The Bear: Season 4

This was a show that grabbed you, shook you and continued to smack you around while you peed yourself a little for the effort. It was stressful and emotional and everything you kind of hoped for a family-based, workplace drama. And it is a drama no matter what the Emmys people tell us. It was adult television at its best. It was controlled, but also loose and pierced with the occasional lol moment. And food. An amalgam that caught fire and captured public attention.

And then came season four. A season that felt like a copy of a copy of a copy. Of a copy. With a dumb clock. A clock that almost felt like the show’s creators taking an exec’s note and passive aggressively being incredibly literal with it. “Look, to create tension and really bookend this season, we need the characters to be on a clock. Like a doom clock. And if they don’t get to point X before the clock expires, something catastrophic will happen.” Introduce the literal clock that Computer (Brian Koppelman) and Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) put in The Bear’s kitchen. The countdown clock that literally tells them and us that shit is over as soon as it reaches zeros. The restaurant must close, and we get a cliffhanger as to what season five will be. That’s stupid. And passively amateurish. 

As the clock counts down we spin our wheels. Or, more so, the characters do. The narrative does. Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) goes back and forth whether she should leave The Bear for a new opportunity. No, she literally goes back and forth. To a place. Away from a place. Ignoring calls and then taking calls and stammering and hedging. The dude wanting to hire her would totally be heading for the hills. But for some reason he sticks with her. I thought he was gonna get creepy with her — which would totally happen in most “prestige” shows — but, no, he just really wants her. So maybe it’s some weird racist thing? Or maybe — and stick with me here — The Bear’s writers have just decided to be straight with it. Like this dude just wants her because he thinks she’ll be the best person for the job. No ulterior motives. Just a guy trying to start a business with the best chef he can hire. Weird.

Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) is equally earnest. Spending the entirety of the season apologizing to everyone and trying to make amends. Trying to be a better restaurant owner, a better boss, a better friend and a better person. Same with Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Though his road to being a good guy seems to just have materialized out of nowhere. Maybe he was just always this guy, but now he’s almost saint-like and also sage-like. And herein lies the issue. We’ve become so used to the cynicism. The twists. The reveals. The characters we thought were good turning out to be shitbags. The people we thought were shitbags turning out to being good, but flawed people. Manipulation. Backstabbing. All the stuff that makes for drama. So if all of your characters just turn out to be exactly who you think they are — and who is presented on screen — it makes for a pretty flat experience. Especially when you remove the volatility and character growth that came to define the show. And yes the characters were always good, but flawed, people at heart but now with everything laid bare, the flaws mostly stripped away and everyone in the TV show attending the equivalent of AA, it’s honestly pretty dull.

The whole season ultimately felt like a clip show. Snippets from season one through three with all the highlights stripped out. Everything kind of muted and robotic. But sometimes bordering on cheese. And I do think that Jeremy Allen White is a good actor, but there are moments — a lot of them — that his pursed-lip, wet-eyed thing reminded me of Jay Mohr’s classic Andrew McCarthy impersonation in the “Sassy’s Sassiest Boy” SNL skit. His silent eye-fucking of his existential dread for ten episodes is just too much of the same. As is the entire season. Some shots of some food, lots of “I’m sorry” and a bridge to the end. Not exactly a compelling reason to watch unless you’re a completest and expect more brilliance to come after stasis.