Why 'The Bear' Starts Over In Its New Season

TV has never done the classroom terribly well. For all the vaunted—even inaccurate!—specificity contemporary television has brought to the courtroom or the emergency room or the police station, sites of learning remain vaguely fantastical, blank spaces. There’s lots of fun dramatic material to be mined in the social networks that surround schools and campuses, but the actual work of learning is rarely deemed interesting enough to spend too much time on. Even Netflix’s campus dramedy The Chair, for example, which nailed the pratfalls of academic bureaucracy, the small-stakes warfare of faculty argument, and, importantly, the soft marginalization of women and people of color in the academy, couldn’t manage to nudge its classroom scenes beyond cartoonish generality.