Better, but Not by Enough

SPOILER ALERT: The following review evaluates Season 4 of “The Bear.” While major plot developments have been withheld to preserve the viewing experience, the network has requested spoiler warnings on all reviews.

The Bear, the restaurant, is struggling to recover from a bad review. In a hotly anticipated writeup, the Chicago Tribune has deemed the fine-dining spin on Italian American comfort food “confusing,” “show-offy,” inconsistent and pretentious, killing the high of the headlong rush to opening. The entire team, led by mercurial yet brilliant chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), has found itself deep in a hole, both emotional and financial. Faced with critical skepticism and mounting debts, The Bear is in a race against time to regain its momentum.

This doubles as a summary of the predicament facing “The Bear,” the show. The FX drama — and yes, it’s a drama — enjoyed a couple of seasons of fever-pitch hype and ample awards before a repetitive, self-indulgent Season 3 brought its ascent to a screeching halt. To this critic, Season 3 only magnified flaws “The Bear” had had since its inception: an emphasis on mood and setting over story, and a refusal to decenter a textbook tortured genius like Carmy in favor of the more interesting people who surround him. But with those flaws moving from footnotes to the center of the dialogue surrounding the series, “The Bear” faces a steep burden of proof headed into Season 4. They may not be haggling with vendors or chasing a Michelin star, but creator Christopher Storer, showrunner Joanna Calo and their collaborators also have to dig themselves out of a deficit of their own making.

The good news is that Season 4 marks an improvement over its predecessor. Gone are the real world culinary superstars whose long, wheel-spinning monologues on the meaning of hospitality ate up vast swathes of valuable screen time; attention is at long last paid to essential ensemble members, like pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and chef de cuisine Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), who got shunted to the sidelines even as the main narrative was treading water. But just like a restaurant that goes from losing money hand over fist to barely breaking even, “better” isn’t quite the same as “enough to make the payoff worth the slog.”

As foreshadowed by the “To be continued…” card that concluded Season 3, these latest episodes have been left with a lot of unfinished business to work through. As a result, Season 4 can feel less like a cohesive statement in its own right than a sort of do-over, circling back to fill in gaps and pick up pieces that should’ve been addressed by now. Sydney, for example, is still waffling between an unsigned partnership agreement at The Bear and an exciting opportunity to build a new restaurant from the ground up — the exact same choice she was mulling over already. By the time the character gets her own stand-alone installment, co-written by Edebiri and Boyce and directed by Janicza Bravo (“Zola”), it’s long overdue for someone who’s ostensibly the co-lead of the show. (Carmy may suck up all the oxygen, but it’s through Sydney’s eyes that we first see the kitchen he leads.) Too long, in fact: “The Bear” has let the audience go hungry for so much time that what’s finally served up can’t satisfy the appetite.

The structure of Season 4 is ostensibly shaped by the countdown clock Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), a Berzatto family friend and The Bear’s somewhat reluctant financial backer, puts up in the workspace. When the clock hits zero, Jimmy says, he’s cutting Carmy off; at that point, The Bear will either sustain itself or it won’t be sustained at all. But for a show obsessed with making the most of one’s time — sous chef Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) spends the entire season trying to shave seconds off her pasta preparation, the sum total of her arc — “The Bear” tends to return to the same motifs again and again. Restaurants are nightmares, but also special sites of communal care. The dysfunction and chaos of the kitchen “family” mirrors the dysfunction and chaos of the workers’ actual families, first and foremost the Berzattos. (The death by suicide of Carmy’s brother Mikey, played in flashbacks by Jon Bernthal, looms over every screaming match.) Only a specifically damaged type of person is drawn to this lifestyle. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

This cyclical loop is by design, as the show pointedly reminds us by having Carmy watch “Groundhog Day” in the premiere, and in keeping with the lingering wounds from the Berzattos’ compounded generational trauma. It’s also at odds with the need for “The Bear” to leave behind what no longer serves it. The finest season of “The Bear,” its second, was also the one that most radically expanded what the show could be, turning its curiosity outward rather than solipsistically in. But in the years since, “The Bear” seems to have wilfully shrugged off this invaluable lesson. Instead, we get set pieces like a family wedding that rhymes with the lauded Season 2 flashback “Seven Fishes,” down to recurring cameos and a similarly extended run time. That the episodes line up so neatly only emphasizes the concept’s diminishing returns.

There is progress made in Season 4, both at The Bear and for “The Bear.” Carmy finally relents on his egomaniacal need to change the menu every day, and starts trusting Sydney to contribute dishes of her own design. Line cook Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) now oversees The Bear’s takeout window, a homage to its past as an Italian beef shop and the only wildly profitable part of the business. After alluding to this intriguing development throughout Season 3, “The Bear” finally makes a meal of it as Ebra starts to explore spinning the window out into an independent business, a prospect with major if unclear implications for the flagship restaurant. Ebra’s mentor throughout this process is a macher played by Rob Reiner, symbolizing another promising tweak: the guest star casting now feels slightly less stunty and more in service to these minor-yet-impactful characters, from Reiner as an elder statesman to Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) as a family friend of Sydney’s to a certain movie star as Francie Fak, the much-ballyhooed nemesis of Carmy’s sister Natalie (Abby Elliott).

Best of all, the season ends with an act of baton-passing that truly, meaningfully moves Carmy away from the center of the show. This may signal the end of “The Bear” altogether; with an increasingly famous cast off starring in MCU tentpoles, Bruce Springsteen biopics and Luca Guadagnino films, there’s been rampant speculation the show may be reaching the limit of its natural lifespan. I went back and forth on how conclusive Season 4 feels, but I honestly hope it’s not the end — not so much because I’m blown away by what “The Bear” has been, but because I want to see what a post-Carmy “The Bear” could become. I also don’t want the show to confirm it’s inextricable from Carmy by following him out the kitchen door. Season 4 makes clear “The Bear” has said about all there is to say about this person’s grief, intimate relationships and professional masochism, picking at his scabs until there’s nothing left. But restaurants and the people behind them are a bigger story than just one person, especially when Storer has shown such a knack for evoking the sensory overwhelm of their world. Or at least, they should be.

Season 4 of “The Bear” is now available to stream on Hulu.