The Bear season four review — all emotional torture and not enough haute cuisine

Times

8 hours ago

Season three of The Bear never really recovered from its first episode. Fans of the Disney+ comedy-drama, set in a chaotic Chicago restaurant run by a neurotic Italian-American family, had waited for a year and had every right to expect what we were used to: smashed plates, raised voices and even a car driven through a living-room wall on Christmas Day. What we got was a 35-minute long, almost dialogue-free tone-poem montage of exquisite plates of haute cuisine and grand vistas of the Chicago skyline; the kind of thing that gets left to play on loop on a wall of 80in Oleds at the back of Curry's.
Now we've waited another year and season four has not dared to make that mistake again, but has it gone too far? We're barely minutes into the more familiar fare of stress, debt, wagyu beef, anger and resentment when The Bear 's main financial backer, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), and the absurdly named Uncle Computer (Brian Koppelman) stroll into the kitchen carrying a giant LCD clock that's counting down from 1,440 hours to zero. 1,440 hours is two months. That's how long they've got to get a Michelin star or the restaurant shuts down.
At this point your humble TV critic must proceed with caution. The Bear makes the ingenious move of pre-owning its detractors. At the very start our heroes, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) — are still burning from the fallout of a bad review in the Chicago Tribune, which cousin Richie — always the best thing about The Bear — rather satisfyingly dismisses as 'the musings of some scustumad millennial jack-off'. (Yes, I had to google it, which isn't easy when you've never seen it written down. I'm sure a Gen Z-er could do it in no time, but it took this particular millennial jack-off about half an hour.)
So when I say that putting a bomb under The Bear, complete with its own, enormous bright blue countdown clock, is an extremely hackneyed variation on an extremely hackneyed plot device, I do so in the full knowledge that I too have been seen coming. Yes, there is greater subtlety of plot to be found in most episodes of Paw Patrol, but come what may, there's going to have to be an explosion now, isn't there?
Well, no, not really. What made The Bear such a hit was partly that it was set in a high-end restaurant. Which means the high-end-restaurant-venerating middle-classes can be guaranteed to gobble it up as unthinkingly as in that old experiment where that Russian guy used to ring a bell, then give his dog a meringue.
But mainly it's because it used to be very clear about what was its main course and what was its side dish. The restaurant was the star of the show; the tension, the stress, the shouting and the friendship. The family's past horrors simmered away on the back burner.
But by now it's all changed. The family drama is front and centre, which is fine, but the restaurant is almost an afterthought, and that's a shame, especially when good old Uncle Computer has turned it into something out of The Hurt Locker. Even though we're literally on a countdown clock, there's still bags of time for desperately unhurried and rather pointless diversions. We know we're ticking down toward annihilation, yet here we are spending almost a full episode on the teenage friendship crises of Sydney's hairdresser's daughter, whom we've never seen before and will never see again.
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Episode seven looms large in the schedule, the double length, 70-minute-long wedding. Knowing what we know from previous series, I found myself taking a minute to steady the nerves for the inevitable hellfire before pressing play. I don't want to give anything away, but it's all far too peaceful.
The Bear has always felt, more than most, like a show deliberately aimed at critics, just like it serves food aimed at writers, not diners (and is, rather ingeniously, being secretly kept afloat by the old beef sandwich business, which is now a serving hatch for delivery drivers).
There are the endless cultural references via film clips and the ostentatious soundtrack. At one point Carmy really does wake up on Groundhog Day, complete with flip clock, buzzer alarm and Sonny and Cher. I also can't recall previously seeing so many long dialogue scenes take place over the unignorable sound of a singer singing — invariably REM's Michael Stipe. But just as Carmy won't be compromised in the kitchen, nor will director Christopher Storer and co in the edit suite.
To be clear, I'm not doubting Storer's genius, but I'm not convinced that he realises that even the show's biggest fans might not be invested enough in the characters to have almost all plot stripped away (big clock notwithstanding), to the point where it begins to feel like a midlife reboot of Dawson's Creek. The back story has gobbled up the front story. There are no chips, just salt and vinegar. It's all pain, it's all emotional torture. Poor Carmy is a tortured soul, yes, but by the end, my goodness, so are we.