The FX dramedy “The Bear” arrived on Hulu in the summer of 2022, and unlike a lot of award-winning TV, this series has stuck to a yearly release schedule, always arriving in late June. So get ready to start hearing “Yes, chef!” during everyday interactions.
Season 4 debuts in full on Wednesday, returning viewers to the eclectic, vibrant Chicago food scene and the struggling restaurant at the heart of the story, the Bear. At the end of last season, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), the Bear’s chef and co-owner, had just received a review in The Chicago Tribune that might determine whether or not his place stays open. But viewers still don’t know what it says.
They almost certainly will find out in the new episodes, though Christopher Storer, the creator of “The Bear,” likes to keep the show unpredictable. Here are some things to keep in mind going into the new season.
Chaos on the menu
A quick reminder of how we got here: Carmy, suffering from self-doubt and burnout from his time working at high-end restaurants, returned to run the Original Beef of Chicagoland a few months after the suicide of his brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), who had inherited the restaurant from their volatile father. The first season ended with Carmy discovering Mikey had hidden thousands of dollars in tomato cans — enough to settle much of the restaurants’ debts, potentially.
Instead, in Season 2, Carmy went deeper into debt with the family’s longtime backer, Jimmy Kalinowski (Oliver Platt), known variously as “Cicero” or “Unc,” to expand the restaurant into a new establishment called the Bear, serving sandwiches for lunch and a Michelin-level menu at night. The soft opening went well, despite a meltdown in the kitchen and a Carmy tantrum inside a walk-in refrigerator.
Last season, the Bear built some buzz but still suffered from internal dysfunction, much of it because of Carmy’s persistent, restless reinvention of the menu. It all led up to the make-or-break review, which, based on Carmy’s reaction when he read it, does not seem to be the rave he and his team badly need.
Meet the staff
Ayo Edebiri has been essentially a co-lead with White. Her character, Sydney Adamu, is a talented young chef who has followed and admired Carmy’s career for years but has discovered that working with him can be challenging.
The big question is whether Sydney’s passion for making great food can survive Carmy’s neuroses and the chaos of his kitchen. When last we saw her in the Season 3 finale, she is weighing whether to become a partner in the Bear or to run her own staff at a promising, well-funded new restaurant, founded by the real-life Chicago chef Adam Shapiro (playing a version of himself). The pressure of that decision and the grind of work are distancing Sydney from her father, Emmanuel (Robert Townsend), who is already worried that her career in fine dining will be unsustainable.
In Season 2, we learned more about Marcus Brooks (Lionel Boyce), a baker who moved closer to his dream of becoming a master pastry chef after studying in Copenhagen under the tutelage of one of Carmy’s colleagues, Chef Luca (Will Poulter). As Season 3 ended though, Marcus was reeling from the death of his mother and struggling to keep up with the pace of dinner service.
Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas), a line cook who started working at the Beef when Mikey ran it, took a while to warm to Carmy’s methods but came around after culinary school classes. At the end of Season 3, though, she also was having trouble turning out dishes quickly enough.
Last season, Natalie (Abby Elliott), Carmy’s sweet-natured sister and the Bear’s business manager, gave birth to her first child and unexpectedly bonded with the moody, overbearing mother of the Berzattos, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis). Whether Natalie can convince Carmy to reconcile with Donna (whose erratic behavior was documented in the Season 2 flashback episode, “Fishes,” a highlight) is another big question hanging over Season 4.
Catching up with the cousins
One important thing to remember about “The Bear” is that it is ultimately a show about family: biological, cultural, accidental and otherwise. Carmy and his childhood pals all call each other “cousin,” not because they are actually related but because they grew up together.
A lot of these friends are knuckleheads by nature and are frequently used for comic relief. This is the case particularly with the bickering, bantering Fak brothers: Neil (Matty Matheson) and Teddy (Ricky Staffieri) — whom some “Bear” fans love and some find exhausting.
The key cousin is always Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Mikey’s best friend and a longtime Beef employee, who overcame his resentment of Carmy’s pretensions and, by the end of Season 2, had learned how to run a proper dining room. “Forks,” the episode chronicling Richie’s training with the attentive and ebullient Chef Terry (Olivia Colman) and her headwaiter Jessica (Sarah Ramos), is another of the show’s best.
But the relationship between Richie and Carmy remains rocky, as the Bear’s problematic kitchen keeps interfering with Richie’s attempts to keep the front of the house well-organized.
What happens next?
There are a few dangling plot threads unrelated to the success or failure of the Bear.
At the end of Season 2, Carmy’s intense stress — coupled with his worries about the Berzatto family’s history of depression, substance abuse and self-sabotage — wrecked his budding romance with Claire Dunlap (Molly Gordon), a medical resident he’s had a crush on since boyhood. But last season it was plenty clear that Carmy still pined for her. At the same time, Richie was debating whether or not to attend the wedding of his ex-wife, Tiff (Gillian Jacobs), and her rich fiancé, Frank (Josh Hartnett) — who is, annoyingly, a pretty nice guy.
But the two biggest unresolved plot points going into Season 4 center on Sydney’s decision about the potential new job with Shapiro and what effect the Tribune review will have on the restaurant’s fortunes. If the Bear is going to rally, Carmy may need to rediscover the kind of person he was so often in Season 1: a true leader, driven to succeed but even more driven to make sure that everyone around him was doing OK.
For the show’s fans who were disappointed in Season 3’s thinner story lines and more melancholy tone, a return to such rags-to-riches basics might be welcome. The cinematic look, tuneful soundtrack, superb performances and artful stand-alone episodes are all fine and dandy, but “The Bear” also has a plot, which has stalled a bit of late.
To borrow a term that Carmy uses when he’s laying down the law in his restaurant, getting some narrative momentum back in this series might be a “nonnegotiable.”
The post ‘The Bear’ Is Back. Here’s What You Need to Know appeared first on New York Times.
