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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 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 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, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The ensemble chemistry gels quickly on “The Bear,” as the frenzied atmosphere draws unedited thoughts and feelings out of the staffers. Once they start to recognize Carmy’s brilliance, and let go of his late brother’s disorganized ways, their banter and mutual support is even sweeter.
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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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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.
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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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Jun 13, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Despite its eight-episode first season falling frustratingly into the tropes of the volatile, violent kitchen and the Genius Chef tasked with keeping it all together, The Bear manages to elevate its product with some strong performances and a deep well of relatable anguish in its characters.
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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.
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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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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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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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IndieWireJun 16, 2022
Season 1 Review:
While “The Bear” may not be one of the best shows in the world, its own act of service is appreciated. Storer and Calo invite us into a fast-paced, high-risk world, hoping to entertain us; hoping we can empathize with those living in it; hoping their gesture is more than just a piece of filler in TV’s content machine. And it is, for those who enjoy a little heat.
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LooperJun 27, 2024
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 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 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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RogerEbert.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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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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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 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 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 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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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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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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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 26, 2025Jun 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:
“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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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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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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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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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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