Tina Is the Best Character in 'The Bear' & Season 3 Proves It
For two and a half seasons, Liza Colón-Zayas’ character in The Bear, Tina, has lingered on the back burner of the Chicago restaurant in which the show is set. In “Napkins,” the sixth episode of season three, Tina takes center stage for the first time and Colón-Zayas gives us the best scene of the season.
Now that Colón-Zayas has secured a very well-deserved Emmy nomination, and could hopefully follow in the footsteps of co-star Ebon Moss-Bachrach who won his first Emmy after his own spotlight episode in season two, it is clear that the 52-year-old actress stepped up to the plate this season.
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Like several beloved but less-talked-about characters in the award-winning FX show, Tina often exists to show the clash between the vision Jeremy Allen White‘s Carmy has for his fine dining establishment and the staff members he’s relying on to build it.
When we first meet Tina, she has her guard up. She glares at Carmy with looks that could kill, pretends she doesn’t speak English to avoid following instructions from Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney and she is reluctant to see her young colleagues institute change at The Beef. She is among the team member’s most fiercely loyal to Carmy’s late-brother, Mikey Berzatto.
“You know how much I loved him, right?” she asks Carmy is season one. “A lot. I loved him a lot.”
But until season three we don’t exactly know why. In fact, we know very little about Tina at all. She’s Puerto Rican, in her late 40s or early 50s, she’s one of the restaurant’s few female staff members, she’s tough when she wants to be and full of heart when she needs to be.
In “Napkins,” which is also Edebiri’s stunning directorial debut, we jump back five years and meet a 46-year-old Tina facing tough times with her husband David (played by Colón-Zayas’ real-life husband, David Zayas) as their rent increases and they’re struggling to support their son with her payroll job and David’s doorman gig.
Even Colón-Zayas didn’t anticipate that this would be her character’s backstory. “When we’re introduced to Tina, she’s pretty hardcore, but we know she’s a mom,” the actress told the Los Angeles Times in June. “I didn’t realize that she had a 9-to-5, and they were working poor, they were stable, and [she and her husband] are in love. There was this whole other peaceful, kind of normal side of her life.”
Tina suddenly gets laid off after 15 years of service and thus begins a heart-wrenching sequence of job interviews, phone calls begging for work and endless resumes handed over to much-younger workers who turn their noses up at Tina’s lack of college education.
Edebiri painstakingly lingers on these scenes and just when you think Tina is finally about to stumble across a “Help Wanted” sign outside the unassuming sandwich shop season one and two viewers know so well, we witness another ill-fated job interview.
The episode invites viewers to keep the rest of Tina’s season one and two arc in mind. Each time she is rebuffed by someone half her age with only a fraction of her work experience, it’s impossible not to reflect those uncomfortable early scenes with a nervous Sydney attempting to tell Tina what to do. How must it have felt for Tina to find herself at the mercy of someone with less work experience than her once again?
Then finally, like a ray of light, Tina walks into a loud, bustling sandwich shop to wait for her delayed bus after a particularly disheartening job rejection. We see The Original Beef of Chicagoland exactly as characters in the early seasons wanted to keep it, unpretentious and boisterous. Richie (Moss-Bachrach) is there with a sparkle in his eye that we may never see again. This is The Beef before the death of its larger than life owner.
For the first time in the episode, Tina catches a break when Richie hands her a coffee and an Italian beef sandwich on the house which she takes into the shop’s seating area. Enter the sandwich shop’s omnipresent owner Mikey Berzatto (John Bernthal) in the flesh for the first time in the season, the perpetual missing piece in the lives of almost every character in the show. He’s filling napkin holders and goofing around with Richie and Neil (Matty Matheson). Tina sits down and begins to cry. Edebiri situates Colón-Zayas at the front of the frame with the men in the background.
Eventually Mikey is sent over to check on her, offering another glimpse at the hole he left in the lives of everyone in the show. He is the one they call on to pick up the pieces — until they can’t. We get 10 minutes of pure dialogue between characters whose bond in the show, until now, was one we just had to imagine.
Mikey eases his way into her life by opening up about his lousy day and his feelings of inadequacy due to his lack of aspirations, an admission made even more heartbreaking by the viewer’s knowledge that these demons would eventually lead him to take his own life. Tina gets candid about her situation. The idea of having a dream is so far beyond her that it’s not even a concern.
“I don’t need to make magic. I don’t need to save the world. I just need to feed my kid,” she tells Mikey.
On a whim, Mikey offers her a job, not just because she needs one but because, after their frank conversation, he needs her too. This is often Tina’s role in the show, a central part of the foundation who asks for no credit and no favors. In her late 40s with no college education and no job, she doesn’t shrink herself for him and he doesn’t ask her to. Tina’s season one admission comes into focus here: “A lot. I loved him a lot.”
In many ways, we meet Tina for the first time in this episode, learning things about her that we’ve never seen on screen before. But in other ways, we knew it all along. We’ve seen her resilience, her adaptability, her skill at rising to a challenge.
This episode isn’t the last time Tina reinvents herself in order to take charge of her career. In season two, we watched her go to culinary school and get promoted to sous chef. We’ve also watched her do what Mikey does for her when she goes out on a limb to help Ebraheim, picking him back up and bringing him along in the brand new The Bear. With Tina, no man gets left behind.
This is Tina’s strength in the show, even without her backstory we know her loyalty to Mikey and trust her as one of the keepers of his legacy. We never doubt her essentialness to the team. But in the simple yet eye-opening episode, we see for the first time how much it all means. We know what she has risked to be part of Carmy’s optimistic new vision for his brother’s quaint sandwich shop and we see that, without her, there would be no The Bear.
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