Lifestyle
How ‘The Bear’ Found Its Voice
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Usually if Joanna Naugle is doing her job correctly, you don’t notice she’s there at all. As an editor on comedies like Ramy and Big Mouth, she’s helped jokes land and performances sing, maintaining the rhythm and snipping the extraneous moments you might not have noticed but definitely would have felt.
And then came The Bear, the propulsive dramedy created by Christopher Storer, who brought Naugle on to the show after their work together on Ramy. It’s not just the frenetic pace of the show that makes you notice the editing, the way dialogue will overlap or scenes will change in an instant. There are insert shots of knives cutting or pots overflowing, and then images from entirely outside the scenes themselves — childhood photos, Chicago skylines, overdue bills. Each new cut brings you further into the stressful kitchen at The Beef, or into Carmy’s frazzled mind. It‘s the kind of editing you notice, but only because it’s so successful at drawing you further in.
On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast Naugle joins to discuss how she became an editor after attending NYU film school, and how she and Storer worked together to find the voice of The Bear in season one, only to change their own rules in the more recent two. Naugle, an Emmy nominee for season one, was back for the second season and calls it funnier than the first — proof that as The Bear continues, it may continue to change, as well.
Listen to the conversation above, and subscribe to Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. You can read excerpts from the interview below.
The Bear is so distinctive, and when it premiered last summer, I don’t think anyone knew it was going to become this huge phenomenon. It’s comedy, it’s drama, and I know Ramy has elements of that too, but was it hard to wrap your head around what it was going to be when you first started on it?
Yeah, seeing the first dailies, I was like, “What is…” Everyone’s just yelling over each other? This kitchen is chaos. After talking to Chris more about the style of the show and the vision for the show, I just totally got it. I love the idea of just really wanting to make the viewer feel like they were standing in the kitchen alongside those characters and not spending a lot of time with exposition, not explaining what their lingo meant, their shared language.
It was a way to just immediately show the dynamic between all these different characters. They have years of experience working together, living at The Beef, the family dynamics of the Berzatto family. I love that Chris had enough confidence to just throw people into the deep end, start the show with such a fast-paced introduction to Carmy, and then just giving people space to fall in love with these characters and see their collaboration come to life.
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Katey Rich
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