Season 4, Episode of “The Bear” runs 69 minutes long and will win an Emmy one day.
Will it be this fall or next fall? Who knows? “The Bear,” like most streaming shows, runs counter to the Emmy Awards schedule. You can never tell what season the Emmys are judging.
Like all “The Bear” episodes, number is full of music. Actually, this episode — about a family wedding that doesn’t explode — has an incredible 15 songs. Fifteen! “The Bear” has some music budget. None of it comes cheap.
Episode 7 includes songs by Taylor Swift, Lou Reed, Darlene Love, Pearl Jam, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Them (Van Morrison), and Everything But the Girl. But the highlight is the final song: Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher than the Rest.”
The hitch is that Bruce is not singing it. “The Bear” uses a lost 1990 cover version by Emmylou Harris that is so good someone should release it to iTunes as a single. Harris’s voice is just magic, and the arrangement is reminiscent of the E Street Band.
Is it pure luck that a Springsteen song is included in a TV series? Bruce never used to let his songs into movie soundtracks. Remember the whole dust up when Peter Bogdanovich wanted Bruce’s songs for “Mask”? He was turned down, and Bob Seger’s music was used instead. It was only years later that Bruce’s songs were added to the director’s cut.
But as luck would have it, “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen in the new Scott Cooper movie, “Deliver Me From Nowhere.” We’ll be seeing this movie in the fall. So it couldn’t have been too hard to clear “Tougher” for “The Bear.” It should be noted that this is the first time a Springsteen song made it into “The Bear.”
As for “The Bear”: it’s a drama, not a comedy. It has few laughs, although episode 7 has the most in some time. It’s also extraordinarily well written, acted, and directed. Christopher Storer has a way of giving every actor a defining scene. This episode guest stars Brie Larson and Josh Hartnett. But my favorite line goes to John Mulaney, whose observation about Bob Odenkirk’s character is best of all. “I’ve met him 9 times,” Mulaney says, “and I still don’t know who he is.”