There’s something not quite right about Carmy’s new love interest on The Bear. Hulu and FX’s ever-tense kitchen dramedy returned for a second season last month, bringing with it a whole slew of new guest stars, including Will Poulter, John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk, and Jamie Lee Curtis. But far and away the most controversial addition to The Bear’s sophomore season was Claire (Molly Gordon), an ER doctor and childhood friend of Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) who serves as his first (proper) love interest on the series. But why? What is it about Claire that has the internet labeling her a “manic pixie dream girl” and putting her on the receiving end of so much ire from fans?
Put simply, Claire doesn’t feel like she fits with the rest of the series, and that may be by design. The Bear (as previously mentioned) is at its best when it’s dialed up the tension to an eleven, everybody’s screaming at each other, and lovably flawed characters are screwing up in ways that send the story spiraling in new directions. The inherent charm of the show is that these are deeply hurt, messy people who frequently make awful decisions—but at the end of the day, their hearts are in the right place, and we learn to grow and love even the most prickly of personalities. From Richie to Tina to Fek, virtually half the cast of the show is introduced as unlikable in some capacity, but the more time we spend with them, the more we understand what makes them tick, and before we realize it, they feel like a part of the family.
Enter stage left, Claire. Very clearly and deliberately, everything about Claire’s character sits in stark contrast to the chaotic world of The Bear’s kitchen we’ve come to call home. While Carmy, Syd, Richie and the rest of the gang are always rushing and yelling, Claire is laid back, with an easy, soft smile and a relaxed demeanor. She’s even lit differently than the rest of the cast—halos of soft light behind her are the opposite of the kitchen’s harsh lightning. From pacing to dialogue to lightning, everything about how Claire is presented to the audience is deliberately engineered so that she feels like the exact opposite of the environment being created in the back of house at The Bear.
On paper, this makes complete sense—season two is all about how overworking and his dedication to cooking has robbed Carmy of any social life, so it’s a no-brainer that when we finally do meet a love interest for him, she has nothing to do with The Bear whatsoever. But in being so careful about setting Claire thematically apart from the rest of the cast and making sure she doesn’t carry any of the stress or anger we typically associate with them and the kitchen, the series has inadvertently planted the subconscious idea in the eyes of fans that Claire *isn’t* part of the family.
As previously mentioned, part of what makes season one of The Bear so impactful is that we aren’t expected to immediately like or care about characters—we meet them when they’re rough around the edges, and (just like real life) are given time to warm up to them as the edges are slowly softened and their story is rounded out. Sydney herself learns the hard way that if you’re going to be around the crew of The Beef, you need to earn your place—she clashes with Richie and Tina for nearly half of season one before finally becoming part of the family.
So, in waltzes Claire—but instead of getting the trial by fire that the audience and Sydney received when we joined the show, she’s made out by the rest of the cast to be an angel among men. It’s almost jarring how frequently characters on the show go out of their way to talk about how wonderful Claire is—Carmy’s relatives all call her “Claire Bear,” and she calls Richie “cousin,” a term that’s deeply personal to the Berzattos and only used for members of the family. Whenever she comes around, Fek and Richie are always talking about how sweet and beautiful she is. We’re assaulted on all sides by near-constant reminders of how great Claire is and how much we should all like her.
But when we’ve spent a season and a half falling in love with prickly outsiders, suddenly, someone being presented as likable and good-hearted off the bat feels suspicious and almost jarring in how much it clashes with what the series has previously established about character building. No, she’s not a part of the cooking world, and thus she operates on a different frequency than the rest of the crew, but why does everybody else in the cast have to earn their place in the kitchen (and fans’ hearts) while Claire gets the red carpet treatment from day one?
Insults and friction are the way Carmy, Syd, and the rest of the gang operate—tough love, but a language we’ve come to understand as how the crew shows they care. In contrast, Clarie’s achingly genuine, plain-spoken affection for Carmy feels cloying and ironically insincere—to the point that fans have picked up on it and are voicing their frustrations online.
Even in the tensest, most heartbreaking episode of the season (2×06, “Fishes”), there’s a brief break in the chaos of the flashbacks so Mikey and Richie can gush about how hot Claire is and how Carmy would be an idiot not to want her. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Claire—and maybe that’s why it’s so hard to like her. In a cast full of messy, angry, deeply flawed people, Claire feels shallow and underbaked—her only real personality trait is that she’s beautiful, and she likes Carmy. When we’ve been conditioned by the series to distrust friendliness and embrace flaws, is it any wonder that audiences find something off-putting about Claire?
If the jarringly different approach to writing her character weren’t enough, the real nail in Claire’s coffin in the eyes of fans was the way in which she inadvertently (or maybe deliberately) drives a wedge between Syd and Carmy, inserting herself in the world of the restaurant in the most inopportune times and causing Carmy undue stress. The Sydney/Carmy bond is a fan-favorite, so to watch their carefully constructed and hard-earned chemistry be suddenly interrupted by this new character who we’re told (but not shown) is charming and lovable is incredibly frustrating, to say the least.
Whether she’s introducing herself to the crew in the middle of a fight she has no business interrupting, ruining Carmy’s focus at a high-stress friends and family opening, or getting endless complements from the typically acerbic ensemble cast, Claire sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of The Bear’s rough-and-tumble cast. It’s no fault of Gordon’s (a talented comedienne in her own right who’d be a great fit for the show if Claire were written like the rest of the cast), and undoubtedly, part of the fan reaction is steeped in misogyny (much like the term “manic pixie dream girl” itself), but Claire’s reception on The Bear is a testament to the emotional shorthand built within the world of the series—and a fascinating case study of what happens when you try to operate outside of it.
(featured image: FX and Hulu)
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