Accustomed as I am to the verbal tomfoolery of streaming services labeling, nevertheless, I was astonished to recently see a descriptor for The Bear, an American television series with drama, comedy and cooking set in a restaurant in Chicago (on Disney+). We are alerted that it ‘contains tobacco depictions’. This is a warning to viewers that there will be a number of characters who smoke cigarettes like they have been hired to be smokestacks for a relay team. As I watched the series, I was very conscious of the actors who had cigarettes dangling out of their mouths like short pencils made of hardened spittle. The consolation for the viewer is that they are most likely smoking herbal cigarettes, which aren’t addictive.

Why I find this descriptor so remarkable is that it has taken decades of successful lawsuits against large tobacco companies and many deaths for this seemingly innocuous description to appear in 2023. My grandfather Thomas Agee Sr. was a chain smoker and later in life suffered from emphysema. My father carried on this family tradition in small town America and started to smoke when he was a youngster. Cigarettes were about sophistication and the allure of the forbidden, but as everyone now knows, they are addictive. Camels, Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls were the cigarette brands of my childhood. The Marlboro Man was a rugged larger than life face on the billboards of the time. 

Cigarette smoking was a backdrop on all our road trips to Ohio where our father would smoke nonstop with a thick cloud collecting in the back of the car. When it was cold, my sister and I would gag from the lack of oxygen with all the car windows closed except for the small sail-shaped one by the steering wheel. I had a serious bout of childhood asthma and one of the triggers is thought to be passive smoking.

I recall our father, as a middle management executive in New York City, struggling to end his chain-smoking habit. One strategy he tried involved using a number of rubber bands to encircle the cigarette packet so that it would be harder to access a cigarette and break the chain-smoking rhythm. He went to a doctor who advised him that giving up cigarettes would probably cause him to have a nervous breakdown. There were cigarette tricks where he took off the protective cellophane of the packet and blew smoke into it. Holding the bottom of the cellophane to keep the smoke in, he took the lit tip of the cigarette and burnt a round hole in the top of the cellophane. The smoke whooshed through the hole. 

I wonder now whether he gave any thought to the consequence of entertaining his daughters with smoking games? Did he expect us to play with cigarettes and smoke? Those endless trips choking in the back seat put us permanently off the idea and fortunately, our mother wasn’t a smoker. Our father finally quit when he developed an illness that would eventually cause his death. Before this, he was a valuable commodity for a tobacco company, having paid for and smoked thousands of cigarettes during his lifetime. (He was a three and a half pack a day man.)

So, it seems extraordinary to me that we now have warnings about the appearance of cigarette smoking in a fictional television series. Do these actors’ performances as smokers make it more attractive? I hope not, and it is progress to see that there is a greater awareness of the dangers of smoking. And as I think about our family’s addictive cigarette history, I certainly agree that it is no longer acceptable to depict smoking as a harmless activity.   

I am now waiting for the next new descriptor ‘contains vaping depictions’.