Using a Little Fat to Cut Through the Acid - The Bear s4

It’s remarkable how one of the best shows on television utilizes all the strengths of television… except for one.

I wish I was talking about The Bear eight weeks from now, but the world we live in is one where shows have to make specific concessions to make it to air. In this case, it’s that FX on Hulu wants all the episodes of any given season to drop as one big bingeable block on the fourth Thursday in June. As such, here I am, talking about this show I love less than a week after the most recent season’s premiere.

It feels like a waste. This show could be one that fits into weeks of discourse as the goings-on of this restaurant plays out for the audience. We could be talking about what it is Carmy did to the restaurant’s ownership agreement or debate the merits of Sydney’s big decision. Perhaps FX thinks the show can’t sustain these questions week over week. Maybe they can’t.

That undervalues the show’s potential to sustain itself as appointment television. It has complicated characters dealing with emotionally rich traumas. It experiments with episodes and formats in the names of lifting up individual storylines. The best installments of this show are the ones where they get away from the format of what the show “should be” and expand what it could be.

But enough complaining about the show’s more alienating aspects. Let’s celebrate.

The Culinary Arts

One of the most remarkable things about The Bear is the way it uses process/competency porn to smuggle in a show about art and artists. From a purely stakes perspective, dramatizing artists is one of the hardest things to do. Just take the pure stakes of it all of being a painter. Not to minimize the craft of painters (who do tremendous work and it’s not a thing I could ever do), the external stakes of painting is “oh gosh I can’t use my paintbrush today”. It’s almost entirely internal struggle, but it’s difficult to portray to a standard audience. To put it crudely, the response to “I can’t paint” is “okay well shut the fuck up and go slap some color on that canvas.” Writers understand the struggle of how hard it is to write, but explaining to people “ugh I can’t pull words out of my head” is the ultimate first world problem. Just sit down, shut the fuck up, and suck them words out of your brain.

In The Bear, Carmy is an artist. He’s a perfectionist and a master of his craft. He’s also a raging douchebag, quick to anger, and constantly demanding that things be perfect. He works with other artists with various specialties and focuses. But only he and Syd have the technical know-how to be the ones in charge.

Assholery in the workplace

While the #MeToo movement is a somewhat salacious topic, one of the lesser discussed aspects of it is one about workplace behavior. It’s easy to look at the gnarly details of sexual assault and harassment and fully understand their illegality or unethical nature or moral repugnancy. When it comes to geniuses treating those who work for them like absolute dogshit, you run into a thornier issue that’s harder to separate. In a world where geniuses are geniuses because they see the world in a different way, it becomes easier for people to excuse unsavory behavior as “part of the process.”

With Carmy and his raging asseholery, it’s clear that none of his behavior is tolerable. No one wants someone screaming at them like that, and certainly not in the name of making some beef sandwich. As the show has gone on, this has become more and more difficult to reconcile. Carmy has such high expectations. He opens a classy joint with low lighting and aesthetically pleasing plates and small protions. He wants to change the menu every single day. He’s going for the Michelen star and there’s absolutely no guarantee he’s going to come anywhere close to getting it. He’s demanding perfection at every level.

In season three this hits a bit of a breaking point. The show has made it clear that Carmy’s early days as a chef haunt him. Chef David Fields (Joel McHale) is a royal asshole who demanded similar perfection, tormenting and bullying him. When Carmy confronts him in the season three finale, Fields rebuffs the accusataion, saying that the abuse he inflicted made Carmy into a better chef. It opens the possiblity that Fields’s behavior have ingrained in Carmy’s mind what it takes to be a successful chef.

The show heads for this reckoning and then……… we get a season that’s really about Carmy trying to pull himself out of thet hole. It’s extremely welcome. Season three felt introspective and a bit too over-plotted. This happens with shows all the time, especially shows that get into more and more serialization. A great example of this would be the second season of Breaking Bad, which opens with the teddy bear in the pool and then spends an entire season trying to build to that moment in the finale’s final minutes. It works in the end, but getting there feels like the show is running in place at times. The constraint is restraining, keeping the narrative from the jazzy improvization that works so well with television seasons, even short ones.

Because the three stars at the center of The Bear are in such high demand, the show chose to shoot seasons three and four back-to-back, with more than half of the season in the can back in early 2024. They shot a good chunk earlier this year (you can’t really tell), but it says a lot that showrunner Christopher Storer knew enough about season four’s direction that he could set pieces in stone before season three even aired (let alone the critiques about it took hold). It really reframes that season. It seems like this was the plan: to take Carmy into a dark place where he realizes he can’t just be the control freak who’s suffocating those around him, thereby threatening his great work. He needs to trust those around him.

Season four doesn’t go into the accountability of it all. There are still plenty of screaming matches (especially in the finale), but it does show a dude who’s trying to put his pieces together.

Not for nothing, but this rising to the surface also makes the show a more rewarding experience.

Light and fluffy happy play time

While The Bear pitches itself as a comedy (because it started as a half hour show), it really plays in deeply dramatic spaces. It has its moments that make me laugh, but that’s not the focus. Which is fine, but it also means that season three felt much darker and less fun than season two (which is still The Bear at its best).

Season four is a step up, playing in the more fun spaces while generally avoiding the pitfalls from before.

Take episode 7 of this season, the one that sets the entire premise of the show aside as Carmy, Richie, and others attend Tiff’s wedding. The show has done these sorts of one-offs before, perhaps most famously in the season two’s “Fishes”. Here, though, this is just an excuse to have all of the characters present bounce off each other in fun and interesting ways. Richie helping Frank with Eva (who is hiding under the table) is wonderful for how it presents his softer side. So, too, the Nat/Francie rivalry is an incredible runner that weaponizes the “everyone yells at each other” trope of this show and plays it for a petty, about-nothing feud. Abby Elliot is an underrated pillar of the show, but her going toe-to-toe with a pompous and bitchy Brie Larson… coulda watched an hour of that.

