“There's degrees of messiness,” The Bear’s prop master Laura Roeper tells me over the phone from Chicago. “Chris [Storer, the series creator] is like, ‘no, [it has to be] chaotic craziness’... So we’re in the kitchen, and we got to throw spaghetti sauce over everything, because the mess wasn’t big enough for Chris. He goes, ‘no, way more’,” Roeper laughs. “We threw spaghetti sauce all over. It's on the ceiling, it's everywhere.”

This anecdote could illustrate almost any episode of The Bear, now raking in Emmy nominations and sitting pretty on several best of 2023 TV rankings. Each ep is cooked up with degrees of chaos, peppered with characters getting their anxiety out through wild culinary exploits. But no episode features more “chaotic craziness” than the second season’s sixth Christmas-themed episode: Fishes.