The Bear

Go into "The Bear" with the right mindset and you'll discover it's the best drama on television.

If The Bear’s previous season was a letdown, Season 4 is a triumphant return to form, with raw emotion and beautiful performances.

A wonderfully nuanced and touching portrait of combatting loneliness, self-destructive rage, and bitterness and resentment through calm, trust, and compassion.

The remaining first half of this ten episode season (I only binged the five so far) are equally strong as the premiere, falling short of only the series’ absolute apex, which is of course Season Two’s famous “Forks” episode.

Much like in the unsurpassed second season, the joy of The Bear comes in watching these dedicated co-workers set challenges, find their passion and grow in their jobs as artistes.

Season 4 of The Bear is a return to form. Every character and major storyline gets their due as Carmy finally faces his demons and allows his restaurant to achieve its full potential.

Not every moment of The Bear Season 4 is perfect (and it’s still most certainly not a comedy). But, with its message that you can’t save someone else until you save yourself, it might be the most honest one yet.

On the whole, these 10 episodes have a warmer vibe that befits the show’s recurring theme of learning to appreciate the time we have with the people we love.

Whereas in Season 3 episodes would often slip and slide around a plot and a point and blur into each other lazily, the new installments are sharp and addictive, begging you to just let the next episode play on.

The show strikes a much better balance between fan service (fun with the Faks!) and forward story momentum. The new episodes have just enough of what we want from the show.

The Bear is really cooking now with an electric return to form, even if it doesn't quite hit the more consistent highs served in Seasons 1 and 2.

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.

While a greatest-hits album by your favorite artist is fun to listen to, the albums those songs came from tend to be more complete, more satisfying. And Season 4 plays like a greatest-hits compilation.

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.

It closes on what is not quite an end — that not everything ties up feels very on brand for the series, and like life, which doesn’t run on schedule — and a sort of beginning.

The Bear is a show that, at its best, will feel as deep and intense as life is for Carmy and his loved ones. And the series is at its best far more often this year than it was the last time we saw it.

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.

Payoffs big and small ping in every scene as narrative seeds carefully sown – including in that bad third season! – burst into bloom and these people we have come to adore are rewarded.

Not every course The Bear serves up is perfect, but with a final dish that sings like that, it remains an unforgettable feast for viewers.

Season 4 takes most of the story out of the kitchen and away from the action. This not only improves the pacing, but it helps to wrap up stories that can't organically come to a conclusion during a service.

While there are big emotional beats and even bigger revelations, "The Bear" season 4 frequently has a back-to-basics approach. It forgoes the experimentation of season 3 to tell a more stripped-down story — one that's easy to get caught up in.

After last year’s strangely listless 10-episode run, the season four premiere is a welcome return to form for a series that built its reputation on rapid-fire dialogue, big feelings, and harried chefs sweating into their béchamel.

Even through all the self-congratulatory needle drops, and the therapyspeak, and the achingly sincere hearts-to-heart that can sometimes suffocate The Bear in its own papillote, it still tastes good on the palate.

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.

Revisiting “The Bear” will likely always leave you nourished. But it’s drifting further away from a Michelin-level hang.

Though we get glimpses of these characters pursuing their goals, there’s not enough of them knocking around together as a group.

Get beyond the talk, inertia and emotional overload, and there's still some truth and beauty here.

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.

The Bear tries to punctuate its narrative arc with elements of magical realism, bringing back our favorite familiar faces from across the seasons, but the series is spinning its wheels.

Does it work? Partly. This season is more consistent than the previous one but also less interesting, with fewer big swings.

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.

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.

It certainly feels like the narrative equivalent of a stretch meal, with too little protein and too many empty carbs. It’s almost comical how slowly the plot inches forward. .... It’s still a superlative hangout show studded with lovely, carefully observed moments.

Season 4 can feel less like a cohesive statement in its own right than a sort of do-over, circling back to fill in gaps and pick up pieces that should’ve been addressed by now.

Although kitchen scenes can be stressful to watch, moments when the crew works harmoniously and produces perfect dishes often thrill in their precision. Yet the bulk of the new 10-episode season — now streaming on Hulu — is maddeningly imprecise.

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.

As nice as it is to be back, it’s also difficult not to notice a stagnancy setting in — as if Carmy’s inability to move on means that no one else is allowed to either.

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.