The Bear Season Four Serves Up the Same Tired Meal

In the last season of The Bear, brilliant but troubled Chicago chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) was stressing about the opening of his fresh fine-dining restaurant, dealing with past family trauma, and struggling to embrace a romantic relationship due to his hangups about intimacy and vulnerability. Carmy’s innovative partner/confidant/friend Syd (Ayo Edebiri) was debating whether to leave the Bear and strike out on her own. Family friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) was trying to find his place as the maître d’hôtel of the restaurant, while also contending with the personal pains of his shared history with Carmy.

In the fresh season of The Bear, brilliant but troubled Chicago chef Carmy is stressing about the opening of his fresh restaurant. The family trauma is still being dealt with, and he’s continuing to pine for Claire (Molly Gordon), the one who maybe got away. Syd is still weighing that career change, and Richie is yet again blustering about, making a clamorous mess of things but doing good in the end.

All that’s changed, really, is that a Chicago Tribune critic has given the Bear a mixed review—complimenting certain aspects of the fussy-seeming restaurant but also dinging its pretension and lack of focus. Which is engaging, because that’s also what some critics have said about The Bear.

Season four was shot back-to-back with season three, so this run of episodes couldn’t have been inspired by the backlash to the show. But there is nonetheless a hint of meta awareness here. Bear creator Christopher Storer knows the nays some might say about his show, and he’s ready to greet that criticism head-on.

But he’s not really willing to make alterations, either. Season four mostly doubles down on all the most frustrating aspects of the series—the problems that have plagued it from the very beginning. It keeps using folksy rock tunes from the beige and weary days of the last quarter of the 20th century to indicate emotion, often underscoring what would otherwise be totally prosaic conversation. Characters behave erratically, sometimes unintelligibly. The Bear suggests that you really can’t bring these people anywhere lest they have some kind of breakdown or outburst—yet we are supposed to find that charming, idiosyncratic, human.

Everyone is upset all the time on The Bear: watery eyed and distracted, a camera hovering close to their face, some crinkly song telling us to feel for them. But Storer barely articulates where all this emotion is coming from until the very end of the season—then it turns out to be the same ancient shit from season one. Growth is in miniature supply on The Bear, save for a few effective moments when a character actually makes a decision—to move on, to forgive, to love, whatever. Maybe that slowness is indeed how people process things in real life, but it makes for fatally inert television.

The performances suffer for all this repetition. White is very good at being bleary, stringy haired, aloof yet soulful. But what once played like gripping realism has been reduced in the show’s saucepan to a mere performance of Carmy-ness. Edebiri stammers and blurts as ever, only really connecting when Syd slows down and lets the audience register the intended meaning of a scene. Moss-Bachrach is saddled with the show’s most cartoonishly written main character, and, bless him, he does manage moments of supple feeling. But then the scripts send him zigging and zagging away from that clarity; you can practically see Moss-Bachrach straining to hold on to the character.

One of The Bear’s great prides is its sprawling ensemble, which ranges from actors fresh to the game (like real-life chef Matty Matheson) to seasoned pros (like Oscar-winners Jamie Lee Curtis and, this season, Brie Larson). Storer’s chief direction to all of these players seems to be “act natural”—naturalism being the great religion of this series. But the harder the show tries to honor that god, the further it gets from its teachings. Storer seems to think that intimate, familiar human interaction is defined by twee detail—like, say, every woman on the show addressing Matheson’s character like he is a child, or a huggable puppy, or some combination of the two. It’s cloying and nonsensical and wildly overshoots the argot it’s aiming for.

That overly mannered approximation of closeness animates much of the show’s rambling crosstalk, perhaps most gallingly in a 69-minute-long wedding episode that is meant to be the heir apparent to the large family dinner episode from season two, “Fishes.” The wedding episode is, at least, quieter than that exhausting scream-a-thon. But it also meanders into storylines so far afield of the central focus of the series that it begins to feel like a backdoor pilot for a maudlin family drama. (Much like “Fishes” did, come to think of it.)

Meanwhile, other staffers of the Bear are left out in the cool. Liza Colón-Zayas won an Emmy for her work on the show last September. (The Academy was recognizing season two, though season three had already aired—and season four had been shot—at the time of the ceremony.) This season, she has been rewarded with a plotline about cooking pasta quickly. That’s it. Here and there The Bear will turn its gaze away from the white family drama and give Colón-Zayas’s Tina a few moments to fret over putting cavatelli in red sauce and grating some parm over it. At least Edwin Lee Gibson’s Ebraheim gets something like an actual arc this season.

I haven’t mentioned much else about season four’s plot because there’s little to report. Wheels spin and spin and spin until there is a climactic fight/reckoning/reconciliation that probably should have happened last season. I’m all for challenging television conventions, but The Bear’s iconoclasm would ideally be housed in something less tedious and self-regarding. On this one, I’m afraid I’m with the Trib.