Why Ayo Edebiri Didn’t Watch Certain Episodes of ‘The Bear’

Even Ayo Adebiri can’t bring herself to watch certain episodes of FX’s surprise smash “The Bear.” We get that, and so does Stephen Colbert.

“The Bear” seemingly came out of nowhere, though IndieWire was a very early adopter. Technically, we may be bigger supporters than Adebiri herself.

“I didn’t watch all the episodes, I think some were kind of hard to watch, if that makes sense,” Adebiri told Colbert on the January 4 “Late Show.”

“There’s massive tension,” Colbert, a fan who had to stop at Episode 7 for a break, offered. The CBS late-night host said he and his wife have yet to return to the program — but not because they don’t like it; they just needed to breathe. That sentiment should check out with pretty much any viewer of the Chicago-based sandwich-shop drama.

Episode 7, “The Review,” is the Season 1 20-minute single-shot episode; IndieWire got the inside scoop on the stressful shoot back in July. “The Review” wasn’t supposed to be a one-shot “until maybe two or three weeks before it was scheduled,” the series’ lead actor Jeremy White told IndieWire at the time.

Showrunner Christopher Storer (“Ramy”) and executive producer Joanna Calo (“BoJack Horseman”) “pretty much” rewrote the entire “Review” script, White said. Not that that was a bad thing.

“We were able to start at the beginning, which I think helped,” White explained. “They still managed to keep all of the important story points in place for it, but they wrote it as a blueprint to allow us to shoot it in one shot. That was very important, obviously, for it to start with the words.”

“We read it out loud a couple times, just kind of all sitting, making sure it all sounded correct. Trying to time it out a little bit, just for words, without anything else,” he continued. “And then we put it up on its feet with our scripts in hand like you would on stage.”

And then it was the camera guy’s problem.

Making a long scene or even an entire TV episode or a film in one shot is “all really impressive and it’s very cool,” White said. “But I’ll say from my perspective in film and television, oftentimes, I don’t know how much a single shot actually lends itself to the story. It’s kind of like: We’ve got a lot of money, we’ve got a lot of time, we can do this, it will be really impressive. And it is impressive. But I think in our case, it really lends itself to the story and where the characters are at because the tension is building so quickly we don’t give the audience a break from it. There’s no reprieve — it’s consistent.”

Enough out of White; you can read more about our Episode 7 interview with him here. Last night was Edebiri’s time to shine on national television — watch her Colbert appearance below. Stick around for the end, where Edebiri and Colbert are completely in sync in how they take their Italian beef.

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