Recently, I’ve been watching, as no doubt have you because absolutely everyone seems to be, the FX series The Bear on Disney+. If you’re anything close to representative of the broad sector of society that can be described as televisually inclined, then you’ve already finished Season Two and have moved on, satisfied, awaiting a third helping. You may have even posted about it on the platform currently known as The Platform Formerly Known As.

I’ve finished Season One (eight episodes in three consecutive days), and am just starting the second series now.

The reason I’ve lagged somewhat is probably fear. Or, I suppose, strong, visceral aversion, which amounts to the same thing. Not of bears (I understood that the title did not refer to a literal bear, though that is precisely what we see the protagonist confront right at the start of the first episode), or indeed programmes about cooking (which, at least on paper, is what this is), but of television more broadly – or rather, British and American television.

To be blunt, most (so called) Quality Television, the like of which you will often find on HBO, but extending to much of the BBC and ITV dramatic output, is something I will tend to avoid as a matter of course.

There has, for some time, been something of a toxicity arms race in US/UK TV narrative and character. I would not necessarily blame The Sopranos for this, though that, I think, was probably ground zero. It was the moment when the overarching cultural agenda seemed to shift away from heroes and villains, challenges and solutions, and instead become about filling the world’s living rooms with people you would not invite into your house, and then causing them no end of torment.

Now, I can stomach a bit of violence. Not horror or gore, necessarily and the penultimate episode of the first season of Punisher really tested my threshold on that front (I loved season one despite my intense discomfort at the carousel scene), but I do like a shooty, fighty, chasey progamme with explosions and a good bit of peril.

The Venn Diagram intersection of shooty, fighty, chasey with exceptional writing, strong characters, good acting and quality production is slim at best, but there are examples of it.

Usually, though, these programmes consist of characters taking turns explaining the plot, then fighting. Not ideal, but I’ll take it if they just clear the low bar of being fun while they are at it. If my eye-rolling becomes so pronounced it’s audible (as it did with Citadel), then I will abandon ship, but otherwise just keep up the momentum and make me smile occasionally.

There is also, an extremely popular and therefore ubiquitous category of programmes (can we call it a genre?) in which irredeemably horrible people have an entirely miserable time. I place Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy and Succession all in this group – not because I have watched the whole of any of them and made an objective assessment based on that, but because I have started and, usually, very quickly stopped watching. Nothing has yet contradicted my suspicions about them. This is not how I want to spend my time.

I also have a fairly low tolerance for depictions of situations designed to cause stress, tension, anxiety or upset to the viewer and not just to a selection of the characters. A thriller should thrill, not traumatise.

A middle ground might be represented by something like Fargo, in which a broadly likeable person finds themselves dragged deeper and deeper into a more ‘real’ world in which it turns out that everyone is horrible, nothing is fair and very little really matters. Fargo had its moments, but ultimately kindness is portrayed as naive and quaint. A curiosity rather than a quality.

Or perhaps Peaky Blinders, which was kind of retro not just in terms of its setting, but in the sense that it portrayed ostensibly likeable antiheroes. I mean, there were no actual ‘goodies’ in that show, but you were never unsure about who you wanted to win and, spoiler alert, you were ultimately not disappointed. I loved it, despite its ultimate bleakness, perhaps because it had more in common with, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark or a classic caper film than something like Breaking Bad, in that the denouement of each series results in cheers, rather than a need for a shower and perhaps a Roadrunner cartoon or two to take the taste away.

There’s a variety of narrative arcs and worldviews at work in these post-Sopranos prestige shows, of course. They would fail to register as good writing and great production if we were just to wallow about in a mire of misanthropy and psychosis without tight scripting, propulsive and compelling plots and masterful delivery. Quality television offers up all the very best in classic tragedy, revenge, nihilism, Kafka-esqe bleak surrealism, and outright sociopathy.

But those things, as literarily valid and de rigour as they may be, are – to put it mildly – not to my taste. A relentless portrayal of a world that is bad because people are bad, and the cycle will inevitably drag you under.

This outlook is not my bag to the extent that I have now given up starting things just because I heard they were good. I don’t want to take away from anyone else’s ‘enjoyment’, of course (if indeed that is what you call what people get from these shows), but they can have that without me. Please don’t feel I’m missing out by not viewing the Netflix series you’ve been bingeing.

