It’s one battle after another all through the fifth and final season of The Bear (2022-2026).
Chicago chefs Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Syd (Ayo Edebiri) can’t seem to catch a break: a bad review, delayed deliveries, failing team spirits, a torrential storm that floods the basement. Amid the chaos, they’re still hoping to earn a Michelin star. Then, in a moment of rare calm, we see Syd prep a batch of short ribs. Between a ceiling collapse and quarrelling employees, she sautees the beef with onions, garlic, carrots and celery, braised in a little cola. It’s one of the dishes that eventually earns the diner two of those coveted stars. This kind of scene is being called competency porn: content that delivers a deep satisfaction that comes from watching highly adept people doing highly skilled jobs extremely well — while fighting to survive in a dysfunctional world. There is plenty of it out there now. SKILL SEEKER The term itself is a few years old. If there seems more of it now, that could be for two reasons. First, shows on average have become more realistic, focusing less on the universal but generic aspects of characters’ lives, such as relationships (as Grey’s Anatomy often did), and more on the gritty and grimy specifics of the worlds depicted. As things spiral, occasionally stabilise and spiral again, there is immense satisfaction to be drawn from people who are also mid-spiral, and aren’t just coping but excelling, making a difference as they do. “It might present as escapism, but it is also regulated exposure, to a recognisably broken world that is then made bearable and even hopeful by the people in it. “It gives viewers symbolic access to control and agency they don’t feel they have in life. SMALL COMFORT Could a fictional TV show really be doing all that? It helps that competency porn tends to feature regular people, in that they are exceptionally skilled but of our world. These are not superspies or assassins, superheroes or martyrs. They’re people like us, struggling as we do but winning a lot of the time, and we draw satisfaction from seeing their satisfaction in this. It also helps that, in the spirit of keeping it real, they sometimes fail, and lose someone they tried to save, see a furnace explode at the school, or earn a terrible restaurant review. “It is also failure, stress and recovery. And then the cycle begins over, and they excel and succeed again. It isn’t often, after all, that we see brilliant hard workers win big, in our rather messed-up and conflicted world. To watch them win over and over… who doesn’t want more of that?
In The Pitt (2025-), doctors and nurses try to make it through a shift in an underfunded, overcrowded ER); in Abbott Elementary (2021-), committed teachers go above and beyond despite corruption, budget cuts and staffroom politics; and Industry (2020-), follows the cutthroat lives of edgy, talented investment bankers on the trading floor. Even 2026 films such as the Ryan Gosling-starrer Project Hail Mary and the Chris Hemsworth-Mark Ruffalo-starrer Crime 101 tap into this, as a scientist, a jewel thief, a detective use ingenuity, method and skill to tackle seemingly impossible odds. It was first used by television writer and screenwriter John Rogers, in a blog post in 2009. Rogers was talking about his TNT drama series Leverage (2008-12; it follows a team of Robin Hood-like thieves and hackers who steal from the preying rich).
Competency porn, he said, was shorthand for “the very specific kind of satisfaction that we feel when watching folks competently handle complex situations using the kinds of specialized skills and expertise that we can all appreciate”. Second, we live in what we might call “interesting times”. “This ties into mood management,” says Katrin Tiidenberg, professor of participatory culture at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of Tallinn University, Estonia. This is particularly helpful in our era of the “polycrisis”. “In an age characterised by uncertainty, watching hyper-competent people solve problems offers vicarious emotion regulation: admiration, inspiration, and psychological distancing from daily stress,” Tiidenberg says. “Watching such characters inspires us, whether consciously or unconsciously, to tap into our own abilities,” says Karen Shackleford, a social psychologist and head of media psychology at the Fielding Graduate University in California. “Competence, after all, isn’t a flawless performance,” says Shackleford. “In all that lies a new kind of escape… a sense of refuge that comes from knowing that skilled, dedicated individuals can still produce good outcomes despite the system’s dysfunction,” Tiidenberg says.
