The Bear on Disney+: A solid fourth season for chaotic Carmy and crew, but is his heart still in it?
The Bear
, left a sour taste. After two years of moreish melodrama set amid the world of mid-level Chicago dining, a once bingeable affair had dissolved into a showy gloop of montages and flashbacks. It was as if it was in a holding pattern – trying to reserve a table in the affections of viewers without doing anything useful with it.
That's all changed as the show returns for a solid fourth run (
Disney+
, Thursday). We rejoin
Jeremy Allen White
's tortured chef Carmy as he recovers from the shock of a mildly negative review in the Chicago Tribune. That a disapproving write-up in a regional American paper could be life or death for an eatery is obviously hugely fanciful in 2025. But The Bear runs with it and keeps a straight face as it does so.
The problem, says Carmy's bestie (and sous chef) Sydney (
Ayo Edebiri
), is that the Tribune's food critic was discombobulated by their multiple visits. Carmy's appetite for creative destruction might feed his creative instincts, but it makes a poor recipe for success.
'The Trip ate here three times at three different restaurants,' she says. 'They didn't like the chaos.'
READ MORE
Such misgivings are shared by The Bear's financial backers, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and 'The Computer' (not a computer, and played by Brian Koppelman). They threaten to pull the plug unless the ship is turned around. It is a signal to Carmy to pull out of his funk and focus on the survival of his business.
[
Natasha review: Moving insight into brutal personal experience that became a national lightning rod
Opens in new window
]
The price of entry at The Bear is believing that a restaurant is more than just a restaurant. Carmy reiterates the point in a flashback in which he talks to his brother, Michael (
Jon Bernthal
), whose suicide originally led to Carmy's return to Chicago from his high-flying chef career in New York. '[Running a restaurant] is hard, it's gnarly it's brutal it's specific ... not everyone can do it ... I can do it,' he says during one of several over-written monologues. 'We can make it calm, we can make it delicious.'
White is soon to play
Bruce Springsteen
in what will, in all likelihood, be an Oscar-garlanded biopic. As the anarchic Carmy, he summons all his now familiar mumbly charm. But you wonder if his heart is quite in it. Hollywood beckons and, set against the glories of Tinsel Town, how can a humble Chicago restaurant – even one bedecked with Emmys – possibly compete? The answer is, it can't. For all its renewed enthusiasm, it is hard not to suspect that last orders may beckon for The Bear.
The Bear can be streamed on Disney+ from Thursday, June 26th.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
17 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Freakier Friday review: Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan return as body-switching mother and daughter
Freakier Friday Director : Nisha Ganatra Cert : PG Genre : Comedy Starring : Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon Running Time : 1 hr 51 mins The year is 2003. The first series of The X Factor is still in development; Love, Actually is bringing festive cheer and a romantic stalker to a cinema near you; and women everywhere are wearing slouch boots, slogan tees and Rachel Stevens hair layers. We are at the tail end of an era when Hollywood profited from making teen movies, notably Freaky Friday, a wildly successful body-swap comedy starring Jamie Lee Curtis and the young screen sensation Lindsay Lohan . Two decades later we have the latest in a parade of long-gestating sequels, a variable collection that includes Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Independence Day: Resurgence, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The good news is that Freakier Friday is better than such recent Disney IP revivals as Hocus Pocus 2 , even if the film is a little cluttered. READ MORE Curtis and Lohan reprise their roles, but their characters have moved on from slammed doors. Curtis's Tess is now a hands-on grandmother to the teenage Harper (Julia Butters), the only daughter of Lohan's music-biz manager, Anna. A playground altercation between Harper and Lily (Sophia Hammons), a snooty new arrival from England, lands their parents in the principal's office, where a spark ignites between Anna and Lily's father, Eric (Manny Jacinto). This chance encounter blossoms into a whirlwind romance, culminating in an engagement that neither daughter greets with enthusiasm. Cue the body-swapping: in this latest reimagining the magical mix-up expands to a four-way generational tangle, with the teenagers inhabiting the bodies of Anna and Tess and the adults hoovering up fast food. The results are messy but charming. Jordan Weiss's screenplay is not short of zingers. 'I put my heart and soul into those songs,' Anna's pop-star charge whines. 'No, a 44-year-old Dutch music producer did,' comes the pithy retort. This old-school confection, smartly reuniting the original cast, delights in every silly scene. In cinemas from Friday, August 8th
