The Rundown: It’s Pretty Cool That Most Episodes Of ‘The Bear’ Are Like 30 Minutes Long

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – Listen to me

There are a lot of things that are pretty cool about The Bear. It’s a good show. It gets a lot of things right about working in a kitchen, which I say as a person who spent one summer working in a kitchen at a bar/restaurant inside the stadium where the Phillies play. (Expert analysis.) The performances are great and everyone is very sweaty and the music choices really hit the nail right on the head in a pretty fun way. I’ll repeat it for the record: The Bear is a good show.

There’s another thing I really dig about it, though. I love that most — not all, but definitely most — of the show’s episodes clock in right around 30 minutes, even though it is — probably, if we want to be technical about it — more of a drama than a comedy. It always struck me as weird that we do things that way, with 30 minutes for the funny shows and 60 minutes for the serious ones. What if you have a serious story to tell that you can wrap up quickly? What if you have too many jokes to squeeze into a half-hour window? We all went and created these dumb rules for ourselves and then stuck with them for many decades. Humans are strange creatures, man.

It’s even weirder that we still kind of stick to it now that streaming has taken over the television world. I can see why it was more important when advertisers were paying for commercials between chunks of action and wanted to know just about where their spots were hitting, but those kinds of parameters barely exist now. Make an episode of your show 24 minutes. Make it 53. Make it, like, 94 minutes if you really think you have to, but please, be careful here. I’ve already shouted at the movie people about bloated runtimes. I have this rant chambered at all times. Please do not make me pull the trigger. We don’t want to get carried away with all this. To quote a wise(…ish) man…

This is what The Bear gets right, though. It gets you in and out quickly, which works well for the show for a few reasons, the primary one being that the action is often pretty stressful — shouting, clanging, Richie always on the verge of calamity — and the shorter episodes cut the viewer loose before it goes from fun and frantic to nerve-frying chaos. I hope more shows learn from this. Or at least try it. Longer does not always mean better. There’s something to be said for an action movie that goes hard for 90 minutes and then cuts to the credits, too. Go watch Nobody again this weekend if you need a reminder.

My points here, summarized:

• The Bear is a good show
• Dramas can be lil half-hours, too
• Not made of time over here, people

Thank you.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – Someone please give Margot Robbie a high-five

The press tour for the new Barbie movie — which, as we have discussed, still has not been released in theaters despite feeling like it might have come out six months ago, which, as we have also discussed, is not so much a comment on the movie itself (it looks good and fun and weird) as it is the media and paparazzi fascination with it — continued this week. Specifically, for our purposes here, it continued with an interview with director Greta Gerwig over at Rolling Stone.

The interview is good and you should go read it. Greta Gerwig is a smart lady who makes me think about things from a slightly different angle than I had previously thought about them. That’s pretty cool. But it’s not the thing I want to talk about. The thing I want to talk about is this, from one of her answers.

How Barbie operates in Barbieland is she’s entirely continuous with her environment. Even the houses have no walls, because you never need to hide because there’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed of. And suddenly finding yourself in the real world and wishing you could hide, that’s the essence of being human. But when we were actually shooting on Venice Beach, with Margot and Ryan in neon rollerblading outfits, it was fascinating because it was actually happening in front of us. People would go by Ryan, high-five him, and say, “Awesome, Ryan, you look great!” And they wouldn’t actually say anything to Margot. They’d just look at her. It was just surreal. In that moment, she did feel self-conscious.

A couple of things are important to note here…

The first is, like, I kind of get why this happened. I think. It was probably a combination of a few things, starting with Margot Robbie feeling like a big fancy movie star that people are nervous around in a way they’re not as nervous around a fun goof like Ryan Gosling, continuing to her being in costume as Barbie on the Barbie movie and that maybe throwing people off a bit in the moment, and undoubtedly circling just the general thing in society where people treat men and women differently in ways that kind of stink sometimes. There are entire college degrees that focus on this. I’m not doing it justice in a single paragraph. But you get it, I hope.

This brings us to the second thing, though, which is a lot simpler: Maybe give Margot Robbie a high-five some time. Not all the time. Not if she looks busy or if she’s trying to eat dinner or anything. But if you see her — to choose a relevant example — out rollerblading and smiling and having a blast, maybe just hold your hand up in the universally-accepted high-five position as she zooms past you. Don’t be weird about it. Don’t yell or be creepy. Just offer Margot Robbie a high-five if she looks like a person who might be open to one.

Maybe a “hell yeah,” too.

Everybody loves getting a high-five and a “hell yeah.”

Lord knows I do.

I must stress again that you not be weird about it, though. That’s a very important part of this. Just be cool. Please. Just a quick high-five and on with your day/life.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – Tom Cruise will not rest until he has mangled his entire body in support of the movie theater experience

Tom Cruise is a maniac. You know this. We all know this. The man has been heaving his body off of and into and through things on movie sets for something like 40 years now. He’s been doing it in the Mission: Impossible movies alone for something like 30 years. That’s barely an exaggeration. The first one — the one where he was dangling from the wires, the one that was somehow directed by Brian de Palma — came out in 1996. He’s still out here quite literally tossing himself off of mountains in 2023. Again, a maniac.

And it doesn’t sound like he plans on stopping any time soon either.

“Harrison Ford is a legend; I hope to be still going. I’ve got 20 years to catch up with him,” Cruise said. “I hope to keep making ‘Mission: Impossible’ films until I’m his age.”

