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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
132
Mixed:
19
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Jun 28, 2024
Season 3 Review:
Jeremy Allen White and the best ensemble cast on TV go slower and cut deeper in a third season of tracking a dysfunctional Chicago restaurant family in the art of making art and emotional chaos. Dizzying, demanding, and utterly dazzling, it’s an indisputable TV classic.
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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
There are only so many times and ways a critic can hail a show for continuing to top itself. To say “The Bear” does not do that in its third season isn’t an indicator of failure, though, but a proposal that we realign our thinking about it to consider the newest episodes as part of a successful continuum.
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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The Bear‘s brilliant blend of overstimulating mayhem, precision, and catharsis is a special place onto itself. Season 3 grills, sears, then professionally plates your heartstrings, right before cruelly tossing them in the trash, and no matter what becomes of Carmy’s rising Chicago hot spot in the future, the show will leave an enduring legacy on television.
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TV Guide MagazineJul 20, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Brilliant second season. [24 Jul - 13 Aug 2023, p.4]
The GuardianJul 19, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The writing remains incredible. Fleet, funny (it’s one of the rare purveyors of convincing naturalistic jokes and jibes between friends and colleagues), and always moving seamlessly from light to dark moments and back again as only people as deeply connected as these can do, it never makes a false move.
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Jul 14, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The Bear Season 2 is perfect. From the performances to the pacing, the second season provides propulsive stakes for the story to build towards, while having the confidence to invest in side journeys that make the ensemble of characters far richer and best prepared for the ultimate challenge of making The Bear succeed.
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Jun 23, 2023
Season 2 Review:
This roaring rager of a series—the “Succession” of chef shows—is better than ever as a blazing cast, led by Emmy-bound Jeremy Allen White, deepens the characters as they open a new Chicago restaurant and serve up TV at its brilliant, blistering best. It only hurts when you laugh.
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Jun 22, 2023
Season 2 Review:
It takes everything that made “The Bear” distinctively alluring — not just the insane level of kinetic energy on display, but the wit of the writing, the off-kilter shifts in dramatic focus, and the contributions of a practically flawless ensemble cast — and makes it bigger and even more probing.
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Jun 22, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The series isn’t a fluke. It’s as good as we thought it was last year and, maybe, even a little bit better. When you see the fulcrum at home, you’ll understand what pokes “The Bear.” In a word, it’s phenomenal. And the series is, too. It proves “every second counts.”
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The GuardianOct 5, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The Bear is half-hour gobbets of kinetic, pressurised, propulsive brilliance with occasional moments of stillness that make you see how much has been done in order to serve up something so delicious. This is a show that has been meticulously prepped, simmered, reduced, balanced and eventually plated up to perfection by the creator Christopher Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo. Dig in.
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The TelegraphOct 5, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The Bear gets the balance between atmosphere and story, sour and sweet, just right. At a time when big budget TV, with things such as House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power, has decided that more is more, The Bear is a real palate cleanser. It’s a masterpiece in reduction - and the sauce has bite.
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Jul 13, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The Bear is horrifically stressful; it’s also thrilling, ambitious, funny, devastating. ... The show ends with a revelation that feels almost uncannily like magic. I didn’t begrudge it, because it seems to set up abundant questions and opportunities for a second season, and series that are this thoughtful—this sly and tender and artful—are rare enough to be relished.
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Jun 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
This is a show created by people who recognize that our lives are a group project. No person is an island and we have to accept that in order to get anything done. Sometimes that process can feel like rough edges forever jabbing at your soft spots. When regular people — not a special ops unit or a group of superheroes — figure out a way to work toward a common goal? There’s nothing better. It gets me in the gut.
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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
Storer and his cast and crew have locked down the formula of what makes The Bear hum: idiosyncratic needle drops, a visual style indebted to both Chef’s Table and 1970s New Hollywood pictures, and the innate romance of dedicating yourself to a noble cause that might just blow up in your face.
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TV Guide MagazineJul 12, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The Beat is a triumph. .... While the cuisine looks great, it really is about the people. [15 Jul - 4 Aug 2024, p.4]
Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The Bear continues to make viewers laugh, dab tears and watch ravenously as the most lived-in characters on TV ply their trades and shake off setbacks. Whether they’re chatty or contemplative, you won’t be able to take your eyes off this unmatched cast and the gorgeous dishes they prepare.
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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
On an episode-by-episode basis, the third season of The Bear is as good as anything the show has ever done. Possibly better? .... Indecision can be exciting and I found the risks The Bear takes in these 10 episodes to be thrilling. But if you’re hoping to see things progress at an adrenalized rate, this is a season in limbo that reflects its main characters and their respective holding patterns. It all builds to a finale that’s impossibly joyful and impossibly miserable, perhaps as pure an evocation of the rollercoaster of depression as I’ve ever seen on television.
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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The show’s greatest gambit this time — when it could have embraced an easy and redemptive story, one in which the Bear delivers on its promise to be all things to all people, bringing together the old and the new (honoring Mikey, making space for Syd, and reconciling the regulars and the rich by offering deconstructed mirepoix as well as the OG sandwiches) — is gamely chasing the dysfunction. While still allowing for grace. And growth.