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
South Park isn't letting go of Donald Trump's hambone any time soon
'I don't know what more we could possibly say about Trump ,' Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, told Vanity Fair shortly before the US presidential election of 2024. The magazine took this to mean the series was 'about done with satirising the Republican candidate'. If that was the team's intention, then intervening events have brought about a change in strategy. The candidate became president again. The president flailed like a maniac. Some of the metaphorical broken crockery belonged to South Park's corporate master. The Comedy Central satire has rarely been so explicit in its attacks on an individual as it was on Trump in the first episode of the 27th season. Broadcast on July 23rd, Sermon on the 'Mount – a reference to both its guest star Jesus Christ and Paramount, the cable channel's parent company – began with a characteristic double-edged dig at Trump's war on the liberal media. READ MORE Eric Cartman, perennially bigoted id-monster, is outraged that the administration has cancelled his favourite show on National Public Radio. We are encouraged to believe South Park's creators are equally appalled at this curtailment of cultural expression, but most of the laughs come from Cartman, hitherto a hate listener, ranting about the unintentionally hilarious enemies he will no longer get to snort at. The show is, he explains, 'where all the liberals bitch and moan about stuff'. Jesus turns up to evangelise at South Park Elementary. The town's residents wonder if that is strictly constitutional. 'I didn't want to come back,' the risen Lord eventually mutters fearfully to assembled multitudes. 'But I had to because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount.' This references Trump's recent suit against Paramount over an episode of the news show 60 Minutes, broadcast on the conglomerate's CBS network, and allows wider connection to be made with capitulations to the president's legal Panzerkorps elsewhere in the media. [ Maureen Dowd: CBS caving to Trump is sickening. At least South Park will still hold people accountable Opens in new window ] All of that was typically bold – The Simpsons' erstwhile digs at its own Fox network were generally more playful – but it was the depiction of Trump himself that really got media-watchers gasping. Like their version of Saddam Hussein, he is seen cosying up to a giant, oddly sensitive Satan, who expresses himself unimpressed by the imperial crown jewels. 'I can't even see anything, it's so small,' the Lord of the Flies says of Trump's penis. At the close, now bespectacled and talkative, the first member dangles from a hyperrealistic, AI-generated version of the naked Trump. How do we know this attack struck home? Because the White House said it didn't. 'This show hasn't been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention,' a hopelessly needy White House statement whined. 'No fourth-rate show can derail President Trump's hot streak.' Asked, at the Comic-Con event in San Diego, what he made of the response, Parker, sitting beside his collaborator Matt Stone, did not break a smile before snapping: 'We're terribly sorry.' The reply needed no ironic intonation to confirm its insincerity. And they are not finished. There was no episode this week, but a teaser trailer for next Wednesday's outing has Trump feeling up Satan's leg at a public event. South Park isn't loosening its jaws from this hambone. Why does this matter more than the countless volleys that have come Trump's way over the past decade? A glance (just a glance, I promise) at the increasingly feeble Saturday Night Live gives a few clues. The sheer flaccidity of the sketch show's satire is one factor. Another is that sense of us knowing which wet-liberal safe house the SNL team emerge from each miserably predictable weekend. These skits are not intended to irritate the Maga base. They are there to comfort those already certain of their own cosy opposition. Remember the execrable 'cold open' that had a white-clad Hillary Clinton – in the supportive form of Kate McKinnon – warble Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah to a blubbing audience straight after the real Hillary lost to Trump? Such obsequiousness towards a politician (any politician) would be inconceivable on South Park. Over the past 28 years Stone and Parker have made a virtue of wrong-footing those who think they have the team's politics nailed down. Way back in 2005, scores of leftish critics raged that Team America: World Police, their now-classic 'Supercrappymation' feature, spent as much time slagging off liberal celebrities as attacking the administration. 'People assumed that Trey and I were going to devote every frame to bringing down George Bush,' Stone, laughing, told me at the time. One side has never forgiven them. The other may not forget their current jihad against Trump. But that uncertain political territory is the best place for satirists to pitch base camp. Nobody should feel safe. They could be after your penis next.
