TV review
In 2022, the first course of “The Bear” was served. And what a fantastic first course it was.
Introducing us to a struggling Chicago restaurant and the charismatic cast of characters who worked there, its debut season felt like something gracefully, stressfully alive. Authentically capturing the controlled — and often not-so-controlled — chaos of what it means to work in a modern restaurant, it was a sharply funny and emotionally resonant portrait of working people. Well-written, -acted and -directed, it thrived in the confines of a tiny sandwich shop that soon felt like it contained within it an entire world. Just by being its scrappy self, “The Bear” emerged as a messy, ultimately moving work of art whose first season still remains a genuine discovery.
Since then, the show has strained to recapture that perfect collection of ingredients, often in ways it seemed painfully aware of. Now, in its final season, one of the most confined, chaotic and oddly compelling yet, “The Bear” goes back to basics while it grapples with how time marches on. It doesn’t reach the heights of its first course, but it successfully reinvents its menu one final time.
Picking right back up after Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) confessed to Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) that he is leaving the restaurant, the gang is now facing another problem: a massive storm that seems like it could very well wash away the entire building. Pipes are bursting, deliveries are tricky, the reservation app is on the fritz, and it’s unclear if they’ll even make it through what could be their last night before the space is sold. But for all the unpredictable chaos of this shift, there was one thing that most surprised me: the laughter.
Not the laughter it elicits from us, which the show has always been able to do, but the laughter from the characters themselves. You realize when it happens that, for the past several seasons, there have been few if any signs of true joy in the kitchen. This hasn’t always been a bad thing — “The Bear” has wrestled with heavy emotions and questions of legacy — though it could also feel like it was falling prey to that heaviness.
This time, everything feels freer and looser. Even as the stakes have never been higher, “The Bear” becomes more playful, often ridiculously so, just as it holds tightly to its ruggedly poetic rhythms. There are some contrived conflicts here and there, as well as some characters who get more than a little underserved, though the core three (Carmy, Sydney and Richie) still get so many great moments together. In particular, Edebiri and Moss-Bachrach are electric, bouncing off each other perfectly when things start to unravel while shining in their own separate scenes. In one scene in which Sydney must step outside the kitchen to serve her own meal, the halting explanation she gives about its origins and what it means to her provides an emotional knockout.
It all makes for a sly, slightly silly, sincere season that seems aware of how the show may have occasionally lost its way leading up to it. But now, it’s successfully stripped any and all excesses to serve up one fantastic final meal. You think back to the motto that increasingly hung over the show: “Every second counts.” Before, this could frequently feel stressful, like we were witnessing a ticking clock that would never stop. Now, in these final episodes, it feels liberating as we know that clock eventually will. But with these richly drawn characters, you realize that the idea of every second counting was not just about them working efficiently as a team, it was about cherishing the moments, however brief, they all shared together. It’s these moments, more than the food or the restaurant itself, that made “The Bear” special. This final course stretches its ingredients as far as it can, but it’s the characters who never wear thin.
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