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LooperJun 27, 2024
Jun 26, 2023
Season 2 Review:
I have a handful of quibbles with the show’s pacing (there’s too much crammed into some of these half hour episodes) and its soundtrack (why so many 80s and 90s songs? Carmy and Sydney would’ve been in diapers during the Replacements’ heyday!). But ultimately, The Bear is an addictive mix of sweet and salty.
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SlashfilmJun 22, 2023
Season 2 Review:
As the characters continue to evolve, to grow, to change, to become not different characters but more developed individuals, "The Bear" takes us along with us, guiding us through several courses, each more delectable than the last. There's no sophomore slump on this menu.
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Jun 22, 2023
Season 2 Review:
If the show has very plausibly presented Carmy’s professional success as an artifact of his trauma and isolation, it has also, to its credit, gently released his stranglehold on the story to make space for quieter players such as Marcus, Lisa and Syd. (And noisier ones, such as Richie.).
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Jun 21, 2023
Jul 8, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Whatever beef I had with how The Bear made me feel, it was hard to let go of the fact that it had made me feel, and deeply. ... A show that instantly had a sense of place, had clear conflicts and character arcs, and did not seem to be following any particular Peak TV playbook.
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Jul 1, 2022
Season 1 Review:
[The restaurant, the Original Beef of Chicagoland] is in a state of complete chaos: filthy, undisciplined, and crushed by debt. All of this fuels Carmy’s mounting panic, which is matched by the series’ taut pacing, propelling us through each frenetic and poetic half-hour episode. ... The Bear is an ensemble production packed with prickly, vibrant performances.
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The Daily BeastJun 24, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It nails the mayhem and the din of flaring short tempers that makes what happens at restaurants nothing short of a continuous miracle: something as delicate and crafted as a plate of food manages to come out of all that pandemonium. ... What it also captures, however, is the beauty that lies underneath: the drive behind people so overwhelmed by their passion for the field they chose and who are so committed to the skill and the art it requires that they’re willing to submit themselves to that kind of environment. ... There’s also something emotionally elegant about The Bear.
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Jun 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Everyone on The Bear must always brace for the unexpected, and that is what makes this series so instantly compelling, tense, and beautiful all at once. These eight episodes may leave you breathless and a little dizzy. But when it’s over, prepare to say, “Thank you, chef.”
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Jun 22, 2023
Season 2 Review:
It is a true testament to the writers and actors that the series remains riveting and rhythmic amid the chaos. In lesser hands, the mayhem would be just that. In the hands of creator Christopher Storer and his writing team, it is a well-choreographed, foul-mouthed ballet.
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Jun 22, 2022
Season 1 Review:
"Bear" is nerve-wracking and a delight. The frenzied pace and the shouty, freewheeling dialogue create an intense, stressful atmosphere that reaches out from the screen and practically tenses your shoulders. But it's also about (mostly) likable people trying to do their best, and that striving energy is as addictive and satisfying as a really good sandwich.
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Jun 27, 2025
Season 4 Review:
If you loved the show before, that shouldn’t change. Having said that, you may find that the best of its recurring all-stars aren’t returning celebrities like Jon Bernthal, Sarah Paulson or Jamie Lee Curtis, but characters who represent the best of their profession. .... Luckily, “The Bear” still serves a purposeful story that earns our attention for a few precisely portioned hours that always run out before we’re ready to let go.
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Jun 26, 2025
Season 4 Review:
There are still a handful of dream sequences and surreal interludes that seem to want to underscore the show’s deep psychological curiosity, and its unwillingness to be an easy watch. But after the slow-drip, languorous suffering of Season 3, it’s thrilling to see the characters and the action move so purposefully and gratifyingly forward.
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Jun 26, 2025
Season 4 Review:
Best of all, the season justifies those early reprises. Each time the show revisits an earlier scene, it adds a layer that deepens the group’s (and the show’s, and the audience’s) sense of shared meaning. It’s a very beautiful thing to watch all those separate elements, and their associated dreams and nightmares, start to link up.
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The Observer (UK)Sep 10, 2024
Season 2 Review:
An extended mid-series flashback episode (no spoilers here) is an exhilarating tour de force. From there, the series ignites: a scorching, shooting blue flame of humour, intensity, camaraderie, disaster, passion. If it sometimes seems like a television prescription for workaholism, the professional kitchen presented as a proxy for the human soul, The Bear gets away with it.
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The TimesJun 27, 2024
Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The bottom line is that the characters haven’t been magically healed between seasons, as they are on some shows; these folks are still wrestling with the same decisions, with old wounds, with one another, and, when all is said and done, with creating a perfect dining experience.
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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
“Tomorrow” is the season’s weakest episode (and in fairness to creator Christopher Storer, The Bear never loses sight of how self-absorbed its tortured-artist chef can be). .... In Episode 3, “Doors”—a classic half-hour of frenzy in the kitchen—the season hits its stride.
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The TelegraphJun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
There is no doubt that The Bear remains among the very best shows on television, its own non-negotiables – a singular marriage of peace and chaos framed in superb camerawork and terrific performances – are all present and correct. Could it have pushed it more in season three, let it rip, strived ever more for excellence and vibrant collaboration? I know what Carmy would say.
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The TimesJul 19, 2023
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