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Irish Times
Kamala Harris and Stephen Colbert symbols not so much of a vanished time as a lost US future
Time moves differently in Donald Trump 's presidency, so the effect of seeing Kamala Harris back on television screens was like the shock return of a once prominent but long vanished character from Dynasty or Falcon Crest, or any of the stars from the classic era of US soap operas that outlasted the rise and fall of several presidencies. The defeated Democratic candidate is in the public eye again to publicise 107 Days, her account of her belated, doomed attempt to resuscitate her party's hopes in the 2024 presidential race after Joe Biden 's candidacy became untenable. She was appearing on the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a flagship talkshow that CBS has decided to cancel once the season ends in May. The decision to end Colbert's run generated delight on the Republican right, not least from Trump, who is frequently in the firing line of Colbert's brand of slick, savagely funny satire. That CBS needed approval from the Trump administration for its sale to Skydance to go through, and that its parent company, Paramount, recently settled a spurious $16 million lawsuit with the president, was lost on nobody. David Letterman, the original host of the show, from 1993-2015, described the CBS decision as 'gutless' and 'pure cowardice'. READ MORE Ironically, the Trump lawsuit was framed around a charge that an interview Harris had given to 60 Minutes during last year's election campaign had been edited to her advantage. Cancelling Colbert was just the icing on the cake for Trump. And it was also a reflection of the fast-changing broadcast news and talkshow landscape. Letterman had the undivided attention of late-night America but the culture, and options, have changed enormously since then. CBS issued a bland statement thanking Colbert and leaked remarks to the effect that a staff of 100 and a bill of a $100 million for a dwindling audience had become impossible to maintain. The Ed Sullivan Theater, where The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is recorded live, in midtown Manhattan. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty So when Harris and Colbert sat down, a desk between them, both seemed like symbols not so much of a vanished time as a lost future. It will be impossible for Americans to ever see Harris and wonder what the road not taken in 2024 might have looked like. The stark numbers of the election are worth repeating. Although Harris and the Democrats were trounced on the big blue and red electoral college board, in actual human votes, Trump won 77,303,568 (49.8 per cent) and Harris 75,019,230 (48.3 per cent). Some 2,284,338 votes separated them: a significant number of people but not so much that Harris and her supporters won't always imagine a different outcome. As Colbert mentioned, she looked rested. She revealed that she spent much of the past six months in restorative mode – 'lots of cooking shows'- and that, no, she had not watched much current affairs. 'I'm not into self-mutilation,' she said in a rare moment of sharpness. [ From the archive: It's a do-or-die moment for Kamala Harris. She needs to assert herself Opens in new window ] That acidic edge was a reminder of what Harris often seemed to lack during those 107 days when she sought to persuade Americans that she was a better alternative to Trump. She had the extraordinary rise from modest west coast immigrant home, a natural telegenic appeal and, when she permitted herself, came across as warm and authoritative. There was no menace. But there was too often a blurriness about what she might do. And even in Thursday night's harmless and friendly theatre in New York, her fatal conservatism remained intact. She brought no gossip or intrigue or fresh revelation, nothing to excite the hopes of the millions of lost Democrats out there. For six months, Trump has talked and talked and talked, as though the Oval Office is his psychologist's couch and the people of the United States his listener. It may be bewildering and contradictory and frightening. But it has the world's attention. [ US AI policy risks disaster because of Trump Opens in new window ] Harris teased an anecdote featuring Doug, her husband, and a missed birthday of hers in the days before the election but when Colbert teed her up, she broke into laughter and said, 'you have to read the book'. A mildly exasperated Colbert mimicked flicking through the pages. It's the golden rule of these shows followed by any celebrities there to sell a film or a biography: the host says lovely things about you and in turn, you tell a few self-deprecating yarns and everyone is happy. Even now, Harris held back. Six months in, Trump's second term has, for now, confounded the doom sayers. The markets continue to thrive despite the tariff upheaval. However, Friday's August deadline was accompanied by reports of a weakening labour market and a dip in markets. He has, as promised ended border immigration but the Ice deportation campaign continues to horrify many Americans. His vow to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict has not been fulfilled. The situation in Gaza has become even more horrifying that it was under Biden. [ Justine McCarthy: Keir Starmer and Donald Trump looked ready to put a ring on it. No wonder Melania stayed at home Opens in new window ] Already, the Democrats are nearing the point where potential challengers to the next Republican candidate will have to step into the bright lights. Many have interpreted Harris's decision not to run for governor of California next year as an intention to put herself forward as a presidential candidate in 2028. To Colbert's army of night-watchers who flicked off the TV for the night, it will take a lot of convincing by Harris if she is to catapult from her place as the face of calamitous disappointment for Democrat voters to their best future hope.
