In its fourth season, ‘The Bear’ gets back to basics
Note: This review contains mild spoilers for Seasons 1 through 4 of “The Bear.”
The fourth season of “The Bear” starts off feeling like a reprise, or worse. Once again, our troubled culinary wunderkind Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) responds to a crisis — here, a mixed review of his new restaurant in the Chicago Tribune — by promising his business partner and protégé Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) he’ll do better, while she worries he’s drawing all the wrong conclusions. She looks skeptical and lightly exasperated. He looks haunted and desperate to connect. Psychologically, this is all correct. Believable. On-point.
Dramatically, it’s a bit stale. Carmy overcorrects in a frenzy of self-reproach, Sydney continues to agonize over whether to stick around or decamp to join Adam Shapiro (Adam Shapiro) in a new venture. The restaurant is once again (or still) in trouble. Carmy rehashes old conversations with his deceased brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal), struggles to face his ex-girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon) and fails to reconcile with Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who’s still coming to terms with his ex-wife Tiffany’s (Gillian Jacobs) remarriage. And the clock is counting down to the moment the place will need to turn a profit or close.
That this all feels a little warmed-over isn’t exactly an accident. “The Bear” has won acclaim (and awards) for how realistically it captures the restaurant business’ constant sense of emergency, but it’s also, essentially, a show about ruts; a “Groundhog Day” clip even pops up this season to drive the point home. Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo’s dramedy about depression and trauma and restaurant work — repetitive, draining experiences all — is built around a repressed, ruminative chef whose talent in the kitchen is matched only by the intensity and cyclicity of his obsessive thoughts. Professionally warped by an abusive boss (Joel McHale) and personally haunted by his family’s dysfunction, Carmy doesn’t so much persevere as perseverate.
He knows this. But four seasons in, it’s fair to ask (of the show, and of Carmy) whether self-awareness is enough.
“The Bear’s” initial story questions — Can Carmy find a way to recover and change and thrive? Can he gently transform and perhaps redeem the world Mikey left? — have always messily (and sometimes charmingly) co-existed with a slough of other issues the show has thematized and explored. These include Chicago, fine dining, class, gentrification, service, vocation, addiction, abuse, co-dependency, mentorship and art.
The show does not handle all these subjects equally well. Its highly intrusive camera can be sure-footed, selective, brutal and precise in ways that brilliantly serve the story. It can also veer into a mode I would characterize as wild-eyed, indulgent and conceptually lazy. This latter, more rhapsodic register, into which the series routinely falls whenever people are making or eating or discussing or simply in the presence of good food, feels divorced from painful questions the show also knowingly raises, such as: Is it a “win” for a place such as the Original Beef, where locals go for cheap, delicious, satiating sandwiches, to become a fine-dining establishment nearby residents surely can’t afford? We know what the characters want, but should we be rooting for this?
That tension came to a head in the show’s somewhat controversial third season, in which Carmy decided that success would require earning a Michelin star. “The Bear” seemed unsure of what exactly it wanted to say about food and drive and excellence and creativity and burnout. A transcendent episode such as “Napkins” (about how a desperate, out-of-work Tina, played by the extraordinary Liza Colón-Zayas, came to meet Mikey at the Beef) sat oddly with the montages of famous kitchens, precious (or monstrous) bosses, well-meaning homages to Chicago eateries, and speeches about luxury restaurants as sacred spaces where “ordinary” people gather (in particular, the cringy dialogue among real-life chefs in the Season 3 finale).
That the show tried to love high and low cuisine equally, without seeming to take a side, didn’t mean it always worked. I am, for instance, in the minority that dislikes “Forks,” the second-season episode featuring Richie’s five-day stint staging at Ever, a fictional fine-dining establishment headed by Chef Terry (Olivia Colman), one of Carmy’s more benevolent teachers and mentors. It stands out to me as an example of “The Bear’s” sporadic need to make the viewer share (rather than merely witness) a character’s epiphany or personal transformation. I can believe that Richie buys the staff’s line that there is nobility and meaning in polishing silverware for free and that a place charging hundreds per person is delivering a net social good and making dreams come true. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t value that definition of service myself, but the show needs me to if I’m to invest in Richie’s long-term arc. For a show that insists on ambivalence and complexity, the episode leaves little room for skepticism.
Similarly, I suppose I can buy that Richie impressed the staff at Ever in the five days he spent there. I don’t believe that Chef Terry would pause to blow him a kiss before delivering her goodbye speech to a roomful of lifelong friends on the night she’s closing her world-famous restaurant. It rang false. “The Bear” is artful in its portrayals of earned sentimentality; the show’s characters are eerily good at sniffing out any false note. It’s strange to watch a series this good at emotional honesty strain for a bizarre and spurious connection.
That’s all to say that I tend to find the show’s engagement with real-world food culture quite interesting on its own terms but — as executed — oddly detrimental to the central story. In this regard, the fourth season, which returns to the core ensemble, is a massive improvement, though fans of the food cinematography will no doubt miss it.
There are also, despite the dreary sense of recursion with which the season opens, some telling (and welcome) changes. The most significant is the show’s use of dreamwork. The series has largely channeled Carmy’s tormented subconscious; it opens with his titular nightmare facing the bear on the bridge, and you could probably make a montage of him waking up to screeching alarm clocks. This season, the dreams (and nightmares, and nightmarish wake-ups) are mostly Syd’s. There is less Sugar (Abby Elliott) and less Tina this season, but Syd’s world and thought process gets nicely built out, most notably in an excellent episode co-written by Edebiri and Lionel Boyce. (Danielle Deadwyler guest-stars as Syd’s cousin and hairdresser.)
As for the restaurant and its fate: The early hope that a fresh start might expurgate the sadness and dysfunction plaguing the Original Beef — or build on its best aspects and leave the worst behind — seems to be fading. The first season ended with a theory of renewal mixed with rejection: The Beef would have to die so that the Bear could live. Or be reborn. Or something. Mikey’s note, “Let it rip,” was literal: Carmy needed to tear it down to remake it into something hopeful, lovely and new.
It is therefore symbolically messy, but also fabulous and interesting, that this hypothesis failed; the sandwich window remains the only profitable part of the business. (This drives an amusing B-story featuring Rob Reiner and Edwin Lee Gibson’s character, Ebra.) Healing and repair don’t always take the expected path.
Good mottos, too, have their limits: This season trades Chef Terry’s reminder that “Every second counts” for her observation that diners remember the people more than the food. Formally speaking, this season delivers a lovely companion piece to “Ice Chips,” the episode in which Sugar gets stuck giving birth with her mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), as her “support” person. There is also an episode that’s functionally an antidote to “Fishes,” the memorable, nightmarish episode guest-starring Sarah Paulson, John Mulaney and Bob Odenkirk (among others) that culminates in Mikey throwing a fork. And if the Season 3 finale contained some missteps, the fourth-season finale is a masterpiece that could easily end the series. (Plotwise, the final turn is faintly bewildering, but I don’t care much about the restaurant or the food; I care about why the show’s characters care — and why they come, and stay, and leave.)
Best of all, the season justifies those early reprises. Each time the show revisits an earlier scene, it adds a layer that deepens the group’s (and the show’s, and the audience’s) sense of shared meaning. It’s a very beautiful thing to watch all those separate elements, and their associated dreams and nightmares, start to link up.
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“The Bear”
Season 4 (10 episodes) is available for streaming on FX/Hulu.