Will Poulter wears an Omega Seamaster

In the second season of The Bear, the FX series set in a high-strung Chicago kitchen, Marcus travels to Copenhagen to learn pastry from Luca, the cook he wants to become, played by Will Poulter. In the kitchen there, Luca pours a bright green juice into a steel bowl while Marcus watches his hands. His wrist is bare.

The Omega turns up a season later, when the chefs reunite at the restaurant Ever and Luca has a Seamaster Aqua Terra on. It is Omega's everyday watch, steel, with the teak-pattern dial of close vertical grooves cut to resemble a sailboat deck, under a name, Aqua Terra, that means water and land. The prop master, Laura Roeper, chose it on purpose. "That was him stepping up a little bit and kind of refining his style and his taste," she told GQ. "We wanted to get him something that was aspirational but not ridiculous." Marcus, over the same stretch, trades a G-Shock for a Tissot that sells for under a thousand dollars. Luca's Omega runs several times that.

The show keeps finding the chefs' wrists, Roeper says, because the whole thing is built on time, on every second counting. A watch in that kitchen is also a way of saying you have arrived. Luca ran the Copenhagen kitchen with nothing on his wrist and put the Aqua Terra on only once he was back among the others at Ever, by which point, she says, his game had changed.