|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
132
Mixed:
19
Negative:
1
|
Critic Reviews
Sep 5, 2025
Season 4 Review:
It’s as confident and singular in its artistic vision as ever. But even though more is happening than there was in Season 3, it’s not quite enough to give the show a shape. Its overemphasis on character and vibe at the expense of narrative momentum leaves it repetitive and flabby. Like the Chicago Tribune’s mixed restaurant review says, it’s missing some Bear necessities — namely, a compelling enough plot.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Jun 26, 2025
The IndependentJun 26, 2025
Season 4 Review:
Like its protagonist, The Bear feels trapped in a loop of its own creation. Will the restaurant succeed? Will Sydney be satisfied? Will Carmy find peace? To unequivocally answer any of those questions would denude the menu of its most appetising morsels, and so The Bear keeps on whetting our appetites, putting only the most delicate amusement in its amuse-bouche.
Read full review
Jun 26, 2025
Season 4 Review:
Growth is in short supply on The Bear, save for a few effective moments when a character actually makes a decision—to move on, to forgive, to love, whatever. Maybe that slowness is indeed how people process things in real life, but it makes for fatally inert television.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
The TelegraphJun 26, 2025
Season 4 Review:
Every exchange is a heart-to-heart, every character is constantly trying to impart something meaningful, everyone says what is on their mind. It’s as if they are in a massive immersive therapy session. As such, the script is too often dragged down into a steaming swamp of triteness. Some of it is downright guff.
Read full review
Jun 26, 2025
Jun 25, 2025
Season 4 Review:
OG fans of The Bear know its capacity for greatness, so when scenes become too self-indulgent and overextended bits read like forced comedic relief (cc: the Faks), the series feels tonally uneven. Even if The Bear still isn’t cooking like it once was, to ignore the show’s positive attributes would be disingenuous.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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]
Jul 3, 2024
Season 3 Review:
A bafflingly bad batch of episodes that gravely misjudge the series’ appeal. .... The new season suffers from both a surfeit of ideas and a lack of vision, relegating beloved relationships to the background while larding the show with characters and story lines that fail to compel. .... “The Bear” has lost the plot—even the food looks unappetizing this season.
Read full review
The PlaylistJun 28, 2024
Season 3 Review:
“The Bear” is still a watchable show, thanks to the cast, but season three is a disappointment nonetheless. Allen White, Edebiri, and Moss-Bachrach are highly engaging, and the way Matty Matheson’s Neil Fak character steps up is interesting too, but the writing generally underserves them all in a filler, spinning-its-wheels season that feels like a placeholder waiting for season four.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
The Bear is loaded with generic conversations about Big Things and plaintive needle drops to the point of self-parody. Only toward the very end of a ten-episode season do we see some true processing of Carmy’s tortured professional psyche—it’s appreciated, but arrives too late.
Read full review
Jun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
At times, the absence of a uniting goal allows Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo to continue adding texture to the monotony of restaurant life. .... But not all detours this season are as effective, and without a fixed destination, the main narrative itself can get bogged down with repetition and stunt casting before the season ends with most storylines unresolved.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
ColliderJun 27, 2024
Season 3 Review:
This bouncing between calm and disorder should feel familiar, but unlike Season 1 and 2, Season 3 feels painfully inconsistent. There is no actual harmony between these moments, and as the show pitter-patters its way through an ocean of plotlines, the season is rendered rudderless, leading to no clear overall arc.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score