Restaurants, they say, are a tricky investment – many go under within a year of opening. To that end, FX’s hit restaurant dramedy The Bear has probably done well to stick it out for four. The show, which follows tortured kitchen savant “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), and his efforts to save his dead brother’s beef sandwich restaurant, was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 2022 – that rare TV series that transcends mere critical buzz and becomes something identifiable by shorthand. Even those who hadn’t sampled The Bear might well have recognised its tone – the frantic, sweaty stoveside arguments – or its jargon. (“Yes, chef!” and “Corner!” may well be the closest thing we have to old-style TV catchphrases, D’ohs and Bazingas having long slid out of vogue.)
The initial effusive reaction held firm through The Bear’s second season, and before long it was sweeping the industry’s biggest awards ceremonies; its cast, especially White, Ayo Edebiri, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, graduated to a new strata of fame. Before you could say “brigade de cuisine”, The Bear was part of the establishment, a TV staple that shows like Family Guy or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia could parody at length and trust their audience to catch the reference. At some point, though, the imported cheesewheels came off. Season three saw the critics sour; their love affair with The Bear entered a state of bed death. A drop-off in viewership followed for season four; a one-off “special episode” that aired earlier this year seemed to come and go without acknowledgement.
The Bear’s fifth and final season, released this week, thereby occupies a strange sort of cultural real estate. It is a show that has outlived its own relevance in record time. (This is thanks, in part, to its new-season-every-summer model, in an age when most of television operates at an interminable slow cook.) But has the series actually done anything to turn viewers away? I seem to be one of the few people who have consistently enjoyed the later seasons of The Bear; when it comes to performance, writing, and tone-setting, Christopher Storer’s show remains one of the best things on TV. So what exactly is the issue?
Let’s start with the cast. On the face of it, it seems a remarkable boon that The Bear has managed to tie down its Emmy-winning cast as they’ve all blown up. Moss-Bachrach is now a blockbuster guy, rebuilt in CGI as the Fantastic Four’s Ben “The Thing” Grimm. Edebiri has worked with auteurs like James L Brooks (Ella McCay), Luca Guadagnino (After the Hunt) and Bong Joon Ho (the forthcoming Ally), while making inroads as a voice actor in big-deal projects like Inside Out 2 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. White, meanwhile, has enjoyed a conventional movie-star slipstream – in-between stints as an underwear model and “internet boyfriend” – repackaging Carmy’s whipped-dog anguish in films such as the wrestling weepie The Iron Claw, the Boss biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin sequel The Social Reckoning.
And yet the unifying fact of most of these films is that they are, by and large, crap. Moss-Bachrach’s work on Fantastic Four: First Steps was a big nothing. White’s Springsteen film was insipid and pointless, and his humiliating turn in this year’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, playing a steroidic space worm with daddy issues, was a much-mocked calamity. Even Edebiri, who shone in the comedy Bottoms (2023) and whose natural charisma made her feel like The Bear’s surest bet, has also struggled to pick the right projects. (Ella McCay? A total fiasco. After the Hunt? Beyond her range, and not a great film in any case.) For all three of them – and indeed everyone else in the regular cast – The Bear remains the strongest material they’ve had to work with. But by now, they’ve been exposed to the world in less flattering lights.
Away from the central trio, guest stars were initially one of The Bear’s great strengths: celebrities such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Olivia Colman, Will Poulter, Bob Odenkirk, and the comedian John Mulaney all featured in what initially seemed like judicious one-off guest spots. But then the show brought them back (who could blame them, really), some of them repeatedly, and they’ve started to steal focus: the beginning of season five ropes in Curtis, again, and Poulter, again – flourishes that jostle the sense of immersion and start to eat into time that could be spent on characters we actually care about.
To some extent, there is also a flaw built into The Bear’s central premise: how do you go from a show about a failing sandwich shop to a show about haute cuisine? It’s a hard change to reconcile, and The Bear has never quite managed it. (We are somehow supposed to believe that this Michelin-courting fine-dining establishment still serves sloppy beef sarnies during lunch hours.) Now, it’s admirably ambitious for a hit TV show to so resist the idea of a status quo. But the changes have often been alienating: the scrappy, ramshackle restaurant of season one was surely a livelier setting than the cold, sleek redesign of season three onwards. As the calibre of food has increased, so has the series’ fascination with it: some later episodes devote too much screen time to glossy shots of impeccable dishes, what is often referred to as “food porn”.
The characters, too, have changed, their various arcs having wended in a way that might be true to life, but lacks narrative thrust. It’s telling, perhaps, that the show’s fanbase seems to have wildly divergent expectations over what, exactly, is the endgame, down to something as fundamental as whether Carmy and Syd (Edebiri) are being set up as eventual love interests. The ships are at sea.
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That said, with its set of strong, likeable characters, and a setting made for procedural television, The Bear has the bones of a first-rate hang-out show. But it’s never leant into this, instead devouring its way through narrative ideas that lesser shows would have savoured. As it’s gone on, its tone has become ever more self-serious: the first few episodes of season five feel almost apocalyptic. (Even the soundtrack seems to lose some of its shine, eschewing, for stretches, its expertly curated jukebox in favour of a more generic, tension-building score.)
In time, I suspect that The Bear will be appreciated in waves: the initial enthusiasm has given way to disappointment, but that will soon correct to an appropriate fondness. This was never a show that redefined television, but simply one that did the fundamentals very, very well. There have been more intelligent TV shows, more inventive TV shows, and funnier TV shows, to air during The Bear’s run. But not everything has to be lobster thermidor; there are pleasures to be found in a well-made beef sandwich. And for four years, The Bear may have been the best beef sandwich around.
The final season of ‘The Bear’ is available to stream now on Disney+ in the UK
