‘The Bear' Isn't Wasting a Second

The Atlantic

6 days ago

'You ever feel like you're stuck in the same day, like over and over again?' Carmen Berzatto asks another chef early in the new season of The Bear. Carm, of course, played in fine haunted fashion by Jeremy Allen White, is the jolie laide centerpiece of the series, the sad-eyed Chicago son whose face launched a thousand 'Yes, chef' memes and whose grief and PTSD preoccupied almost all of Season 3. Stuck? I can forgive The Bear almost anything, because it's one of the few shows on television now still willing to wrangle with the mess of being human—with what it means to try to live differently. We all know what it's like to feel stuck. Most of us have loved The Bear since it debuted in 2022: an impossibly gorgeous and teeth-grindingly stressful show that put viewers through the restaurant-kitchen wringer so that it could reward us with moments of transcendent payoff. Season 3, relentless in its examination of the sticky contours of Carm's trauma, offered fewer bursts of that kind of respite.
These new episodes, though, bear fruit, in the form of progress, and forward momentum, and the impossible optimism of people changing for the better. In Season 1, Carm—a burner-scarred veteran of some of the world's best kitchens—returned to Chicago to try to save his dead brother's hopelessly dysfunctional sandwich shop, sparring with Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), his coke-dealing 'cousin' and a poster boy for woeful masculinity. In Season 2, with the help of his protégé, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Carm prepared to open the restaurant he'd always dreamed of, while Richie found his own sense of purpose. At the end of Season 3, the Bear—the restaurant—received a thoroughly mixed review from the Chicago Tribune, leaving the team scattered and uncertain.
On the plus side, this means there's no time left to waste. The motif of the new season is a clock that Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) unceremoniously plonks down in the kitchen, counting the number of hours until the restaurant runs out of funds. If the team is going to save the Bear, it has to be now. Christopher Storer, the show's creator, turns the last minutes of the first episode into a rousing, synth-scored, preparing-for-battle montage reminiscent of a Cold War action movie. Every Second Counts reads the sign on one wall. 'Why am I crying?' I wrote in my notes, as lockers slammed shut and knives rasped against sharpeners ahead of service. The biggest obstacles, beyond money, are the ones in the chefs' heads: Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is still slower and clumsier with the desserts he's trying to perfect than he can afford to be; Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) can't turn the pasta around quickly enough; Sydney can't decide whether Carm's genius in the kitchen is worth the risk of sinking her own career and mental health.
The Bear has always had an expansive understanding of what restaurants represent—the task not only of elevating food into an art, but also of making every guest feel cared for, affirmed, at home. And for the people who spend 80-hour weeks sweating all the intimate details of service, the job means so much more than work, the team so much more than colleagues. 'Please, help me out with this place,' Richie prays one night. 'If it's fucked, then I am fucked. It's like the last thing that's actually keeping me attached to anything, so please, help me out here. Amen.' Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), whose work in the sandwich window is the lone financial bright spot in the Bear's books, seeks a mentor to try to figure out how he personally might be able to help. Sydney agonizes over the question of whether to abandon Carm and the Bear for a more functional (if annoying) chef who's trying to poach her.
The new season, as is series tradition, makes space for some intriguing curveballs. An episode co-written by Edebiri and Boyce takes Sydney outside the restaurant to a hair appointment at a friend's house, where she considers what it means to have people who really know her, and to feel like she belongs. Another episode that runs upwards of an hour brings together virtually everyone in the show's history for an event that seems to promise chaos and destruction—say, a car driven through a house, a gunfight—but goes somewhere wholly unexpected. Almost more than ever, The Bear is preoccupied with what we as humans inherit and what we pass on in turn, and whether we can actually choose, as Carm wanted in Season 3, to 'filter out all the bad.' Carm's sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), trying to raise her own child differently, starts using gentle-parenting techniques at work, almost unintentionally, with understandable lapses in patience. Richie's work on himself continues to, in my opinion, sustain all hope for humanity. ('Neil Jeff, you're beautiful,' he whispers to his and Carm's childhood friend, Neil Fak—Matty Matheson—in a heartbreaking instant of pure television.) Marcus and Sydney, both of whom have lost their mothers, interlock neatly with Carm, who still dreads seeing his own. In Season 1, the show seemed intent on conveying how toxic masculinity poisons not just kitchen culture but all hierarchies; now, because the team members have opened themselves up to more nurturing models of care and communication, their potential is fully unfurling.
All of this wrestling with pain and purpose and guilt and growth is intermingled with Storer's musical callbacks and quick cuts of dishes being plated, red lines on charts running menacingly downward, clocks ticking, casual conversations that become so unexpectedly profound that they rip your heart right out. The pace isn't always so rapid-fire—when episodes slow down, it's for a reason. There are still a handful of dream sequences and surreal interludes that seem to want to underscore the show's deep psychological curiosity, and its unwillingness to be an easy watch. But after the slow-drip, languorous suffering of Season 3, it's thrilling to see the characters and the action move so purposefully and gratifyingly forward.