Can Heart Sustain The Bear?
Sentimentality abounds in the FX darling's fourth season. What is there to chew on?
Spoilers for specifically Seasons 3 & 4 of FX’s The Bear, but also the assumption of your familiarity with the rest. :)
In most critical coverage of FX’s The Bear, you will be met with an abundance of food and restaurant analogies. The prestige darling’s third season, which aired in June of last year, was heavily criticized for diluting the rich flavor of what had come to be a dish beloved by many, at the height of its popularity; suffering the consequences of that explosive growth in clientele which translated into a decline in quality, in service of the product’s longevity.
There is the expected connection to be drawn between the front and back of house of The Bear’s production. Many of the alleged storytelling issues besetting the show’s last season can probably be attributed to behind-the-scenes conflicts and/or negotiations that led to one (supposedly final) season’s worth of story being split into two branches. Whether a discretionary choice or not, the new plan left Season 3—or rather, 2.5—suspended mid-air, between having to simultaneously move the plot forward enough to justify its existence and hold enough things back in order to justify that of its successor.
The latter seemed to win over the first. The series’ third run, by and large, morphed into a season of television about a person stuck in a rut. Arguably not the most compelling of spectacles—though, this wouldn’t be The Bear if there weren’t some inherent poetry to the motionlessness. Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) may have physically escaped the walk-in refrigerator he found himself trapped in courtesy of his own (in)actions at the end of Season 2’s transfixing finale. Yet its metaphorical enclosure—the mental “prison of [his] own making” as “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss Bachrach) puts it—persists for another round of episodes, keeping him frozen in time, trauma and his inability to break his self-destructive patterns.
The result was a season thoroughly tinted by Carmy’s psychological immobility, one that dwelled on the past and remained static in its present, despite the heaps of emotional frustration bubbling underneath. This branch of the show’s story felt caught in a loop of memory, meditation, and ideas that lingered in conversation with little to no impact on the plot. For a while, The Bear seemed to orbit around itself with little to march towards and a lot of time to kill with filler dialogue for a series that hinges on its “every second counts” mantra. The contrast from the previous two seasons’ clear-eyed intensity grew too noticeable to shrug off as the show stalled, experimented and hovered around its premise as we’d come to know it, opting instead to occupy itself with its own framework and push the boundaries of its medium more than it ever had before.
It’s a testament to the series’ creative spirit how, even at its most unconventional or outright unpleasant, Season 3 held TV-making propositions in its hands. Episodes such as “Tomorrow” (essentially a 37-minute-long, ambient Nine Inch Nails music video plunging deep into Carmy’s psyche) and “Ice Chips” (which bottles two secondary characters in an excruciatingly stressful situation fit to explore their complex bond) could be regarded as equal amounts innovative and hard-to-watch, while season highlight “Napkins” (delving into a supporting character’s backstory) is a total outlier among its counterparts as an unprovoked blast from the past in the middle of the season.
In the season finale titled “Forever,” the real-life culture that inspired The Bear bleeds into the show, as fictional fine-dining establishment Ever becomes a liminal space where our characters get to physically coexist with notable figures of Chicago’s culinary scene. Right then, the series boldly transcends its sparse meta touches—typically sprinkled throughout episodes in the form of quick namedrops and food tour montages—into wholehearted acknowledgment of the actual world it operates in, offering a generous glimpse into the circumstances behind its creation. Not everyone watching will be thrilled to sit through elaborate chef talk about the joy in taking care of people. Ultimately, however, the juxtaposition of that energy against Carmy’s self-centered obsession with success has unmistakable narrative merit to it.
Food often tells the story of its own making. The Bear’s third season, similar to the titular restaurant’s trajectory throughout it as determined by a manic, status-chasing Carmy, juggles ambition and mess, evoking the feel of eating (though mostly delicious dishes) at a different place every visit. Dissonance—as the Chicago Tribune’s review of The Bear (no italics) suggests—is the crux of the matter, alongside what can be perceived as a lack of clear and rewarding purpose. Whether it’s a weak sense of culinary identity or low storytelling valleys, there are holes in the structure that the fanfare doesn’t cover.
It’s particularly during its stripped back moments—where artistic flourishes don’t apply—that the season falters, with dialogue growing redundant and comedy struggling to hit its mark. At times, the show leans too heavily on lukewarm interactions between its worn-in characters to fill up space, under the pretext of emphasizing different evolving relationships and injecting the season with the familial warmth it’s missing. Due to the palpable absence of a narrative goal, a number of these scenes ultimately seem to fall flat. One may say they taste like too much sauce when there isn’t enough meat on the bone.
