Rene Gube wears a Rolex Submariner

In the dining room, among a line of cooks in their aprons, one man stands apart in a black suit, reading from a small notebook. On The Bear he is the gentleman from Ever, the fine-dining restaurant run by Olivia Colman's Chef Terry, and he is played by Rene Gube, who also writes and executive produces the show. His character spent a career working the front of the house in rooms where the staff notice a watch, so the one on his wrist is a Rolex Submariner.

The Submariner is Gube's own. The show's prop master, Laura Roeper, asked him what he wanted to wear on screen, and he turned up in the steel diver he had bought himself as a gift after The Bear won its first round of Emmys, the haul that included Outstanding Comedy Series. A watch a writer bought to mark the real show's success went back to work as a costume, on a character for whom a Rolex is exactly the right call.

Rolex has made the Submariner since 1953, and decades of it have turned the steel diver into a shorthand for having arrived. That reading fits the show better than the dive bezel ever will. The Bear is about a restaurant clawing toward the kind of room where a Submariner belongs, and the one wearing it here is the man who helped write the show, in the watch he bought the year it got there.