What If I Don’t Want to Binge 'The Bear'?
Good luck surviving this week's discourse. Plus: a preview of my conversation with 'A Quiet Place: Day One' director Michael Sarnoski
So . . . have you caught up on season three of The Bear? Did you clear your schedule, send the kids to grandma’s, shut off all social media to avoid spoilers from people even more committed to the cause?
By dropping all 10 episodes of the new season last Wednesday, The Bear is doggedly sticking to a binge release format that I thought — or maybe just hoped? — was going out of style. After all, FX already had a hit this year with Shogun, which rolled out carefully week by week. It was a smash hit and is about to hit big at the Emmys, where the vast majority of contenders also had weekly releases.
Although Prime Video and Netflix largely remain committed to the binge drop, most other streamers and networks seem to realize that if you give everyone something new to talk about each week, they’ll keep talking about your show for months instead of the single weekend it takes them to watch.
The Bear, however, is unique, and they know it. Earlier this year FX chief John Landgraf said that after the successful binge drop of The Bear’s first season, the die was cast: “Even though the episodes are separate, there’s a whole vibe to every season, so we decided not to change what we had already set in motion,” he said in February. “Even if we could, I don’t think we’d change it now.”
There’s some debate out there about whether the current season of The Bear matches the heights of what came before, and if a season about Carmy and company grappling with their success is a little too on the nose about what the show’s creators are going through themselves. The show’s critical score on Rotten Tomatoes still sits at a robust 94 percent, though the audience score of 59 percent might be something to keep an eye on.
None of this is likely to affect the show’s Emmy chances, as nominations voting ended before the season premiered and they’re still contending for almost universally loved season two. But if backlash starts brewing over the coming weeks, that will make for a compelling meta narrative between now and September’s awards.
The Bear is still one of the best things we’ve got on TV, and worthy of spending our entire July 4th holiday week talking about it. Even complaining about a binge release means I wish I could spend more time talking and thinking about it. For now, as I try to make time to watch more episodes, I’ll just have to make my peace with spoilers.
It’s a short holiday week, and there will be no newsletter from me on July 4. But ahead I’ve got a preview of tomorrow’s Prestige Junkie podcast, and some reflections on how an independent film landmark from 35 years ago might be even more of a juggernaut if it were released today.
A Quiet Roar
Congratulations are in order to my guest on tomorrow’s podcast, A Quiet Place: Day One director Michael Sarnoski, who just found enormous success following a career path that had started to seem more poisonous than promising.
“You come on to a big franchise, people have big expectations,” Sarnoski confessed to me when we spoke on Friday, as early box office numbers were suggesting that Day One would indeed be a smash. “I just kind of have to not think about it. I mean, it probably manifests as night terrors and an upset stomach. But consciously I just repress it as much as possible.”
After releasing the acclaimed Nicolas Cage-starring indie Pig in 2021, Sarnoski was approached by John Krasinski to do what many other indie directors have done before him: take on a franchise. The past decade-plus is riddled with Sundance breakouts who became stewards for franchises far bigger than they were: Cary Joji Fukunaga for Bond, Colin Trevorrow for Jurassic World and Ryan Coogler for Black Panther being the prime examples.
But as Eternals director Chloe Zhao, A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay or The Haunted Mansion director Justin Simien could tell you, being handed the keys to a franchise isn’t a guarantee of creative fulfillment — which they probably wouldn’t expect anyway — or even success. More recent indie breakout directors like the Daniels, Robert Eggers, Chinonye Chukwu and Emma Seligman have been doggedly pursuing their own work; whether the franchises have stopped asking or they’ve started turning them down, the career path after a beloved indie debut is clearly changing.
Sarnoski has instead gone the studio route, but just as A Quiet Place was no ordinary franchise — his contribution, Day One — is no ordinary summer blockbuster. In my interview, which you can hear tomorrow on the Prestige Junkie podcast, we talked about the inspiration he took from silent films as well as such classic action movies as Aliens, and how when he first met with Krasinski about bringing his sensibility to the world of A Quiet Place, Sarnoski felt certain that he’d actually be able to do that.
“I had to just focus on what he was telling me— do something that you care about and make this your own,” Sarnoski said about that initial meeting. “That was what I wanted to do with A Quiet Place — go into a world that wasn’t mine, but find characters and a story that felt like me, and felt like something that I wanted to spend time with and explore.”
There are thrilling sequences and impressive effects in the new A Quiet Place, but much as in the previous two films, the most memorable moments are about silent connections between characters (and one extremely memorable cat named Frodo). Sarnoski now has the world at his feet, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he pivots to something smaller for his next act. Any up-and-coming director approached to take on a franchise can now ask the producers to give them the Sarnoski treatment — that way we might get better blockbusters, and better careers for promising directors, too.
Sex, Lies Turns 35
Steven Soderbergh wasn’t so sure about the title. It was the first-ever public screening of what would become his breakthrough feature, and the 26-year-old director was chatting with the Sundance Film Festival audience, wondering if there was a better way forward for his chatty film about the entangled lives of four yuppies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The title — sex, lies, and videotape — stuck. Picked up by Miramax after one of the first blockbuster screenings in Sundance history, Soderbergh’s film went on to win the Palme D’Or at Cannes and become a word-of-mouth smash when it was released in theaters 35 years ago, in August 1989.
As Peter Biskind describes in his book Down and Dirty Pictures, sex, lies, and videotape was a landmark for Miramax, Sundance and for Soderbergh, three forces who would come to define the indie film boom of the '90s and beyond. So what better way to celebrate this week’s Independence Day than with a look back at the independent film that created the world we live in today?
On tomorrow’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, I go deep on the legacy of sex, lies, and videotape, with my guest co-host and longtime friend, The Ringer’s Joanna Robinson. Obviously you should subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already!
There’s much more to sex, lies, and videotape than we had time to get into, alas, particularly in the legacy it left for independent films at the Oscars. That legacy is irrevocably tied up with Miramax, which had its breakthrough first best picture nomination for My Left Foot the same year that Soderbergh was nominated for best original screenplay. The Miramax legacy is one that, even almost seven years after the reporting that ended Harvey Weinstein’s career, most Oscar followers don’t quite know how to reckon with.
The world of independent film, however, is much larger than the Weinsteins, as any of the other indie film execs of the time would have gladly reminded you. Many life cycles since Miramax’s emergence, through the fellow upstarts of the '90s and the boutique studio divisions of the 2000s, indies are finding their way around new challenges, from the shifting sands of the streaming era to courting investors outside Hollywood.
Through it all indie studios have survived — and when it comes to the Oscars they’re probably as dominant as they ever were. Only one major studio, Universal, has won best picture in the past decade; it did it twice, with Green Book and Oppenheimer.
Not all best picture victories guarantee future success — just ask 2015’s best picture-winning distributor Open Road, which declared bankruptcy three years after Spotlight’s release. But indie outfits A24, Neon, Searchlight and even Sony Pictures Classics have marched right alongside the Academy’s changing demographics to expand fundamentally the idea of what an “Oscar movie” might be.
If sex, lies, and videotape were released today — bold new directorial voice, box office hit, source of endless buzz — it would almost certainly be a best picture nominee. Same for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, also nominated for best original screenplay at those Oscars, whose awards under-performance has only become more notorious as the years have gone on.
We will spend much of this coming awards season talking about the films the Oscars still aren’t ready for, the campaigns that didn’t get enough attention, and probably how much the system is still built to favor those with deep pockets and industry connections. But there’s still never been a better time in history to be a small, ambitious and innovative film hoping for Oscar glory. Sex, lies, and videotape didn’t get what it deserved — but its descendants are getting closer.