A storm is brewing. We’re circling the drain. The shelves are bare. Cracks are being papered over. Everything’s at boiling point. The Bear just dropped its final season and the visual metaphors in these new episodes are painfully unsubtle. But they do offer some neat parallels to the series itself.
What was once the buzziest show on TV has been largely abandoned by its audience after two lacklustre seasons derided as “aimless” and “undercooked”. Though the show still has its defenders, it’s a cultural dropoff the likes of which I barely have a comparison for in my past decade of covering television. At least, despite the bad writing, people were excited for closure on Game of Thrones.
Now, creator Christopher Storer and his team face the same question as Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) standing at the door of the prestigious restaurant he worked so hard to build: will people turn up for one last serving?
Should you watch season five? An honest review
If you tuned out of the series because the past two seasons were too slow or contemplative, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by this final instalment. We’re thrown back into the kind of manic action that characterised season one, with the entire fifth season covering one chaotic shift.
Uncle Jimmy’s countdown clock to financial ruin has stopped ticking, the credit cards aren’t working, deliveries have been declined, and the restaurant is being literally submerged in a torrential downpour drowning Chicago. Through all this, Syd (Ayo Edebiri) and Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) are also icily at odds, with the story picking up the morning after Chef Carmy has decided to step back from the restaurant he worked so hard to build.
The Bear is often compared to The Pitt for its “competency porn” – both shows characterised by hard-working people accomplishing difficult things. That pleasure is front of mind here, as the odds are carefully stacked against our talented and tormented underdogs and the stakes are raised with a Michelin star on the line (yes, “star man” is officially in the house). But this is the first time the show has also shared the medical drama’s real-time structure, which provides a much-needed sense of momentum and narrative cohesion.
“We’ve got no f—ing money,” Richie tells the staff in a rousing pre-service speech. “We barely have any f—ing food. And we are understaffed – and we have each other, you know? We got each other right now.”
While that kind of forthright sentimentality might have been previously met with loving looks over a dawdling Wilco track (no shade, I also dig dad rock), we instead cut to the characters like they’re superheroes – the entire thing soundtracked by a propulsive synth-laden Hans Zimmer score (yes, the Academy Award-winning composer behind Dune, Interstellar and Inception) that swings effectively between fear and joy.
This also marks the first time the show has really made the binge model work in its favour. These are episodes best watched in quick succession rather than slowly savoured, and – if you’re still emotionally invested in this journey – you’ll find yourself smashing that next episode button to see what happens next.
Longtime fans are rewarded with cute winks along the way. A restaurant patron invited into the kitchen operates as a brief stand-in for the audience, at one point getting overly enthusiastic with the now-iconic “yes, Chef” catchphrase; the persistent “theories” of a Syd/Carmy romance get a knowing shoutout; and the season opener features our most absurd Paul Rudd moment yet via a cardboard cutout of the comic actor (fans have been chasing Easter eggs about Rudd ever since he appeared to have an uncredited voice cameo as a hallucinated video game character in the first season).
Those who tuned in to Gary, however, will be surprised to see that the shock ending of that standalone episode seems to have literally no effect on the plot (until the final episode of the series at least, which was not provided for preview). If that holds true to the end, it’s a very cheap trick to hook viewers back for the final instalment.
But should you give it one last shot? It’s not must-watch television. It doesn’t reach the heights of the series at its peak. But it’s a fun ride with some old friends. And the upside of the interminable character stasis of the last two seasons is that it’s pretty easy to jump back in without missing a beat.
Remembering The Bear
Defenders of this critically acclaimed show will think I’m being far too mean. Seasons three and four, the argument goes, are deliberately slow and repetitive. The story is centred on people who are stuck – between the past and the present, between versions of themselves, between cycles of trauma that are seemingly destined to repeat. The show is representing that stuckness, artfully giving space to each character’s interiority before stitching it all together into a finely crafted family portrait.
I get that. But that doesn’t make it entertaining or, after a certain point, worthwhile. Some reviewers have been gaslighting audiences into thinking the fact “the second half of [season four] is like one long therapy session” is a good thing. It’s simply not good storytelling if all your characters – hospo workers from Chicago, no less – now speak in earnest twee aphorisms, all huddled under the world’s largest table at a wedding.
But it’s especially frustrating because we know how well this show can deliver those same emotional truths. Remember Forks? That 32-minute episode from season two – where Richie worked at Ever and peeled mushrooms with Olivia Colman – delivered more character development and clarity for the foul-mouthed front-of-house manager than Syd, for instance, was granted in the entire series.
We implicitly understood how the events of that episode changed him, not because he artfully articulated any deep truths about his character but because of the joyful way he screamed Taylor Swift’s Love Story in his car.
I think when we look back on The Bear, we’ll remember it at its best. There’s a reason we know certain episodes by name: Fishes and Napkins also come to mind (the latter a rare standout from season three). But I also don’t begrudge it at its worst.
As Moss-Bachrach said in a recent interview, The Bear was never anticipated to be a hit. The entire cast and crew were surprised when the world fell madly in love with this “strange, soft-boiled, red-headed stepchild of a show … about people trying to make sandwiches together”.
I love that there’s still space in our TV landscape for those kinds of surprises to find us – and enough creative freedom for them to find (and lose) their footing.
The Bear is streaming now on Disney+.
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Meg Watson is deputy TV editor at The Age and Sydney Morning HeraldConnect via X or email.
