:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(999x0:1001x2)/the-bear-season-4-jeremy-allen-white-062425-2c56fdcdffa14a3f9f519b6f48926a03.jpg)
Warning: This post contains spoilers for season 4 of The Bear.
In the first episode of season 4 of FX’s The Bear (now streaming on Hulu), you finally see the Chicago Tribune review of the restaurant that Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) has put his heart, soul and genius into. It’s a mixed write-up, faulting him for his ambition and an overabundance of creativity.
Carmy’s response is his usual one when things go wrong (as they tend to do on The Bear): he stares off into the middle distance with an expression of numb despair in his watery blue eyes, the way a poet might if he were suffering from tuberculosis and realized he’d be dead before he could think of a word to rhyme with “orange.”
Carmy is an artist, and he suffers like one.
Surprisingly, his cousin, Natalie (Abby Elliott), doesn’t exactly encourage him to hang in there until the Bear — the restaurant shares its name with the series — finally earns a star from the critics.
There’s no shame, she suggests, if Carmy should decide to hang up his apron and throw in the towel. Once upon a time, she tells him, “you found something that you love. And it’s completely 100 percent okay if you don’t love it anymore. Because the most special part about it is that you were capable of that love.”
This, of course, is how The Bear’s devoted audience may have felt after a messy, disappointing season 3 that, by the end of 10 episodes, seemed to have turned the series into a paean to high culinary seriousness, with a bunch of restaurateurs seated in a chillingly chic dining room and swapping memories and philosophies. At that point, it proved to be surprisingly easy to fall out of love with The Bear. It wasn’t as if you could send the whole season back to the kitchen.
The PEOPLE App is now available in the Apple App Store! Download it now for the most binge-worthy celeb content, exclusive video clips, astrology updates and more!
Season 4 seems to be determined to win you back, and for the most part, it succeeds. The dialogue is engrossingly knotty, the acting is uniformly strong, and — unlike season 3’s controversial premiere episode — there are no dreamy, half-hour recaps that make you wonder if you’d gotten your pills mixed up and taken a sedative. Like Carmy, who decides to simplify the Bear’s menu and reduce each dish from five components to three and then two, the season doesn’t serve up any off-putting fancy business. I’m not sure The Bear manages to completely recapture the emotionally clenched momentum of the first two seasons, but it ends on a powerful and unexpected dramatic note that brings the story almost to a full circle.
Which is another way of suggesting that a season 5 isn’t necessary. That would be like reaching the end of a twelve-course, prix-fixe tasting dinner and then being handed a brunch menu. Why keep going when you’re sated?
The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!
The narrative is shaped around two essential, important arcs. First, how will the Bear recover from that mediocre review — and can its comeback be achieved before the joint runs out of money? Second, will Sydney (Ayo Edebiri, phenomenal), hemming and hawing to herself, resolve to leave the Bear’s kitchen and work at a different upstart restaurant?
Oh, and there’s a third, lesser arc: Will Carmy, having sacrificed his relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon) in his drive for culinary mastery, be able to reconnect with her?
The narrative moves along steadily—maybe too steadily— before peaking with an hourlong episode set at the wedding party of Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs), the ex-wife of Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach ), and Frank (Josh Hartnett), who’s routinely described as a sincerely nice guy yet, for all that, never strikes me as especially sincere. (Has anyone peeked at his internet search history?) The episode has a heft and sweep that are gratifying and, you suspect, meant to please anyone craving something as momentous as season 2’s flashback Christmas dinner.
In fact, you become reacquainted with many of the less-than-likable characters from that episode, including Bob Odenkirk’s odious Uncle Lee, although he’s slightly less odious in his few minutes in the hour.
This, perhaps, is a sign of emotional growth, of hope, even if it’s as thin and frail as a thread of saffron.
The episode also answers a long-standing question: Who is the mysterious Francie Fak, a woman frequently alluded to as Natalie’s sworn enemy? Well, she’s a guest at the party too, and she arrives in high dudgeon, as if she were about to send the British fleet off against the Armada. She’s played by Brie Larson as aggressive and dauntingly judgmental — a bit of a bully. Her face-off with Natalie is clangorously funny, but also something of a letdown. This mythic figure turns out to be just another maladjusted member of the fractious, extended Berzatto family.
Then again, maybe that’s the point. Like Uncle Lee, Francie is a monster revealed to be human. And, really, aren’t all of us just so many Barzottos, wondering if we can ever make peace with our parents, our siblings and our pasts? And, having done that, will we at last be ready to deal with today? Maybe even tomorrow? As you know from The Bear, these improvements have to be taken as baby steps, and they’re excruciatingly painful.
The season, overall, seems to want to leave the Barzattos on the threshold of that sort of resolution. Syd, discussing the Tribune review with Carmy, tells him: “They didn’t like the chaos, and frankly, I don’t know if I do, either.” And the chaos does gradually diminish, like a pot of stock boiled down to a sauce. (Relax: there’s only one more food metaphor ahead.)
In the season’s most moving scene, Carmy visits his endlessly troubled mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), and they reach a rapprochement. Then he offers the truest gesture his nature allows: He makes lunch for her. This, by the way, is as good a place as any to leave the poor woman: The Bear seems to have run out of ways to deepen the character, or Curtis’s performance. The scene’s wallop, which is considerable, comes from White’s reaction — largely silent, with tears pooling in those already watery blue eyes. An Olympic swimmer could train in them.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
It’s a shame, in a sense, that a series as original and daring as The Bear —possibly the darkest show to ever be Emmy-nominated as a comedy —should feel as if it needed to try and win you back. (The Sopranos certainly was uneven across six seasons, but you could take it or leave it, like it or hate it — Tony Soprano didn’t care.) If this season is a relief, and it most assuredly is, it’s also the first time The Bear has lost its exciting, challenging edge — its nerve.
In one of the later episodes, Carmy’s Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), the restaurant’s impatient investor, displays a degree of empathy for the frustrations that have plagued Carmy and Syd. Running a great kitchen, he tells her, should be fulfilling, without all the migraines: “The businesses in the world that give the most amount of joy — or try to anyway, right? Unfortunately, they’re all just shitty-ass businesses.”The same probably goes for anyone who cooks up a great TV series and then tries to keep the ingredients fresh.
All four seasons of The Bear are now streaming on Hulu.