Some fans of the FX on Hulu show The Bear have a sickness that no kind of medicine can cure. Symptoms include editing fan-cams of characters Sydney and Carmy to desperate Taylor Swift love songs, writing romantic fanfic about the pair, and making enough noise about the ship online that the cast and the crew have no choice but to acknowledge the delusion. Though the characters played by Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White, respectively, have an intense working relationship built on mutual understanding and respect, much like Mad Men’s Peggy and Don, thirsty people keep wishing on a star that Syd-Carmy would kiss. While The Bear’s main leads do share a deep intimacy, it’s clear that the show isn’t a romantic love story based on what it presents to the audience. Showrunners Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo and cast members Edebiri, White, and Molly Gordon agree: Syd-Carmy is not a thing. Here’s all the times they’ve made it clear.
July 22, 2022: Just a month after The Bear premieres, creator and writer Christopher Storer friendzones Syd-Carmy. Talking to Esquire about the real-life Copenhagen restaurant Noma’s role in the show, he says the characters’ fixation on the restaurant brought them together. “It’s a big part of the reason why Sydney and Carmy develop this friendship,” Storer says. “Carmy is someone who’s terrible at communicating on some things, and Sydney communicates too much, but their middle ground is this creative thing — and between the two of them, Noma would be the North Star. Something like Noma, for these characters, as a young cook starting off, that’s where you’d want to be.” Friendship. Creative partners. These are the operative words.
July 26, 2022: White makes it clear that he is firmly against a Syd-Carmy tryst for narrative reasons and because he thinks a trauma-bonded romance would not be enjoyable. The actor does an interview with W making plain his feelings about the ship that launched a thousand Archive of Our Own fanfics. “I hope for Sydney’s sake that’s not going to be explored in later seasons,” he says. “I just love their relationship: the amount of respect they have for one another, and that they have a shared history, even if it’s not together. They’ve been through similar traumas and they really see one another. To add romance or sexuality would monkey up what I enjoy about their relationship.”
August 16, 2022: Weeks later, Edebiri echoes White’s sentiments regarding the Syd-Carmy thirst. “I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but I don’t think so,” she tells TV Line. “I don’t think so. And Jeremy has said this, too.” She instead offers this to fans: a hot and heavy partnership between a man and his fried dough. The “sexiest relationship” on the show “is between Marcus (played by Lionel Boyce) and the doughnuts. So I’m rooting for that, I’m rooting for Lionel and the doughnuts.”
January 4, 2023: Edebiri and White acknowledge that fans are horny for Syd-Carmy, but that doesn’t stop them for shooting down their hopes and dreams. “I know there are people who are very invested in that, and I understand and I appreciate it, but it was not that for me,” Edebiri tells Variety with a laugh. White dittos her feelings: “No! It was never discussed by anybody.” In that same interview, co-showrunner Joanna Calo corroborates that the idea of a Syd-Carmy thing simply “never came up.”
Chris Storer is just as emphatic as the others. “We wanted to make something that was about friendship and a partnership,” he says. “It really is so funny that that is one of the things that people took away — of all the heavy shit that’s going on in the show! It was interesting because Ayo and Jeremy, since they are our friends and are such wonderful people, I think there is this charisma that comes off both of them.” Here are the showrunner’s intentions: “From the beginning, it was like, we should just show people being really good at their jobs and pushing each other,” Storer reveals.
June 30, 2023: In an interview with Variety, White says there can be love and respect in the characters’ “beautiful” platonic relationship, despite the desires of rabid shippers. Discussing the viral moment where Sydney was frustrated with Carmy because his romantic relationship with Claire distracted him from the restaurant, White explains why Syd’s reaction wasn’t jealousy. “They’re doing this thing together and she does not have Carm’s full attention and focus while they have a partnership,” he spells out. “They’re trying to create this thing that’s very difficult to create. Of course there is love and and respect in this relationship. There’s admiration, and I hope that even in platonic relationships, you are able to say things like, ‘I need you.’ When they speak to each other under the table in episode nine, it’s such a beautiful scene. It is a scene about partnership, but not a romantic partner.”
June 30, 2023: Molly Gordon, who plays Carmy’s girlfriend Claire, is asked about Syd-Carmy in a sit-down with The Hollywood Reporter. “Sometimes they’re just people with whom you have everything but the romantic element,” she believes. “I’m interested, though. I’m on the journey with the fans. But I think it’s incredibly cool to have this dynamic onscreen that isn’t romantic but that feels charged and sexy.”
August 10, 2023: Calo likens Sydney to Carmy’s “work wife” in a Hollywood Reporter interview, but nothing more (even if she was tempted to make them kiss in the writers’ room). “I will say, at one point, very early on, I was like, ‘Maybe they do hook up.’ And Chris was like, ‘No!’ [Laughs],” she remembers. “And he was totally right, but I think what I was getting at was that these relationships are complicated. I’ve heard people use the term ‘work wife’ — there are relationships in our lives that have all different meanings, and we sometimes really rush to characterize everything very cleanly and there’s something beautiful about acknowledging how messy our lives really are and just how enmeshed so many of our relationships are.”
June 24, 2024: White and Edebiri give reporters a flat out “no” when asked if Syd-Carmy is ever going to happen at a season-three press conference. “There was no talk in the rooms about any romantic implications” between Carmy and Sydney, White says, per Vanity Fair. Yet another nail in the Syd-Carmy coffin.