Sauce, Season 4 wants to argue, is the truth of the world. The season unveils its cards from the outset; its opening scene, a flashback of Carmy making the infamous Berzatto red pasta sauce alongside his deceased brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) in their family home’s kitchen, might just be the heart of not only it but The Bear as a project. Between Mikey pointing out the careless mistakes in Carmy’s cooking (too much garlic, needs stirring) and a bright-eyed Carmy sharing his thoughts about a potential joint venture between the two of them for the very first time, bridging their dynamic of codependent sophistication and reliability, is the flickering acknowledgment that the sauce can only work if tended to with love.
An all-around cheesy statement. This is where The Bear gets Billy Corgan levels of painfully earnest—if the placement of The Smashing Pumpkins’ gut-wrenching “Disarm” as Season 3’s very last needle drop hints at anything beyond itself. This is where words start sidelining narrative importance and intention, trusting in their ability to conjure emotion from a raw and instinctual place. The show’s overindulgence in quiet, naturalistic dialogue that’s expected to carry more narrative weight than it’s primed to is still the biggest writing issue. Yet the fourth season finds the perfect excuse for its prominent presence in adjusting the frame to put focus on—well—the obvious answer to the question of “Why would you keep going?” posed in Episode 8: people.
Having hit the peak of Season 3’s chaotic streak, the first thing the series now concerns itself with is toning things down. “You would be just as good. Maybe even [a better] cook without this need for mess,” a broken Carmy hears from his business partner, chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) at the top of the season. His main character syndrome is already beginning to dissolve. For the rest of the journey, phrases like “I’m trying to be better” and “I’m working on it” hang around in his mouth almost as much as nicotine gum, as he makes conscious choice after conscious choice to relinquish control and trust the people around him to handle responsibilities instead of imposing his way. His objective becomes subtraction: a fixed menu, less components per dish, prioritizing the restaurant, its customers and the team rather than appeasing his selfish craving for challenge.
I keep going back to a few words from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, an endearing feature of Carmy’s visit to his childhood bedroom in Episode 9 (the season also happened to release on June 25 which would’ve been the revered late chef and author’s 69th birthday). “Personally, I’d prefer to eat food that tastes good and is an honest reflection of its ingredients than a three-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemongrass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry,” Bourdain writes to support his stance that “a good cook is a craftsman—not an artist.” The idea harkens back to Carmy’s Season 3 crisis, fueled by his compulsive drive to pursue the art while ignoring the craft.
It can be argued that the show is decisively on its way to undoing the same crisis in Season 4. One of the questions lingering in the air on the heels of the third season was whether The Bear, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, would finally be ready to balance out the business between its floundering fine-dining joint and the beef sandwich window consistently thriving against all odds in the background. (Indeed, the latter is now given its dues.) There is a facet to this I find uniquely interesting, which pertains to The Bear’s stakes looking like this at a time when Apple’s Severance and HBO’s The Pitt, ambassadors of high versus low-concept television respectively, are battling it out for Emmy dominance.
Judging from the serendipitous success of HBO’s medical procedural, “beef sandwich TV” seems to be re-entering the zeitgeist, in terms of the medium reconnecting with the joys of cable-esque, week-to-week formats, as well as—most notably—reclaiming its “empathy machine” function with storylines hitting traditional beats and aiming for emotionally moving rather than brain-stimulating (granted, Apple’s equally lauded sci-fi mystery extravaganza might have a bone to pick here). The overt sentimentality The Bear is unabashedly leaning into this season may, on the surface, read like a gear shift towards a more bare-bones TV approach; one that’s dependable, direct and effective in making the viewer feel. Nevertheless, there is barely anything around to sink one’s teeth into.
If anything, at this point, the show seems to rely on its signature artistic elements a crucial amount. Its storytelling remains fairly unconventional. Season 4 moves largely at a languid pace, zones in on characters’ faces and does its best to convey interiority through romantic editing style and media references. Heart-to-hearts, as alluded to above, abound. In fact, they’re what the season spends most of its time on; bringing characters together (sometimes in odd pairings), having them open up to each other about their emotional states in intimate settings (work, for The Bear, is one too) and testing various, often unexplored interpersonal dynamics. In service of all the talking the show deems necessary, traditional episode structure is almost entirely dismissed; cliffhangers, especially, get near-eliminated with action having explicitly taken the backseat.
