A progression on almost all fronts, The Bear’s fourth season moves away from its early years of chefs engaging in shouting matches over trivial matters and having their issues simmer unnecessarily long in the pot, as show creator Christopher Storer finally moves the series and its characters towards an overdue adult form.
Following the mixed review by The Chicago Tribune, The Bear’s crew find their existing problem of keeping the business afloat being made harder after investor Jimmy Kalinowski (Oliver Platt) gives them a two-month deadline to turn the business around or face being shut down due to operational costs exceeding generated revenue.
With a literal timer counting down in the restaurant’s back of house, Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) hedge their bets on saving The Bear by not only tightening the operation and menu, but also by chasing their first Michelin star.
Back to basics
The Bear’s fourth outing fixes a lot of the problems from the third season. It is hard to say whether Storer intentionally went overboard with certain ingredients when he cooked up the previous season just so he could pivot and save the meal with the fourth season.
The excessive amount of the comedy from the Fak family, along with the distracting cameos by Hollywood A-listers have been dialled back. Instead of having them in every single episode, Storer – more or less – shoves them into the seventh episode Bears.
However, rather than being bogged down by the cameos, Bears quickly positions itself as the one of the best episodes of the season for an entirely different reason: character development.
It also serves as a turning point for the series, with subsequent episodes also serving as vehicles to develop not just Carmen, but also co-main leads Sydney and Richard Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).
These episodes – Bears, Tonnato and Goodbye – are critical in not only expanding Carmen, Sydney and Richard’s characters beyond who they were for the past three seasons, but they will play a role in the actors’ oeuvre as their strongest performances to date, especially for the next Emmy Awards.
Risky ending
However, it is not all smooth sailing for the season, as The Bear ends the season with Goodbye, an episode that will no doubt be the most divisive among fans and critics. Initially, there was no word on whether FX would renew their mega hit comedy-drama for a fifth season.
It seemed as though The Bear was over for good, with Goodbye seeing its three main leads arguing in an alley before abruptly ending without a sense of closure.
Thankfully, a week after the fourth season was released in bulk, FX announced a fifth season would be coming next year.
If this season had turned out to be the last for The Bear, with Goodbye being the series finale, it would have left a sour taste in most viewers’ mouths and gone down in television history as one of the most divisive endings ever.
The Bear is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
