FX’s The Bear is riveting for a myriad of reasons, and the different relationships between characters are one of the key reasons why. It’s a quiet, thought-provoking character study, but the show isn’t a romance, so we aren’t exactly holding our breaths about whether or not our ships will be canon. However, it’s still engrossing to deconstruct all the stunning ways in which the romance could make the series feel more rich. Carmy Berzatto and Sydney Adamu, known together as SydCarmy within the fandom, are a great example of workplace partners. If nothing else, the threads binding the two characters together are particularly compelling to analyze and geek out over.
Whether in a romantic sense or platonic, SydCarmy are soulmates—two parallel lines, brought into each other’s lives to improve the state of everything exponentially. They understand each other in manners no one else in the series could, and they’re alike in ways they’ve yet to discover, allowing the unique bond to make them unquestionably fit to be business partners. Further, this very bond could also make them a great couple if they ever choose to go down that route because while neither says it aloud, they are best friends. They’re closer today than they imagined they would be on that fateful day when Sydney first walked into The Beef.
Now, three seasons into The Bear, while there are fractures in their partnership (and in their lives individually), there’s an even more significant cause to see them draw closer to one another—to realize that they could help carry some of those burdens they harbor alone. Again, they don’t have to be together (as much as I’d want them to be), but solidifying the friendship they already have could be the very thing to restore so much of what they’re missing.
At the same time, Season 3 delivers even more proof that they’re meant to orbit around each other when we finally get a glimpse of Sydney’s best meal to date. It might not be overtly romantic, but it’s certainly intentional, and if the show were a romance, these signs would point to the eventual happy ending the characters deserve. There’s also something to be said about how, even if SydCarmy isn’t the endgame, Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri are such excellent scene partners that it makes it easier to root for the characters to continue staying in each other’s lives.
We might not get the fictional romance we’re rooting for, but at the very least, we have amazing fan videos to hold us over while we cry about our many, many feelings.
