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The Bear is heading for extinction. So the restaurant’s perma-stressed proprietor and head chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) is warned by his uncle-investor when a lukewarm review by an influential critic is swiftly followed by some chilling financial projections. Save for a sudden change in fortune — a Michelin star, say — the business will cease to be viable in two months — or 1,440 hours, to be precise.
In the kitchen, a timer mounted on the countertop starts counting down. Carmy and his crew must make an effort to mitigate the culinary and emotional carnage that has brought the establishment to the brink of collapse — and pushed Carmy ever-closer to a breakdown. There will be no more chaos, he promises; no more hours wasted stirring tensions and reheating old arguments.
Christopher Storer’s singular tragicomic series returns with a fourth season that delivers less frenetic intensity and more quiet introspection; fewer screaming matches and more honest conversations. While it still features plenty of fine acting, writing and visual storytelling, the overall flavour has mellowed. It won’t be to everyone’s taste. Those who felt the show lost its way in the divisive, digressive third season are unlikely to be won over by a run of early episodes that do little to drive the main restaurant-in-crisis narrative.
But The Bear has always been less about plot-upending events than the complex inner lives of its characters. As the clock continues to tick, we see Carmy, chef-de-cuisine Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), maitre’d Richie (habitual scene-stealer Ebon Moss Bachrach) grapple with the existential doubts thrown up by the restaurant’s potential closure. What is life like outside the jaws of The Bear? Who would they be if not part of their dysfunctional, codependent work family?
The series’ other family, the Berzattos, also loom large, appearing en masse in a feature-length episode set at Richie’s ex’s wedding, of all places. A counterpart to season two’s extraordinary but skin-flayingly uncomfortable episode “Fishes”, it initially seems to have the makings of another excruciating get-together derailed by unstable matriarch Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) and erstwhile stepdad Lee (Bob Odenkirk). But this piece de resistance unexpectedly proves to be one of the series’ most beautifully bittersweet, cathartic episodes.
If that episode could have made a fitting season finale, the actual closer features a tense confrontation between the outstanding lead trio that reminds us how quickly chaos can return. A bold cliffhanger ending suggests there might yet be more to come — and I for one wouldn’t say no to one last course.
★★★★☆
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