Spoilers for The Bear to follow
As someone who has binge-watched all four seasons of The Bear immediately upon their release, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on all the things that piss me off about this show. Nothing brings an annoying propensity to use lingering musical montages as a substitute for good writing into relief quite like watching so many episodes at once. And after bingeing the show’s much-anticipated fourth season, I think I’ve finally figured out why The Bear is both impossible to stop watching — and totally infuriating.
Creator Christopher Storer admittedly chose a rich world to mine when he decided to make a show about restaurants. But so regularly he refuses to dig into the meat of the industry’s most complex issues in favor of flashy dishes and chef worship. The Bear positions kitchen work as a noble pursuit, a labor with intrinsic, creative value beyond putting food on the plate, and it certainly is. But the show never really makes a strong enough case for why this work is worth putting yourself through emotional hell, as its protagonist Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) has done for years.
Instead of examining something like the industry’s incredible reliance on underpaid, undercredited labor from immigrant cooks who never see their names in a restaurant review or the stages who show up to peel potatoes for free, Storer spends most of these four seasons of The Bear stuck inside the head of his main character, Carmy. That would be great if we ever really got to see what Carmy was thinking beyond sheer panic. When he comes to his conclusion about what the restaurant actually needs to survive — his departure — it only seems sudden and shocking because there’s been no build up to that decision, and it never really feels earned.
A lot has clearly happened between Carmy tacking up his list of “non-negotiables” in Season 3 to the end of Season 4, when he decides that it’s time to walk away from restaurants forever, but those events are never examined in any meaningful way until the very end. I guess we’re just supposed to infer that Carmy has been building internally toward a decision to leave the industry that he loves through the many scenes he spends wistfully staring off into space, soundtracked by maudlin dad rock. Or maybe the emotional arc was secretly taking place during all those long shots of characters staring at each other blankly before a conversation begins, the lengthy transition shots viewers slogged through, or the many loud arguments between Berzatto family members that never really seem to go anywhere.
Something that really frustrates me about this show is that many interactions between the characters seem so surface, so shallow, even when the writers are seemingly attempting to dig deeper. When Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) tells Carmy about how much he disliked culinary school and how he didn’t feel like he was creating value for the restaurant, Carmy can muster little more than “that sucks, man.” I get that we’re supposed to understand that these are characters who struggle to process and express their emotions, but often the portrayal comes across as flat — and sometimes just straight-up lazy writing — instead of a real examination of why it might be difficult for Carmy to meaningfully hear the concerns of Ebraheim and everyone else around him.
I also don’t think that The Bear really ever makes the case for Carmy as the kind of guy you’d go to war for. That, too, is frustrating, because if you really believed that Carmy’s culinary genius was worth all the melodramatic bullshit he causes, it might on some level justify that behavior. Tortured genius is a trope well-trodden, but The Bear expects us to just take their word for it that Carmy actually is one. He does not appear to be an especially good mentor, or even the best cook in the room. We see diners responding more enthusiastically to Sydney (Ayo Edebiri)’s cooking, which seems to simplify Carmy’s directionless chaos into actually delicious dishes.
Storer and the writers repeatedly tell us that Carmy is one of the best chefs in the world, but he never actually shows us why that’s true. In failing to look critically at Carmy’s actual skill as a chef, The Bear misses the opportunity to show — not tell — us how he is changing and growing in a way that makes him want to leave restaurants forever.
What makes this all so exasperating is that The Bear is replete with moments of greatness, and that’s why we keep watching. Because we want to see those moments coalesce into something truly exceptional, but that never happens. Instead it’s disjointed, chasing endless rabbits until Season 4’s end. I understand that the show is exasperating because Carmy is exasperating and because restaurant work is inherently that way, but there’s only so much annoyance a viewer can take. If this is actually the end, if Season 4 is The Bear’s last, the show went out doing what it does best: absolutely infuriating the fuck out of its viewers.
