FX
This review contains spoilers for season four of The Bear, but nothing about notable guest stars, overly detailed plot points, or how the season ends.
Four seasons in, The Bear has established itself in two primary modes: artsy and corny. Season one leaned artsy with a late-season swerve toward corn; season two served corn pudding in artful ways. The third season swung back to smugly artsy with overburdened montages, constipated plotting, preening cameos by real-world chefs, and fussy shots of a fussy man making fussy food. In season four, the pendulum crashes so far into the cornfields that the cast at times seems moments away from breaking into a number from the musical Shucked!
This is a good thing. The Bear operates best when it is painfully sincere and strips away its own gimmickry to focus on making a good meal. The show still lacks the balance its first two seasons were able to find, and by now, some of its moves have become familiar enough to lose their sheen of novelty. But compared to its predecessor, this season is the better, more appealing, and more confident version of The Bear.
Season four picks up roughly when three leaves off, with the crew of Carmen Berzatto’s fine-dining establishment reeling after the release of the Chicago Tribune’s long-awaited, mixed review of The Bear. Once again, they’re the underdogs, not just in terms of reputation but also financially. Uncle Cicero’s money won’t last forever. Their suppliers can only extend so much grace. Their families cause them angst, their pasts are full of unresolved emotional turmoil, and the only way to turn things around is by spending even more on payroll. Where season three is a promising new beginning that takes a nosedive into self-sabotage, season four has the pleasure and the challenge of pulling everyone out of the hole.
“The Gang Gets Their Shit Together” is always going to trend the mood upward, usually with a dash of sentimentality. In the best moments of season four — there are several really great moments — that sentimentality comes with an element of tension, ambiguity, or messiness. An episode that leans primarily on Ayo Edebiri as Sydney, Carmy’s business and creative partner, is one of the season’s highlights, in part because Sydney’s character approaches the restaurant’s dire circumstances with humor and directness while Carmy gives dour opacity. That episode is written by Edebiri and Lionel Boyce, who plays the show’s pastry chef Marcus, and although it is unmistakably an episode of The Bear, it benefits significantly from stepping outside of the show’s typically claustrophobic kitchen spaces. It’s nice to have a change of pace, but even more, the show’s ability to see itself from the outside leavens all the grandiose pronouncements and persistent thesis statements that get thrown around whenever Carmy stares deeply into someone’s eyes or Richie struggles over a motivational speech for the staff.
And the season is not short on those thesis statements. They get voiced again and again — usually by Carmy, but sometimes by Richie or Tina or Cicero or whoever happens to be passing through and wants to throw out a broadly encompassing take on the appeal of eating food with other people. Restaurants are special places. You know where you never feel alone? A restaurant. Restaurants feel like your family. Restaurants are a family. Families, meanwhile, are like a restaurant. (The show does not express that one quite so explicitly, but the parallels between the Berzatto family chaos and Carmy’s need for mayhem in order to be creative are not subtle.)
The Bear has always been a show about the way restaurants lead to a confusing intermixture of familial intimacy and workplace hierarchy. One of the breakout features of the first season, after all, was that unrelated men kept calling each other “cousin.” In season four, though, that thematic directness teeters into the realm of slogan. It’s as if the dream sequences and stretches of plotless montage in seasons past have led to a paralyzing fear that someone watching season four might somehow miss the larger message. The show’s instinct for frequent needle drops underscores every emotional beat, not lyrically on the nose but still suggesting a deep anxiety about whether someone might not immediately get the tone of each scene. Season four does not go all the way to a slow-motion shot of laughing people passing around a basket of unlimited breadsticks while glancing lovingly into one another’s eyes, but it’s closer than it probably should be.
Still, this version of The Bear is a more comfortable fit for the series than season three’s overwrought intensity, and it has dramatically dialed back on some of that season’s most frustrating features. Thank God it has tamped down on the Faks (the restaurant’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–style hangers-on played by Matty Matheson and Ricky Staffieri), and it’s given more space for Sydney to be a independent character in her own right rather than an eternally frustrated hand brake for Carmy’s worst instincts. The series has been positioning Sydney as a meaningful partner for Carmy since season two, but four is the first time it finally makes good on that promise. And corniness pairs well with spectacle, which The Bear does well. A scene where the staff pulls out all the stops for a table of VIP guests is absolutely absurd, but its wish-fulfillment quality hits the right notes — grand gestures, sense of wonder, commitment to the bit. An episode at a family wedding plays into The Bear’s love of getting a bunch of Berzattos together and letting them loose on one another, and it similarly features a scene with some improbable emotional spectacle in the form of a clown-car-size banquet table (likewise laden with thesis statements).
It’s always been hard to disentangle The Bear’s medium from its message. Season three was about a genius chef climbing too far up his own ass and getting lost in his own anxiety and perfectionism and need for chaos and greatness; it was also a season of TV too full of itself, too overstuffed with bits and not driven by a single confident idea. Yes, it was an unpleasant experience to watch, but it was also an unpleasant experience for the characters to live through. One does not excuse the other. But even when it’s irritating, it’s also fascinating to watch the narrative of The Bear mirror the arc inside The Bear.
