‘Every second counts’: Urban affect and culinary chaos in The Bear

Set in Chicago, the Emmy award-winning series The Bear (2022–present) overlays its diegetic world over the city’s architecture, charting its urban geography across a fictional map of sites and culinary spots, imbued with personal histories and narrative significance. As the series intersects the city’s real locations with its fiction, it creates a network of places and non-places that affect individual characters’ narratives and embody their memories. The juxtaposition between meaningful urban spaces and transitional locations in The Bear ’s diegesis illustrates Marc Augè’s commentary on supermodernity’s enforcement of needless progress and productivity, and the subsequent fragmentation of the human experience that results from such exertion. The following article employs Augè’s place/non-place binary and his interpretation of supermodernity’s effect on the metropolitan experience in an analysis of the city’s significance to The Bear ’s commentary on accelerated gentrification and the individual perception of such frantic and expedited progress. Organized in three parts, this article’s analysis investigates the ways the series intertwines Chicago’s architecture and local culture with the characters’ own lives in order to deliver its critique on supermodernity’s impossible expectations, the city’s place as a formal tool of narrative development and its role in structuring the series’ culinary achievements.