Hello and happy Last Weekend of Pride, the granddaddy of all Pride weekends. I know most of you will be out there in the streets reading Fear of Flying to children in your Andrew Christian (rip) nightie set. But in case you are lame or straight or whatever and instead want to watch something on a screen over the next few days, here are two suggestions for you. Otherwise, enjoy the rave down at the old 2(X)IST factory and be proud of who you are. 

The Bear, final season (Hulu)

Perhaps my biggest pop culture bête noire in recent years has been The Bear, FX’s vacuous drama about a Chicago restaurant. Or, rather, about a ragtag band of locals trying to make a Chicago restaurant. The premise is personally intriguing—in my spare time I watch enough food content to fill the Nile—and a substantial part of the show’s first season is an engrossing behind-the-scenes, albeit fictional, look at the mechanics of food service. 

But even in that best-in-show run of episodes, The Bear’s wheels rattle on their axles. There’s always been something smug about the show: both its whispery (some might call it mumbly) minimalism and its loud antic comedy have a performative quality; it’s putting on a grand act of humble authenticity. All scripted TV is artifice, of course, but The Bear, more than most series out there, brashly asserts hyper-realism as its hallmark. The show routinely suggests, in deathlessly self-serious fashion, that its hushed pathos and shouty crosstalk profoundly embody the fine texture and cadence of real life. 

In that way, The Bear is one of the bullshittiest shows on TV. Beyond all the technical kitchen stuff, which I have to assume is accurate enough, none of it rings true to me. On the squishier side, the human side, everything seems so false and effortful, so pleased with itself. Early on in the show’s run, creator Christopher Storer became so enamored of his rambling slice-of-life tone that he kind of stopped coming up with actual plots, seeming to figure that a lot of overlapping dialogue and some nice lighting and camera technique—along with a few digressive, enervating, awards-hustling family episodes in which a bunch of famous people like Jamie Lee Curtis do garish guest work—was enough to make The Bear great art.

The Bear’s hokum became more glaring in seasons three and four, which are basically the same season. There’s no real narrative difference between the two, and essentially nothing happens in either. But there is a lot of maudlin music, and plenty of closeups on faces expressing inscrutable emotions that we are somehow supposed to understand as really deep and meaningful. It’s mortifying television. 

So, of course, when it came time to watch screeners of the show’s final season, I leapt. Because it is a little fun to loathe The Bear, such a preening piece of flimflam. I’m only human, and sometimes humans like to roll their eyes at silly things. 

Which is exactly what I did for the first few tedious (though, blessedly short) episodes of the final season, in which a torrential rainstorm bears (ha!) down on Chicago and the staff of The Bear (the restaurant) scramble to get ready for a very important, if possibly final, dinner service. Wacky things happen with the wacky characters who are there solely to keep the show from being switched to the drama category at the Emmys—Matty Matheson and his various goon friends are the TV-show equivalent of an empty house in a district represented by a carpetbagging congressman—while the main characters (whose motivations and personalities have changed willy-nilly across five seasons) all furrow their brows and frown and sigh in approximation of complicated feelings that I’m not sure even the show’s creator understands. There are setbacks, conversations loaded with meaning so hidden I don’t think it exists, and then finally it is time to serve the customers.

Well, okay, there’s actually a fake-out, “time to serve the customers!” cliffhanger and then there’s a whole other episode in which they prepare to serve the customers. But finally, in the season’s sixth and seventh episodes (of eight total), actual diners show up and food is prepared for them. When that gets underway, something miraculous happens.