But… and so it was The Bear’s dual critical public discourse (magazines, radio shows, websites, podcasts) which appeared to uniformly agree that on the one hand ‘it’s incredibly stressful – like a panic attack’ and on the other ‘it’s such great television – the writing is incredible’ (such common bedfellows that the assertion of one leads one to assume the presence of the other) that caused me to look elsewhere for entertainment. I’d heard this before and I knew it was not for me.

Until suddenly it was.

I was having brunch with a family member at a café in town – something I rarely get to do – and wondered aloud (because these are the sorts of conversations we sometimes have) whether there was any such thing as a Redemption Arc anymore – either in real life, on social media or in film and television.

“Well yes,” they said, because contradiction is rightly the default position when responding to generalisation.

An example was given of someone who had said something profoundly problematic in a public forum and was immediately sent, presumably permanently, to the online naughty step. However, this person had achieved the Herculean accomplishment of working their way back to civil society from exile through a process of humility, meaningful apology, learning and genuine empathy.

And then “oh – and also The Bear.”

The notion that The Bear contained redemption was enough for me to give it a chance. That it was entirely about redemption made it utterly compelling.

This is, to be clear, not what everyone else is getting from the series. Some reviewers come close – talking about the characters learning and growing as the show progresses – but the idea of redemption – even, in some respects, of transcendence – hasn’t, as far as I’ve seen, really come up.

Which is not only fine, but entirely unsurprising. Not everyone is as fixated on the idea that stories about people we at least want to like, and who then become people that we do like for the reason that they become better people – are stories that are not only worth telling – but urgently needed.

The truth is that most people (and therefore society at large) are mean, miserable and myopically self-serving. And the reason for this has been attributed to a lack of institutions, platforms or vehicles for what you might call “moral” education, instruction or modelling. I’m not talking about the kind of morality that forbids progressive kinds of behaviours. Or moral as in puritanical, religious or otherwise holier-than-though. I’m talking about the kind of morality that instils and privileges kindness, and teaches it as a strength.

The obvious recent example is Ted Lasso, in which a coach creates better footballers by inspiring them to become better people. That right there is a morality tale, and as a result, sounds so much more insipid than the brilliant, witty and heartfelt comedy it actually was.

But I think the comedy drama series that comes closest to what (at least Season 1 of) The Bear achieves is Northern Exposure. They are not, in tone, related. But their ultimate effect is the same. And we need much more of that effect in our society if it too is to be redeemed.

I don’t entirely know where The Bear is heading. I get the sense that Season 2 is somewhat less frenetic, perhaps even more reflective – and that will be very welcome. But if the intensity and pace of the programme continues, it is largely the kitchen environment providing the toxicity, and the people who are human and deserving of empathy and grace doing what they can to survive in that environment.

They are working to live, and making food to give – despite all that brings out in them and each other. The context provides the problem, not the individuals. The tragedy of The Bear (Mikey’s suicide) occurs before the show begins. Season 1 works towards the dismantling and rebuilding of the restaurant. It seeks to make a better world. The Bear itself is post-tragedy – and shows a possible path back.

It’s a comedy – not just because it has jokes or funny moments in it. There are plenty of comedies on television that make light of the knowledge that the world is terrible and people are bad. These comedies are resigned to the decline, the funny situations are, on reflection, tragic – and the jokes have victims. The Bear is a comedy in the Shakespearean sense. We know that despite the trials and misunderstandings, things will work out. We have hope. And either figuratively or literally, it’s not over until there’s a wedding – that most symbolic of literary forgiveness, redemption and love.

It’s not entirely alone. I’ve mentioned Ted Lasso. There’s also Reservation Dogs. There is a small but promising handful of programmes that, overtly or otherwise, rightly pinpoint the problem as societal, historical and environmental, rather than an irreversible flaw of humanity we must lean into. These programmes suggest we can change the environment. We can teach and learn. Things can be better.

These shows are not naive. They acknowledge and grapple with tough problems at both the personal and the societal scale. But they do so with what kindness and humanity they can muster. They do so because they have not given up on us.

I hope that the accolades accorded to The Bear help to encourage a new wave of what we might call hopeful media. A movement towards film and television as a vehicle for societal and moral repair. An investment in redemption programming. This is the sort of animal we should absolutely be feeding.