See, the thing here is that you’re tempted to chuckle at the idea of an 80-year-old Tom Cruise… oh, I don’t know… let’s say jumping out of a flaming helicopter and onto a passing speedboat (the speedboat is also on fire). But think about it this way: Harrison Ford is still doing Indiana Jones things — pretty well! — at age 80. And Tom just drove a motorcycle off of a mountain at age 61. Let’s go ahead and file this one under “possible, if not probable.”

There is one place where Tom will never catch up to Harrison, though. Tom Cruise could never pull off something this cool.

Honestly, though, I don’t think any of us could. Let’s not give Tom too hard of a time about this one. He might take it as a challenge and try to commit so hard to being cool that it finally becomes the thing that kills him after decades of tossing his body willy-nilly into danger.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Important mustache news

This is the trailer for an upcoming movie titled Corner Office. It stars Jon Hamm as a man who works in who I am kidding look at Jon Hamm’s mustache in this sucker.

LOOK AT IT

LOOK AT JON HAMM’S MUSTACHE

HAMM MUSTACHE

HAM MUSTACHE

MUSTACHE MADE OF HAM

HAMMSTACHE

MUSTHAMM

THAT ONE DOESN’T WORK AS WELL

BUT STILL

The official position of The Rundown remains as follows: It is deeply cool that Jon Hamm played the most serious man who ever lived on Mad Men and since then has mostly played weirdos and goofballs and Fletch and sometimes guys with bushy mustaches. Good for Jon Hamm, man.

But especially good for his mustache.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Well, here’s a fun little brain exercise

Background, quickly…

There’s a podcast called 50 MPH that focuses entirely on the movie Speed, which is just kind of an awesome thing in general. On the last episode, host Kris Tapley talked to a former Paramount executive named Don Granger, who revealed that back when things for the movie were getting all gummed-up in pre-production, he actually pitched it as a Beverly Hills Cop sequel, just to try to get it made.

“I really wanted to try to mount the movie, and my last-ditch effort was … I pitched it at our chairman’s lunch as a possible script for ‘Beverly Hills Cop III,’” Granger said. “I got about 15 minutes of traction before it was dismissed, because that was back when the mandate was to find a ‘Beverly Hill Cop III.’ So I was like, ‘Let’s put Axel Foley on the bus.’ It was a Hail Mary, man.”

The primary takeaway here is that Hollywood is a fascinating and perplexing place. But there’s a second takeaway that I want everyone to focus on for a minute, too. This potential Eddie-Keanu swaperoo, the one that would have put Axel Foley on a speeding city bus, opens the door to a hypothetical situation where the two actors switch careers entirely.

Eddie in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Keanu in Trading Places

Eddie in Point Break

Keanu in The Nutty Professor

Eddie in John Wick

Keanu in Dreamgirls

And so on. Some of these don’t really work — Keanu in Coming to America leaps out here — but it’s still a fun little ride to go on anyway. My gift to you.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Joe:

I know you have a regional bias on this one, but where do you rank “Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson throwing out the first pitch at a Detroit Tigers game and the team’s Twitter account leaning into the ITYSL of it all” on the “Chase Utley throws out the first pitch to Rob McElhenney from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia after years of discussing it on the show” scale? I feel like it has to be pretty high.

Oh, buddy. Oh, it is really high. It would’ve been high even if it was just the two of them throwing out the pitches, too, if only because they’ve represented the city so proudly for years now. (WATCH DETROITERS. IT IS SO GOOD AND FUN. I AM TYPING IN ALL-CAPS BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT AND TRUE BUT ALSO BECAUSE I AM STILL MAD IT ONLY LASTED TWO SEASONS. COME ON.) But then, as you mentioned, the team’s official Twitter account got in on the fun. Look at this.

And this.

And this.

That’s just really excellent work all around. For those of us who are in on the joke, at least. It’s pretty funny to think about some like 65-year-old guy who just wants to watch a baseball game and doesn’t understand why a bunch of 33-year-old fans are shouting obscenities at a person named Bart Harley Jarvis who doesn’t even appear to be a player on the other team. I enjoy that.

Still behind Mac and Utley, though. For me. You are correct that my bias is showing here. Might have helped if they had the Phanatic there.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Houston!

Hundreds of collectible plastic cups designed by Dallas rapper Post Malone were apparently stolen last week from a Galleria-area Raising Cane’s restaurant, according to photos of a police report posted to social media.

Well, this is about to be the only this I care about for a while.

The report shows that 249 limited-edition cups were taken from the fast food restaurant’s location inside the Galleria, with an estimated value of $6,150. Thieves also stole cleaning supplies, including nearly four gallons of Dawn dish soap.

See, your first instinct here is to assume that this is the work of amateurs. Just some goofs who broke in and ran off with whatever they could find. Cups, soap, anything they could carry. Real smash and grab operation.

But.

Think about this.

What if they stole the dish soap so they could wash all the stolen cups before they sold them off on the black market?

What if they’re just responsible and hygienic and thorough, like a real professional operation?

Makes you think.

There are four different cup designs, meant to be released one at a time in two-week cycles. The first drop began on June 21, just a day before the theft took place. The next drop starts on July 6. A quick scan of eBay shows the first cup design reselling for between $15 and $30.

I choose to believe these cups are being sold with “WASHED AND CLEANED BEFORE SHIPPING” in the description field and I will absolutely not under any circumstances go do any research to ruin this for myself.

Please do not take this away from me.