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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
132
Mixed:
19
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
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:
The show still lacks the balance its first two seasons were able to find, and by now, some of its moves have become familiar enough to lose their sheen of novelty. But compared to its predecessor, this season is the better, more appealing, and more confident version of The Bear.
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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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Jul 15, 2024
Season 3 Review:
By the end, many of the questions of season two remain, particularly the types that one might expect a TV dramedy to rush to answer: the resolution of ongoing conflicts and the will-they-won’t-they of a romance. In the end, though, it hardly matters, as Storer has managed to keep the center of interest away from such plot-driven considerations.
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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 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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IndieWireJun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
Subtle episodic arcs and set-ups are enough to hold the season together, even if its overall inertia doesn’t really test those ties. There’s a time to let it rip and a time to let it be. “The Bear” Season 3 doesn’t quite strike the right balance (like the previous season did), but it serves up enough suitable side dishes to satiate diners until things really get cooking again.
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The TimesJun 27, 2024
Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
Veracity is tempered by the show’s appetite for contrivance. Barnburner monologues give way to dialogue so repetitive it might as well be a Meisner exercise.. .... The show’s highs remain incredibly, dazzlingly high, and its ability to overwhelm you is thrilling — it’s the front car of the roller coaster for 10 episodes.
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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The 10 episodes that dropped late Wednesday pretty much say there's nothing to worry about here. In fact, a few of these do gently temporize, and at least one treads water, but there are also four which are flat-out great (more on those in a bit). A pleasure as always if hardly perfect, this balance seems about right for a series that explores the gulf separating craftsmanship from genuine artistry, and whether perfection can bridge it.
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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:
In many ways, The Bear’s latest season is the same circus of agita and the beauty of human connection it has always been. .... But The Bear, like the in-show restaurant, is clearly undergoing a transformation, one that may prove that the fans who were perplexed by the show’s inclusion in the comedy awards categories were right. And it’s not an entirely successful transformation.
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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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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The level of excellence established by the first two episodes and the one featuring Tina isn’t quite sustained all season long. But what emerges from the noise is a deeper, more convincing feeling of family throughout the ensemble as Carmy has to confront the light and dark influences that have made him who he is.
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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:
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:
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:
“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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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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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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LooperJun 27, 2024
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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Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
“Tomorrow” itself is an odd dish, combining ingredients that don’t quite go together. Though it sometimes feels like a dreamy (and nightmarish) journey through Carmy’s psyche, it often lands with all the artfulness of a clip show, making what should be a stage-setting season premiere feel like a filler episode. Maybe Storer could stand to take his own advice: subtract.
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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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The TimesJul 19, 2023
The IndependentJul 17, 2023
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 28, 2023
Season 2 Review:
What makes the sometimes nerve-wracking, often funny, and meticulously constructed second season of The Bear much more than clever propaganda for Chicago fine dining is the core observation realized in Carmy’s character that our successes and our hindrances often share a source: our infuriatingly complex selves.
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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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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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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 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:
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, 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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Jun 21, 2023RogerEbert.comJun 21, 2023
Season 2 Review:
This season of “The Bear” is less rough around the edges. It relies on glossier, more elaborate visual statements—twirling cameras, canted angles, and vaster locales—along with a jukebox soundtrack of radio hits and a string of surprising cameos propelled by big star power.
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