This article discusses events through Season 4 of “The Bear,” now available on Hulu.
The new season of “The Bear” is the story of a struggling restaurant and a successful restaurant. They are both the same restaurant.
The struggling restaurant is, of course, the title establishment. Season 3 ended with the chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) speed-reading a crucial newspaper write-up. (There is no better way to flatter critics than to make your cliffhanger about the contents of a review.) Season 4 reveals that it was mostly a pan, and not the nice, carbon-steel kind. Now the Bear is on a ticking clock — an actual, physical clock — counting the seconds until the “parachute” of investment cash runs out.
Bustling happily alongside is the beef-sandwich window, a legacy of the restaurant’s origins as the humble neighborhood joint the Original Beef of Chicagoland. Overseen by Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), an eager, soft-spoken culinary-school dropout, it hands out dripping Italian beef sandwiches to an endless line of customers.
Unlike the Bear, the Beef (if we can call it that) is not fancy. It does not change its menu daily. It does not serve flavored steam or desserts that double as magic tricks. It is not trying to dazzle you with technique. It does one satisfying thing, then comes back and does it again. And, Season 4 suggests, it could be the salvation of the foundering business, as Ebraheim’s new consigliere (Rob Reiner) steers it toward becoming a local franchise.
When is a sandwich not just a sandwich? “The Bear,” like many shows about creativity, seems to contain its own critique. The dichotomy of the Bear vs. the Beef embodies an argument over how to make art, one that very much applies to this show — and one that is to some extent the show’s subject.
It’s about ambition vs. accessibility, change vs. repetition, consistency vs. risk, complexity vs. simplicity. What do you want when you watch TV — a good sandwich or a challenging tasting menu? Beef or Bear?
“The Bear” is, of course, a pop-culture phenomenon, not niche performance art. But it has always been vulnerable — especially with the artful, slow-moving third season — to the charge that it shares too many of Carmy’s flaws, that it is overly impressed with itself, unfocused, fancy but directionless. These critiques were not entirely wrong, but they could also feel like a meta-complaint about TV itself — that, as it became more expensive and prestigious, a populist medium had become too froufrou.
For most of its history, prime-time television was a beef-sandwich window. TV series — sitcoms, cop shows — served you one thing every time. There was very little serial storytelling, few departures in format. The dish was the dish.
As outlets like HBO changed both the business and narrative form of TV, this changed. You had more experimentation and greater use of longform — multicourse, if you will — storytelling. Episode lengths and structure were up for grabs, as were genres; comedy and drama mingled like sweet and savory elements on a plate. This expanded the range of what TV could do and how it could look and feel.
“Law & Order” (a different murder every week) is Beef TV; “The Wire” (a single city’s dysfunction probed over five seasons) is Bear TV. “The Twilight Zone” is Beef; “Lost,” (polar) Bear. One is not inherently better than the other, and many shows have elements of both. But the two forms work differently.
Compare “The Bear” with “Cheers,” another character-driven favorite set in the service industry. Things changed over time on “Cheers” — Diane left and Rebecca arrived, love affairs developed and ended — but this happened at the margins of a show that told a discrete, funny story every week while Norm walked onstage the same way, over and over.
“The Bear” is of a generation of TV that has more options than did the Beef TV of old. Season 2 used them brilliantly, with evocative single-character spotlights and bravura extra-length episodes. It was pleasurable, inventive and moving — Bear TV at its best.
But Season 3, while spectacular in spots, showed the flip side of creative freedom. It seemed paralyzed by choice, flitting from idea to idea without going anywhere. In a way, this mirrored the restaurant plot of Season 3: Carmy, obsessed with proving himself, sets the goal of changing the restaurant menu daily, resulting in the culinary chaos that the Chicago Tribune reviewer picked up on.
Season 4 feels like a do-over, for the restaurant and the show. (The critiques we hear in the restaurant review — “confusing,” “show-offy,” “dissonance” — could have come from Season 3’s notices.) Carmy and his partner Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) streamline the menu, simplifying and subtracting elements, a creative necessity that, as money gets tight, becomes a financial one.
The creator Christopher Storer pares down and focuses the storytelling — to an extent. The season sets the stakes up front (tick, tick, tick). The early episodes build momentum and slam-cut to the credits. Questions that dragged out in Season 3 — Carmy’s estrangement from his girlfriend, Claire (Molly Gordon), Sydney’s decision to stay at the Bear — are resolved. There is a much more reasonable amount of Faks, the extended comic-relief family that Season 3 was overseasoned with. Also, there is now a delivery robot, and all shows are made better by the addition of a robot.
Does it work? Partly. This season is more consistent than the previous one but also less interesting, with fewer big swings. Any scene with Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the sad sack turned front-of-house ninja, is a delight, and an episode focused on Sydney is a standout. But the centerpiece long-format episode, set at Richie’s ex’s wedding, feels like a sentimental but faint echo of Season 2’s Christmas catastrophe, “Fishes.” And Carmy’s emo tribulations are getting old, even if the repetition is meant to echo his feeling “stuck.”
By season’s end, “The Bear” felt like it was asking itself what the numbers guy Computer (Brian Koppelman) asks Natalie (Abby Elliott): If you’re just holding steady, “Why would you keep going?”
This was never a question for old-fashioned Beef TV — the goal was to keep going until you got canceled. But “The Bear” is ultimately Bear TV. It’s not just a hangout comedy that can run in place indefinitely, as pleasurable as its set pieces are (like the stateroom-scene confab under the world’s largest wedding-reception table). It needs narrative momentum. It needs to go somewhere and, eventually, to end.
It does feel like time for “The Bear” to start wrapping things up — which might just give it the urgency to return to greatness. Though FX has yet to announce future plans for the series, the season finale — despite the title, “Goodbye” — suggested a final arc in which Carmy hands off the restaurant to Sydney, with the promise of a Michelin star still looming in the night sky.
With that, maybe, there’s a chance for the show to regain the balance between its Beef side and its Bear side. What does that mean? That — as in the first and second seasons — a show can be artistically inventive while still dishing meat-and-potatoes pleasures like laughter, catharsis and plot advancement. That simplicity doesn’t have to equal mediocrity.
After all, what makes an Italian beef sandwich great? Yes, it is accessible and unfussy. But it’s also not an assembly-line burger you can get anywhere. The Italian beef, like great TV, is specific — it comes from a place and a people. It is not to everyone’s taste. You can’t get mayonnaise on it even if you love mayonnaise, because “[expletive] mayonnaise.”
At its best, “The Bear” is a kind of high-low fusion, like Carmy plating up a beef sandwich on fine china for an out-of-town guest family, or Sydney doctoring dinner-out-of-a-box with tomato paste. I’d like another order of that before we’re done, and then the check, please.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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