The review below contains details about Season 4 of The Bear, out now on FX on Hulu.
Does Carmy like working in restaurants?
For three seasons of The Bear, we've seen Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) put all his efforts into food, often at great cost. He finds satisfaction — perhaps his only satisfaction — when he believes he's even momentarily achieved perfection. He can spot talent in other people, as he did with Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), and his desire to be great inspires them. He is ambitious and creative, and he's so gifted that nearly everyone who's ever eaten his food thinks it's among the best they've ever had.
Does he like it, though? Can he like it?
It makes sense for the fourth season to confront this question. Because after all, as long as we've known him, the man has been miserable. At first, it appeared that a lot of that misery arose from the death of his brother, Mikey. Or maybe it arose from the chaos in his family of origin and his estrangement from his mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis). Maybe it was the abusive bosses like David Fields (Joel McHale) who burrowed into his head and filled him with self-loathing.
But what if he doesn't like the career he picked, and he's too busy to notice?
When we last saw Carmy, he was swearing at a review of his restaurant, also called The Bear, that had just been published by the Chicago Tribune. Early this season, we find out what that review says, but what it says doesn't change the trajectory of his efforts, which bend still toward: get better, improve, figure it out, become perfect. The restaurant's finances have activated a (literal) ticking clock, as Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) can't keep pouring money into The Bear forever.
It will probably be a relief that the first episode of the season does not repeat the choices that frustrated some viewers about Season 3, including that season's nonlinear, contemplative first episode. This one, by contrast, picks up right where we left off, and it takes us back into the kitchen for a dinner service.
Some of the things that work best in this season are things The Bear has always done well. As in the past, the cast and creators deliver standout episodes away from the restaurant. In one, we see Sydney go to have her hair done by her cousin, played by Danielle Deadwyler. Sydney is still trying to figure out what to do about the job offer she got last season from chef Adam Shapiro, and Edebiri (who co-wrote the episode with Lionel Boyce, who plays Marcus) does a beautiful job with the balance between Sydney's resilient, incisive sense of humor, her worry about the direction of her career, and the sheer weight of the trust she's placed in Carmy. Robert Townsend as her father is always welcome, but seeing more of Sydney's family than before, and seeing her as they see her, helps shed light on her bone-deep ambivalence about what it's like to work with Carmy.
There's also a crowded gathering, along the lines of Season 2's chaotic flashback episode, "Fishes," which brings back many of the guest stars who make up Carmy's extended family. This one takes place in the present, though, where things are different in a bunch of ways. Relationships have shifted, things have been learned, and combinations of characters — look for a lovely and unexpected scene between Platt and Gillian Jacobs as Richie's ex-wife, Tiffany, for instance — mix and drift apart and back together.
Despite this attention to worlds outside the restaurant, Season 4, more than Season 3, reflects a refocusing on the powerful relationships creator Christopher Storer and the team of writers have built among the trio of Carmy, Sydney and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). That does mean some of the most beloved supporting characters, including Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), get a bit less to do than last year, though others, including Sweeps (Corey Hendrix) and Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), get to step up. Storer has also eased up on getting every moment of comic relief from the Faks family, although one longstanding Fak arc gets the spotlight (with a fun bit of casting). As funny and specific as they are, a little Fak goes a long way, and the balance is better this time around.
The most frustrating character on The Bear continues to be Claire (Molly Gordon), whose on-screen role in Season 3 was limited, but whose importance even as an unseen force has grown and grown. Regrettably, Claire has never been developed very much as a person beyond the facts that (1) she's really into Carmy and (2) Carmy is really into her. How good she supposedly was for him and how foolish it was for him to throw the relationship away was conveyed not by showing who she was and how their relationship worked, but by having other characters declare it to be so and cloyingly call her "Claire-bear" (way too often, please stop).
The third season treated Claire's breakup with Carmy as the manifestation of his self-destructiveness and the disaster that sent him spiraling (even though it was in large part her own fault for forcing her way into a restaurant kitchen on opening night because she refused to listen to the staff; I will die on this hill). As of the beginning of the fourth season, she hangs over the show like a ghost, her absence standing for the notion that Carmy never knows how to hang on to what's good for him. But despite the fact that Gordon has been excellent in other things and makes the most of what she has to work with, this character has never been strong enough — or, sadly, interesting enough — to bear the weight that the show wants her to carry, either as an abstraction or when she inevitably reappears. It's a real issue for the narrative sturdiness of the writing.
It would be unfair to say very much about where the season ends, except that it's a particularly strong showcase for the heart of the cast. The one worrying aspect of that strong showcase is that it will be deeply unsatisfying if there is not a fifth season, and one has not been announced yet. There are a couple of early narrative promises that never pay off, traps set and never sprung, and it certainly seems likely that they're meant to — just not yet. It's hard to imagine this is intended to be the end. Hopefully, this is just delayed renewal news (it's easy to imagine the words "fifth and final" appearing in a press release soon) and not the creators or the network playing the dangerous game of ambiguous non-resolutions that can result in stories never getting a chance to end as they're supposed to.
It's a solid season full of strong performances and some killer episodes, leaning into The Bear's strengths more fully than season three. But this is not where anyone would want to leave this story, so here's hoping we get word soon that there will be another chance for The Bear, Claire and the Faks to all find an ending that works for them.
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