Like a four-top of gavones holding up the 7 p.m. turn, “The Bear” stayed at the table too long. Its self-indulgent third season destroyed its momentum, and its fourth wasn’t enough of an improvement to fully recover. (Let that be a lesson to producers wondering if they have enough story to stretch across two seasons instead of one.) And so FX’s formerly sensational dramedy enters its fifth and final season tired and beaten down.
But “The Bear” is a show about underdogs, and no one was expecting it to become any sort of cultural phenomenon back when it premiered, so having something to prove is a good place for the show to be. Season 5 is scrappy and stressful in a good way, as the characters struggle to succeed against difficult odds. Season 5 is the best since Season 2, thanks to a streamlined focus on the restaurant.
It’s not exactly accurate to call Season 5 “back to basics,” because it’s more stripped down than the show ever was before. There are no flashy celebrity cameos, standalone episodes or even hipster needle drops — the indie rock soundtrack has been fully replaced by a sleek Hans Zimmer-produced synth score. The self-indulgence was confined to the unnecessary “Gary,” the prequel specialabout Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Mikey’s (Jon Bernthal) ill-fated road trip to Indiana that preceded the season’s release. This is “The Bear” at its leanest.
Season 5 — or at least the first seven of eight episodes FX sent for review — takes place over the course of a single difficult day at Chicago’s hottest but most chaotic new restaurant. It’s the day after chef-owner Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) told his sous chef Syd (Ayo Edebiri), his front-of-house manager Richie, and his business manager/sister Natalie (Abby Elliott) that he was quitting and leaving the restaurant in their hands — if there is a restaurant at all, now that the building’s owner Jimmy (Oliver Platt) is planning to sell.
With Carmy handing over head chef duties to Syd but sticking around to work as a line cook to smooth the transition, it was bound to be a difficult day, but then Murphy’s Law kicks in: a rainstorm floods the restaurant, a glitch in the reservation app leads to an overbooked dining room and they don’t have enough food. It’s a pressure-cooker environment, and every Bear has to push their abilities to the limit in order to get through service without falling apart. It might be the last night, so they’re going to leave it all on the floor — or plate.
In contrast to the often meandering approach to plot, character and theme in previous seasons, Season 5 is ruthlessly efficient in its storytelling. It almost never leaves the restaurant, and the most prominent celebrity cameo is local Chicago weatherman Tom Skilling. Almost everything that happens — from Syd demonstrating how to run a kitchen without yelling, to pastry chefs Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and Luca (Will Poulter) praising McDonald’s for being so consistent — has something to do with making the Bear sustainable as a going concern. That singleness of purpose, combined with the pressure of this crazy night potentially being the last one, means there’s less room for nonsense with the Faks or scenes that exist purely for vibes. It amounts to addition by subtraction.
This locked-in approach also means there’s a ton of restaurant action. If your favorite part of “The Bear” is its intense depiction of the constant stress and momentary satisfaction of restaurant work and its celebration of the alchemical power of fine dining, you’ll really enjoy this season. There’s a moment where Marcus reveals a surprising new dessert that so perfectly captures the sense of joy and wonder that restaurants like the Bear create that you may find yourself getting choked up over some caramel.
The inclination toward action over big character moments makes Season 5 a bit less emotionally driven than previous seasons, but the show still finds ways to make an impact. One of the season’s few subplots — Natalie stressing over returning to work after giving birth and leaving her baby with her mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) — is the source of its most potent emotional moments. It feels drawn from personal experience and working mothers are likely to relate.
As always, the performances from the core cast remain strong. Syd and Richie essentially become the main characters as Carmy takes more of a supporting role in the kitchen and the story, and Edebiri and Moss-Bachrach do some of their best work on the show to date. After watching Syd flail for so long, it’s wonderful to see her confidence grow, and Edebiri plays it naturally. And with his lived-in, sensitive performance, Moss-Bachrach remains the show’s beating heart.
Will a stronger-than-expected final season be enough to change the narrative that “The Bear” fell off? Probably not. It’s not so good that it erases the memory of the show’s lowest moments — and because those moments were due to the show being itself too much, the problems cannot be unseen just because they’ve been reduced.
If you go back to a restaurant that once made you sick, you will always remember, even if the present meal is pretty good. Momentum lost is rarely recovered, especially when TV zeitgeist moments are shorter than ever. But even if the legacy of “The Bear” ends up being an uneven one, it will always be the show that swept the Emmys in 2023 and taught the world to say “Yes, chef.”
“The Bear” Season 5 premieres Thursday at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on FX and Hulu.
The post ‘The Bear’ Season 5 Review: FX’s Once-Mighty Dramedy Gets Better in Stripped-Down Last Shift appeared first on TheWrap.
