‘The Bear’ is a victim of its own success: Full review of Season 3

As well as other exciting recipes, bear‘s first two seasons established a solid mix of tradition and experimentation.

At first glance, the show seems like a workplace drama. But as we get to know the various employees at The Bear (formerly The Beef), bear Playing with its own format has only made the show more compelling. Season 1 gave us a taste of the unsettling “Review,” an intense, one-take episode unfolding in real time. Season 2 upped the heat with “Fishes,” an hour-long, nightmarish retelling of the Christmas special.

but bear The show also proved it could do more than just stress us out. Single-character episodes like “Honeydew” and “Forks,” focusing on Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), served as surprisingly calming oases in a sea of ​​screaming chefs. By shaking up its own formula, these episodes bear This work has established itself as something special, so it’s no wonder that “Review,” “Honeydew,” “Fishes” and “Forks” have appeared on various best of the year lists.

unfortunately, bear It seems the wrong lessons were learned from the success of those episodes, as the highly anticipated third season repeatedly tries (and fails) to recreate those shocking moments, delivering one tonally discordant episode after another that’s overall frustratingly lethargic.

bear In season three things went haywire.

Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear.”
Credit: FX

bear Season 3’s imbalance begins with the first episode, “Tomorrow,” which picks up the morning after the Season 2 finale. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) begins creating a new menu from scratch, recalling everything from accidentally getting locked in Bear’s walk-in fridge to the awful things he said to Richie and his ex-girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon). With the project comes memories of all his previous restaurant experiences and family tragedies that got him to where he is today.

The memories range from gentle cooking scenes to painful experiences with an old boss (Joel McHale), which neatly sums up the show’s double-edged view of restaurant work: on one side, there’s the joy of creating something that pleases customers; on the other, the obsession with perfection leads to conflict and harm. (Think “Fawkes” and “Honeydew” on one end of the spectrum of what it means to work in a restaurant, and “The Review” on the other.) Carmy’s cycle of memories, punctuated by looping ambient music, lulls the viewer into a near-meditative state. But after a while, the loop (all 37 minutes long) becomes stale, repetitive and borderline boring.

After a melancholy recollection of “tomorrow” bear Season 3 pivots to rapid-fire episodes focusing on extended conversations between Carmie, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and the rest of The Bear’s staff, then, in the third episode of season 3, pivots again to a lengthy montage detailing a month in the restaurant’s life.

The episode-to-episode changes can be disorienting, much like how The Bear’s staff is constantly teetering between competence and chaos, but when the formal inconsistencies pile up over 10 episodes, it starts to feel like co-showrunners Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo are trying to craft standout episodes rather than standout seasons.

The clearest attempt comes in the second half of Season 3. Edebiri’s directorial debut, “Napkins,” capitalizes on the success of “Forks” and “Honeydew,” building a story around Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas). However, rather than focusing on Tina’s current inner life and the challenges and triumphs she will face at The Bear, “Napkins” takes us back to the past to show how Tina came to work at The Beef. The flashback format of the episode is a shame, as we’ve already seen Tina grow exponentially as a chef and as a person since the beginning of Season 3. bearWhy can’t we focus on Bear’s growth as he gets up and running? Why must we look to the past when other character-driven episodes can ground us in the present? The episode as a whole, while featuring some great storylines, hurts in that it missed an opportunity to give both Tina and Colon Zayas the showcase they deserve.

And “Ice Chips” is the season’s later answer to “Fish,” with Natalie (Abby Elliott) going into labor with only her mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), to help her. bear It paints a more tense relationship than we saw in Season 2, with some genuinely sweet bonding and some tense arguments between the two, but just like “Tomorrow,” the pacing starts to slow down and leaves you wondering what the rest of the season will bring. bearThe ensemble is superb. “Ice Chips,” and every episode before it, feels more like an Emmy reel for Curtis’s performance than a compelling episode. why To begin with, people cared about “forks” and “fish.”

People were attracted to “Folks” and “Fish” because they bear‘s familiar (but excellent) structure. bearUnder normal circumstances, these episodes would reinforce the show’s usual framework and allow for further understanding of the characters and the reasons for their actions. But in Season 3, there’s almost no standard framework to reinforce or deviate from. Instead, the novelty of these episodes quickly wears off, and bearis the standard. If you are always doing something different, doesn’t it seem like the differences will blend into the sameness?

The sheer variety of the menu recalls Carmy’s insistence that Bear change the menu every night, a request that no one else considers feasible, and confusion ensues as characters mistake ravioli for agnolotti and cavatelli. bear Season three suffers from a similar identity crisis.

bear Season 3 is more frustrating than anything.

Ayo Edebiri from “The Bear.”
Credit: FX

With these constant changes, this season bear There can’t be any momentum. It’s not. bear Whereas previous seasons have been briskly unfolding, season three has stagnated, sometimes hinting at major plot points for a few episodes at a time but never following through.

Consider the fact that Carmie has to apologize to Claire, or that Sydney is offered a prestigious position at a new restaurant and has to decide where her loyalties lie, or that the threat of reviews has been hanging over The Bear for over half the season. These are all important storylines that have been building throughout Season 3, but none of them are resolved. The way the reviews are handled, especially in the final episode, is one of the most infuriating things I’ve seen on TV this year. It’s not so much a cliffhanger as it is an infuriating moment that leaves you hanging.

Elsewhere, bearThe film is stifled by its reliance on flashbacks of just a few seconds each. It’s nearly impossible to watch an entire episode without seeing the Fish fight, Sydney and Kermie’s conversation, or Kermie and Claire’s relationship. bear I’m going to change up these flashes a bit and take the idea of ​​best and worst case restaurant reviews from Carmy and bear You might say, but still, it’s not enough to make these montages of memories feel fresh.

Of course, the reliance on memory is more thoroughly established in “Tomorrow,” and it’s thematically relevant — Carmy is too caught up in past mistakes and past trauma to move forward, and so he traps those around him in a cycle of misunderstanding and emotional turmoil that goes on and on — but from a stylistic standpoint, the nonstop flashbacks do halt whatever little momentum there is. bear In season 3, bear It doesn’t trust the audience to connect the dots between the characters’ past and present: After Carmy repeats exactly what his former, nasty boss told him, why do we need footage of that boss repeating the exact same lines we’ve already seen? You can make the comparison without the flashback. bear If it were to be released all at once, avid binge-watchers would notice the moment right away.

bear There are bearThat said, there are still plenty of memorable moments throughout the season: the entire main cast continues to deliver great performances, particularly the trio of White, Edebiri, and Moss-Bachrach, plus discussions of everything from tradition to why chefs cook in the first place provide strong emotional touchpoints throughout.

It’s a shame that so much great stuff gets lost in a pile of dissonance and odd stylistic choices. bear Season three feels like an overlong, repeated experiment that never quite pays off, and perhaps would have benefited from one of the non-negotiable principles Carmy is preaching this season: less.

All Episodes bear Season 3 is currently available on Hulu.