To go off on a short tangent for the sake of specificity, perhaps the most glaring (and much joked about online) problem when it comes to the writing itself is the predominantly formulaic nature of these conversational scenes. When the end goal is a sort of unorthodox emotional bonding, monotonous, expositional exchanges which often plateau at a “You ever think about X” or “You ever feel like Y” after timidly dancing around vulnerability for several beats become the go-to. For more passionate confrontations, the coined pure “Bear way of arguing” might be employed, which has characters enter a discussion with honest intentions, proceed to yell at each other, maybe cry, and eventually resort back to aloofness or embrace a defeated comedown. Furthermore, in Season 4 especially, besides quickly slotting into predictable pockets, the show’s excessively naturalistic dialogue sometimes bites its own tail, with its innate spontaneous pauses and repetitions occasionally disrupting back-and-forth flow.
Regardless, these exchanges are pretty much what the season revolves around, as the business circles the drain it’s used to. The restaurant’s fate may, once again, be on the line but, unlike its predecessors, Season 4, with its convenient two-month parachute set-up, appears to have that deal figured out for the most part: communication among the staff is smoother than ever, services are rolling, the Michelin star guy has registered the team’s dedication to creating beautiful experiences for their guests—treating them like family—by the end of Episode 3.
This season’s looming clock, introduced in the first, return-to-form episode by Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and the Computer (Brian Koppelman), is counting down not so much to the end-all moment for The Bear’s future as initially promised, as to Episode 10’s final confrontation between the series’ pillars: a masterfully performed half-hour-long, one-act play of built up tension bursting through the seams, as the realization that Carmy is leaving the restaurant due to his love for cooking having ceased settles in. This screaming match, in appropriately poetic fashion, concludes in hugs and understanding. Even amid the irony of the Michelin star—an achievement that demands the pursuit of excellence in its name—being the only thing that can keep the place afloat, it’s people who emerge as the key catalysts for success, with the most clear-cut acts of kindness.
Sincerity and sentimentality have been engraved in The Bear’s DNA since day one, rendering the series a brilliant example of heartfelt TV that can simultaneously be stylistically eccentric—artistic TV with a strong emotional core. The show is at its best when it balances storytelling intensity with individual character focus. In its fourth season, its trademark bite is missing. Nonetheless, for adamant believers in the parallel idea that our reasons for returning to certain restaurants have more to do with our memories of the vibe and company rather than the flavor of the food, The Bear’s atmosphere is still tremendously inviting—maybe even more than ever.
Season 4, like its most emblematic episode, “Bears” (the wedding party episode), feels like a hangout. Its television is intuitive, slice of life-oriented, easy as a comfort meal, with beloved guest characters finding their way back on and being welcomed by a strange calmness. It’s safe to say that the show’s central theme of the collective versus the individual has never been explored in a more articulate manner. As Carmy’s self-importance subsides, characters slowly come together almost as one entity, tuning into one another’s frequency, opening up, making amends, listening to and leaning on each other, and showing up whenever it takes a village to accomplish a goal. They become a mousse—become family, flaws and all.
“Bears,” specifically, as a soulful showcase of the gravitational pull of family (the compassionate counterpart to Season 2’s “Fishes”), highlights the Berzattos’ odd charm, palpable through the communicated experiences of outsiders absorbed into their magnetic—in spite of dysfunctional—orbit. Besides the familiar Faks, we see characters like Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs), Claire (Molly Gordon) and Stevie (John Mulaney), long ago indoctrinated into the Berzatto drama, mingling seamlessly and joyously around the blood-related family members; but the episode, importantly, marks a rite of passage for Sydney who, over the course of the season, learns to embrace their intertwined beauty and chaos as a place to belong. Additionally, the episode’s heart is defined by another occasion of The Bear tapping into a borderline fantastical element in its storytelling; as more and more “Bears” gather under the table to talk about what they’re most afraid of, the force of their unity seems to transcend the limitations of physical space, just like their ties to each other extend far beyond blood.
An inverted mirror to Carmy’s arc, Sydney’s journey—which unfolds through some of the series’ most meaningful conversational scenes to this day—underscores the season’s mission, as she oscillates between following the path of consistently okay away from the mess she knows, or sometimes wonderful in its throes. Her exchanges with Claire, Carmy’s mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Jimmy are portals to Season 4’s most essential concepts, driving home emotional truths such as the idea that people worrying about us is all we have, the strange comfort in seeing the same people everyday and becoming accustomed to their noise, or the wonder in witnessing people grow against adversity. It’s partly Sydney’s gradually acquired insight as an audience surrogate which helps reveal the glimmers of magic in people healing, changing, and casting aside their better judgement in the name of love. That’s magic The Bear is anchored by belief in—magic that affords it “sometimes wonderful” no matter what.
Thank you for reading. Comments are always welcome.