After undercooked interlude, The Bear is back on the boil
SPOILER ALERT: This column discusses plot details of Season 4 of The Bear.
The Bear (season 4 is now streaming on Disney+) is the story of a struggling Chicago restaurant and its conflicted star chef, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White). The titular resto's working dynamics parallel the messy closeness of the Berzatto family — everyone calls each other 'cousin' whether they're related or not — but also its entrenched, everyone-yelling-at-once dysfunction.
The series gathered a fanatically devoted following in its first two seasons, with viewers tuning in to watch the loud, stressed-out interactions of these tragicomic Chaos Muppets, with their high-key craziness and low-key sweetness. As with the restaurant's standout dishes, there was a balance of flavours — a little sentimental hoke and a lot of rawness and realness, a pinch of knockaround comedy and an almost unbearable amount of trauma.
And, of course, there were the spectacular food scenes, which had everyone saying, 'Yes, chef!' in their home kitchens and working on their knife skills.
Because the show operated at such a high level in its first two go-rounds — Fishes, season 2's anti-holiday episode, is some of the most electrifying TV you'll ever see — many viewers were let down by season 3's wheel-spinning. They were frustrated with Carmy and his unrelieved mopeyness, with sous chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and her ongoing inability to sign important paperwork, with the continued non-appearance of Carmy's on-off love Claire (Molly Gordon).
In that season's excruciating exercise in emotional procrastination, there were a lot of montages and melancholy '90s pop songs but not a lot of character development or narrative momentum. While asking the fundamental question of whether people can change, the show itself had become like Carm — folded in on itself, up in its own head, unable to move forward.
Season 4, which dropped all 10 episodes on June 25, seems to announce itself as a deliberate course correction. Episode 1 starts with a riff on the movie Groundhog Day, as if admitting last season had somehow got stuck, repeating the same cycles again and again.
That circular sense of time is brutally dispatched when Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), the restaurant's financial backer, brings in a doomsday clock — a digital countdown to when the money runs out and he'll have to pull his support. Time is now ruthlessly rapid and linear, those implacable red numbers underlining this season's urgent sense that something's got to give — and soon.
Then there's the acknowledgment from front-of-house manager Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) that the mixed restaurant review by the Chicago Trib, which described The Bear dining experience as 'showoffy,' 'confusing' and 'dissonant,' actually made some fair points.
The response by the beleaguered restaurant is to simplify. Carmy and Syd will have to turn out fewer dishes with fewer ingredients. Richie's motivational pre-opening speeches will have to use fewer words. (Really, 'At my signal, unleash hell' works just fine.)
Likewise, the show itself has simplified. When it comes to the food porn, there are fewer scenes in which people are plating things with tweezers. It feels significant that the most dramatically effective food sequence this season involves Hamburger Helper (albeit zhuzhed up with tomato paste and toasted breadcrumbs).
Matt Dinerstein / FX
Jeremy Allen White portrays conflicted Chicago chef Carmy Berzatto in season 4 of The Bear.
Matt Dinerstein / FX
Jeremy Allen White portrays conflicted Chicago chef Carmy Berzatto in season 4 of The Bear.
There are also fewer narrative distractions. The writers still want to acknowledge the kitchen's teamwork — in terms of both cooking and acting — but they are focusing more on the main characters, an approach that culminates in the extraordinary bottle episode that ends the season. This sequence takes place entirely in a dusty outbuilding in the alley and consists of two long, intense conversations, first between Carmy and Syd and then between Carmy and Richie.
This episode sets up a very different direction for season 5, which is due for release in 2026. It might also explain why the show stalled out in season 3. That narrative hesitation could come down to Carmy's — and the show's — tricky relationship to perfection.
Carmy's response to any problem is that he needs to do better, to be better. This demand for perfection makes for good food, but it can be bad for him and the people around him. The show explores this tension, adoring — even fetishizing — the end product of seared Wagyu beef but also acknowledging the personal costs of the process.
Carmy's list of non-negotiables, his insistence on constantly changing the menu, his control-freakery are all responses to his chaotic childhood. Those high-pressure scenes where everything is about to fall apart and everyone is about to lose their damn minds may not feel great to Carmy, but — because of his upbringing — they do feel familiar. In the season finale, he admits that maybe he sets up this constant churn of stress to keep himself from having to deal with real, hard things. You know, like his emotions.
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But it's not just Carmy. The show has also been a little hooked on the yelling and arguing and the epic emotional meltdowns. Stevie (John Mulaney), who has married into the Berzatto family and observes their dysfunction with a kind of arch, amused affection, gives the game away in this season's wedding episode, where the appearance of Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) threatens a big Berzatto blow-up. 'If they didn't bring it, I'd be a little heartbroken,' he admits.
And it's true that calmer, quieter, healthier interactions might not be as hyper-dramatic or, as Stevie hints, quite as much fun to watch. But the show, in this season, seems to be searching for a different way for Carmy and his crew to be, in the kitchen and out of it.
By the end of season 4, we realize the show has been gently pushing the idea that maybe we shouldn't be rooting for the restaurant's Michelin star. Maybe we should just be rooting for Carmy's mental health. And it could be that those two goals are simply not compatible.
I guess we'll find out next season.
alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca
Alison GillmorWriter
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
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