Even Carmy talking with Lee about the family is hardly the pain point it would have been in season three. There’s a slight calibration that they put into this season that, again, feels like it’s by design. It’s constructive rather than abrasive.

Also, who doesn’t love that giant ass table that the entire cast goes and sits under? God that was wonderful.

The thing about the show at this point is that it feels like it looked back at the previous season and accordingly toned down its more unpleasant aspects. It recognizes that it doesn’t need to go nearly so hard in order to make its complex and prickly points about the sticky thematic topics it’s trying to explore.

Snowing in Chicago

And here’s the thing… This show is great. It’s really fabulous. But it’s great because it’s so good at deploying one of television’s great strengths: characters. Carmy and Richie have a contentious relationship, but there’s also a burgeoning respect that they’ve built over the last few seasons that make moments in the finale (like when Richie enters the conversation between Carmy and Syd) so great.

It also means that Ayo Edibiri1 can easily carry episodes and show what it’s like to make a delicious looking Hamburger Helper meal for her cousin’s daughter. The show has tremendous confidence in the ensemble. While this particular one-off isn’t as incredible as the Marcus or Richie episodes in season two or the Tina episode in season three, it’s one of the things that prestige shows like this used to do all the time. When was the last time a Netflix series did something like the special mid-season eps The Bear does?

They build off what they’ve done too. The season two Richie episode (“Forks”) means there’s a foundation for the episode three side story where he makes the wishes come true for one of The Bear’s patrons. I could watch an entire series that just Ebon Moss-Bacharach learning about some client’s weird impossible desire and then doing everything within his power to make that person’s dreams come true. It was the sort of beautiful catharsis that made me start crying.

Think about how far this show has come. There’s a direct line from the Chicago pie at Ever to Richie bringing the Beef sandwich as a special surprise. This is Richie’s thing. It’s him making this dream come true. But it’s more than that. Carmy stops him while he’s en route. Despite Richie’s insistence that Carmy not fuck this up, the two of them have built enough trust that he lets the chef cut it, plate it, and present it so that it fits in the style of the restaurant. Presentation adds to the level of care and attention that Richie is trying to bring. It’s Carmy’s contribution.

There’s a harmony to it. The moment is only possible because of Richie’s impossible empathy and the pride he takes in his job as the guy in charge of guest relations. Carmy’s perfectionism and understanding of The Bear and its culinary standards enhances that moment so that it doesn’t feel like it’s something Richie slapped together. It would have worked fine without Carmy, but it sings because of what he adds. The show earned that moment. And that’s even before the snow starts falling.

The Bear handles trauma extremely well. Hell, it even convincingly portrays the difficulties within Carmy’s perfectionism and “no one understands me” genius. But it’s also a show that feels like it is slowly grasping that this family can be supportive and kind without losing the bite it so often has. It’s like the previous season gave it an almost ulcer-inducing level of acidity, and it’s rapidly developing a more balanced diet.

The new partnership deal

The final episode of the season (and like… spoilers for the whole season I guess) feels like the show playing with its strengths. There’s no cooking and no big kitchen drama. The entire episode is just Carmy & Syd, then Richie, and finally Nat all in the back patio shed just… talking. Or arguing, really. Borderline fighting. Disputing. All that.

It’s difficult to read this last episode as not a series finale. It’s called “Goodbye” and FX has yet to pick it up for a fifth season. Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bacharach, and Ayo Edibiri have all exploded off the back of this show. Scheduling is now a problem, especially in a world where a television series isn’t completely subsuming an actor’s life because of the 22-episodes-per-year schedule. If the show comes back, who knows what it’ll look like.

I admit that this finale felt like an improvised ending should it serve as one. It pays off the final vestiges of Carmy & Richie’s lingering tension w/r/t Mikey’s death. Carmy decides to step away because he doesn’t trust himself to be a chef within a context that will keep him from being a monster. And Syd, Richie, and Nat will now control the non-Jimmy stake in the restaurant.

There’s a way that it all feels too neat. And… not for nothing, but I can’t get enough of Syd and her character. I want to see her run the restaurant and get better. I want to see her succeed and thrive. I want to see Richie continue making peoples’ dreams come true and get into weird squabbles over life and shit. It’s also deeply dissatisfying for Carmy to just… walk off into the sunset like this. Yes, Carmy has started to put the various facets of his life together and exorcise his demons… but that isn’t the level of healing that it should be. To make a show about artists and cycles of abuse and not show an artist on the path of wrestling with this trauma in a way that can make him function within it feels dissatisfying. Like this is some addiction disease rather than a trauma he can work on and learn to live with. He should be able to engage with his art in a healthy way. The world is richer for it.

It feels like the work is only half done. Like this is an acceptable option, rather than the best one.

None of that takes away from this show or this season. Carmy ceding his stake in the restaurant to Syd is a great move, and one that does humble him. It would be far better, though, if he agreed to work for her because he believes that she’s as good as he says she is. Sure, maybe he needs to work it through, but working under someone who knows her stuff, whom he can respect? Isn’t that more cleansing? Wouldn’t that better help his deprogramming? That takes real humility, the sort that he so desperately needs.

At one point in the season, as Marcus is working on desserts, he holds a sifter over small puffs and slaps a spoon once to get the perfect fine blue powdered sugar over the top. It’s a level of precision worthy of a venue as prestigious as The Bear. But it means that anything slightly off stands out all the more loudly. Maybe that’s overstating the series, but the parts of it that are so good are so good that when there’s the slight misalignment I notice it.

Man, now all I want to do is eat good food and watch it again.