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When The Bear premiered, I called it one of 2022’s standout TV shows. I loved its thrilling immediacy: the way it plunged viewers into its stressful restaurant kitchen like fresh tomatoes being peeled in scalding water, then an ice bath. The choppings and stabbings and spills! People shouting over one another! And the camera gliding nimbly through the whole mess …
Every so often, the show would scoop up a denizen of the Original Beef of Chicagoland and abandon them to a montage of their own agonised thoughts … in a perfectly contrasting moment of stillness … over a perfectly chosen indie song. Bellissimo!
Its second season won a record-breaking 11 comedy awards at the 76th Emmys in 2024, but at the 77th Emmy Awards last month, The Bear shambled away empty-pawed as Seth Rogen’s The Studio swept the comedy categories.
Perhaps to justify all the banter about what counts as comedy these days, The Bear has had some really awful, chumpy guest stars, including John Mulaney, John Cena and Brie Larson. But it’s already verging on self-parody.
It’s just been renewed for a fifth season, but I’m hoping Jimmy Cicero (Oliver Platt) will install a giant digital countdown clock in The Bear’s production offices and threaten to shut the whole thing down if Storer won’t stop being so insufferably cheffy.
The Bear has fallen in love with itself
ScreenHub’s Silvi Vann-Wall generously observed of Season 3 that ‘if a show, much like a high-end restaurant, doesn’t branch out and try new ideas once in a while, it will get stale’.
Well, The Bear is trying new ideas in the same way that Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) tried to serve up an entirely new Michelin star-worthy menu every night.
If Season 1 was the TV equivalent of an overstuffed Italian beef sandwich – hot, messy, filling, and devoured in under half an hour – Season 4 is a giant white plate marooning a tiny morsel of protein on a swoosh of purée, which takes forever to arrive at your table.
There’s barely anything to it. It’s in love with its own mannered technique. And everyone hates it except other chefs!
The Bear has become too highfalutin
I’m actually cackling at how metatextual The Bear has got. The pretentious critic side of me loves that it’s exactly the sort of painfully highfalutin television Carmy would make, were he a TV showrunner rather than a traumatised culinary genius.
And I’m relishing that Carmy and his crew of epicurean martyrs spent the interminable Season 3 begging to be reviewed by the Chicago Tribune, only for the review to echo The Bear’s lukewarm real-life reception.
‘They didn’t like the vibe,’ Carmy says disconsolately.
‘They didn’t like the chaos,’ retorts Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), ‘and frankly, I don’t know if I do, either.’
But Syd does! She loves the vibe! A cashed-up rival chef (Adam Shapiro) offered her a job in Season 3 Episode 4 and, unbelievably, she left him hanging until Season 4 Episode 8!
Meanwhile, Carmy burnt his promising relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon) at the end of Season 2 by shouting at her from inside a locked walk-in fridge. But he does not find time to apologise until Season 4 Episode 3! He ghosted Claire for more than a whole season! I mean, there’s ice-cold … and then there’s sous-vide!
The Bear: please let this be intentional
This turgid vibe has got to be thematic, right? That The Bear is so lost up its own clacker now because so is Carmy?
My uncultured oaf aspect – the person who likes chilling out with TV shows where stuff happens – is finding The Bear hard going now. I really laboured through Season 3’s allegedly standout episode, Ice Chips, in which Natalie ‘Sugar’ Berzatto (Abby Elliott) endures a natural childbirth as her terrible mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) forces her (and me) to moan, Hee, hee, hee.
Somehow, the show got worse. I had to turn the TV off maybe 40 minutes into Season 4 Episode 7, Bears, as the entire damn Berzatto family and their associates failed to reignite the magic of the Season 2 Christmas episode Fishes, then crawled under a wedding table for yet another ponderous convo.
The Bear: life’s too short
Life is simply too short for this. Or, as the sign Carmy inherited from his delightful, now-retired former boss Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman) says, EVERY SECOND COUNTS.
Unfortunately, the intellectual cultural-critic sicko who also dwells in me, and who is currently typing this, has been immensely enjoying the The Bear’s attention to theme and motif. Rather than slogging through it from start to finish, I’ve been selecting individual episodes from across its whole run, like a degustation.
And that’s how I noticed how long Storer has been cooking with motifs of urgency versus stasis, procedure versus surprise.
As Episode 1 of Season 4 kicks off, Carmy dozes in front of Groundhog Day.
And that movie’s motif – the alarm clock flipping from 5:59am to 6:00am – previously appeared in Season 3’s much-praised Episode 6, Napkins (directed by Ayo Edebiri), in which a moment of kindness from Mikey (Jon Bernthal) offers Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) a job, hoisting her out of an unemployment spiral.
The Bear is deep in its own spiral. Yet I now believe with my whole heart that Cicero will never manage to shut down that ridiculous restaurant. Like its creators and characters, it’s thoroughly stuck on the most elite level.
