s
coming to a boil, and then at the end, it overflows.”
That was the emotional genesis behind one of the most ambitious, star-studded and Emmy-nominated installments of the FX comedy. The Season 2 episode is one of the most nominated single episodes in Emmy history, with separate noms for its directing, writing, picture editing, costumes, hairstyling and makeup. That’s in addition to the acting nominations for Jon Bernthal, Bob Odenkirk and Jamie Lee Curtis, all of whom submitted the episode in the guest acting categories. The nine nominations come for an episode that revolves entirely around a Christmas dinner gone horribly wrong, thanks in large part to Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), the mentally unstable mother of Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sugar (Abby Elliott).
It was important to Naugle that the episode felt “claustrophobic and intense” but also “lived in,” as if the viewer was watching this family’s home videos. The editor made sure music was always present and viewers could hear conversations from the next room to heighten a sense of chaos. Nearly all of the footage shot for “Fishes” ended up in its final cut, save for some improvised scenes from the Fak brothers (Matty Matheson and Ricky Staffieri) and one moment with Michael (Bernthal).
“Every time we come back to the kitchen and we’re with Donna, it should just feel like we’ve ratcheted it up another couple of levels in terms of intensity and stress,” Naugle said. “That’s so much of what the holiday experience is: balancing all these different emotions, feeling suffocated by it all and having trouble juggling all of them at once.”
This anxiety was incorporated into the look of the characters, especially when it came to Curtis’ portrayal of Donna. “She’s very much trying to keep up appearances,” hair department head Ally Vickers said. To capture that aura,
Vickers styled Donna’s manicured hair with the idea that this is a woman who goes to the salon “monthly or weekly.”
Costume designer Courtney Wheeler pulled dressy but worn pieces for Curtis to convey that Donna was “someone who had money at some point, came into it fast and lost it fast.” She also made Donna look “a little sexy” as a nod to her relationship with Uncle Lee (Bob Odenkirk), a relationship that’s a sore spot within this family. Makeup department head Ignacia Soto-Aguilar used eyeliner and fake eyelashes to signal that this is a woman who cares about her appearance.
Once this picture-perfect version of Donna was constructed, all three teams were careful to make her deterioration look natural. That meant employing very minor touch ups. “As the episode goes on, her buttons come down a little more,” Wheeler said. “Maybe you see a little peek of bra. There’s pasta sauce flying everywhere, it’s all over her shirt.”
The team took the same amount of care when it came to styling the other characters in the episode. For example, Soto-Aguilar’s team had a tattoo time- line for Carmy for this episode, which is a flashback to five years earlier than
the bulk of Season 2. White’s makeup was also less red and his hair was a bit longer to indicate that he’s a bit younger and less stressed. The hair team even dyed Sugar’s hair brown for this episode before dying it back to blonde a week later. It’s a small decision that shows Sugar cares about her appearance, much like her mother. On the flip side, Sugar’s bright lip color, which remains perfect as the episode spirals, becomes a signifier for her distinct emotional state.
“Donna’s makeup progressively gets worse, just less put together,” Soto- Aguilar said. “With Sugar I made sure that her lips stayed constant. It’s almost like she’s trying to cover up for what’s going on.”
One of the biggest challenges for everyone involved in “Fishes” had to do with its long list of guest stars, which also includes Oliver Platt, Gillian Jacobs, John Mulaney and Sarah Paulson. Wheeler noted that the aim was to make the
audience feel like they already knew these characters when they appeared on screen. “Carmy, Richie [Ebon Moss-Bachrach] and Sugar — the people we know best in the room — become minor characters,” Naugle said. “You have all these huge personalities who are coming in and [who are] famous actors, and they suck up all the oxygen in the room in a great way. It really shows you, with Sugar and Carmy, why they are the way they are.”
Another difficult needle to thread was Bernthal’s Michael. “The Bear” begins in the wake of Michael’s suicide, and throughout the series his memory haunts the Berzatto family. Whereas the rest of the family dresses up for the Feast of Seven Fishes, Wheeler put Bernthal in Michael’s “good Under Armor” to telegraph his troubled headspace.
Originally, “Fishes” planned to include a scene that showed Michael either taking pills or looking at a pill bottle. But after seeing Bernthal’s “heartbreaking” performance, Naugle opted to cut the scene for a more “subtle” approach.
“He seems like he’s a courageous, confident, fantastic person. And then right below the surface is this really broken person,” Naugle said. “We really tried to find footage that showed a little bit of him cracking through the veneer.”
The tension of “Fishes” comes to a head in its final 20 minutes when everyone takes a seat at the dinner table. Between Michael threatening to throw a fork at his mother’s boyfriend and Donna’s breakdown, Naugle knew this single-room scene would be the emotional crux of the episode. That’s when she took inspiration from another TV dinner scene — the Season 2 premiere of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” — and zeroed in on reaction shots to make
this potentially stagnant scene feel “alive.”
“Everyone in this room has been to many of these dinners before,” Naugle said. “Everyone’s just waiting for something to go wrong. So if you see that everybody is uneasy, that transfers to the audience. Seeing that telegraphed on our amazingly talented cast’s faces just makes it feel that much more visceral.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Read more from the Down to the Wire Comedy Series issue here.
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