A concept is introduced in season 3 of The Bear called “haunting”. In the world of the show, haunting is somewhat of a joke between the Fak brothers and other characters where they essentially just mess with each other as payback in an argument. But on a more serious and literal note, season 3 of The Bear is all about being haunted. All of the main characters are haunted by the ghosts of their past while this season of the show is haunted by its previous seasons. So much of the season is told through flashbacks, living in the past the way so many of the characters do in their own minds. Carmy is obviously the most afflicted. He sees his family members, he sees Claire, he sees all the chefs that formed his culinary career. He’s so stuck in his past that while actively trying to move forward at a relentless pace, he’s really just spinning his wheels and repeating the same cycles he’s been trying to avoid. 

As a result, the season doesn’t progress much plot-wise. It is much more internal than past seasons and looks back way more often than it looks forward. This has been a major source of frustration for many fans who have been wildly critical of the new batch of episodes. They’re not wrong that this season is low on plot and high on style. The show has always taken big swings and it continues to do so. But the issues come when the show hits high highs like the episodes “Forks” and “Fishes” or even “Honeydew” from season 2 (more on all of those in my season 2 review) and fans then want every episode to hit those same beats. To give them the exact same feeling those episodes gave them. This show refuses to do that. It wants to try new things, give you new feelings. But for many fans, this creates a disconnect when they come back for more of that dish they loved the last time and the menu has changed. The shadow of the past seasons hangs over this new one in the eyes of many fans who had different hopes and expectations of what it should be. 

I actually think the show suffers the most when it tries to duplicate past successes. For example, building off the star-studded surprise cameos of season 2 like Olivia Colman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sarah Paulson, John Mulaney, and many more, this season had an episode that featured John Cena as another Fak brother. Cena’s appearance just totally did not work for me. I didn’t buy him as a Fak or even a believable part of The Bear universe. It took me out of the episode and felt like a forced stunt to showcase a big name celebrity. Relatedly, the Faks have always been the furthest end of the spectrum of the show’s comic relief and I found their small moments to be so funny. But season 3 radically increased not only their screen time but the length of their bits to a point where it felt overused and started to wear thin. It seemed like the creators noticed the fans enjoyed the Faks so decided to add even more of them which defeats the purpose. Their brand of humor is best enjoyed in small doses, providing a quick laugh in a dark moment instead of dragging out a nonsense conversation over multiple minutes per episode.

But, for the most part, instead of retreading covered ground, season 3 of The Bear continues to push the envelope in new and interesting ways that either work for you or don’t. I’ve said in the past and will say again that I will always appreciate a movie or a show for taking a swing. Even if I don’t personally like it or find it to be unsuccessful, I give any creators credit for trying because doing the same thing that’s always been done or that everyone else is doing is boring. Probably the biggest risk in season 3 is episode 1, deceptively titled “Tomorrow”. Deceptive because it is way more of a look backwards than a look ahead. The premiere episode immediately throws us back into the chaos of this world but chaos in a different flavor from the show’s usual. In this instance, it comes in the form of a 36-minute-long montage telling Carmy’s backstory (that has thus far only been referenced) with minimal dialogue, full stylistic flair, and complete with almost every guest star who has ever been on the show. A huge flex right out of the gate. This is not a show begging for attention and ratings. They’ve won Emmys and Golden Globes and more. They are telling us from the jump not to get comfortable in thinking we know this show and how it works because they aren’t afraid to switch it up. One reviewer even said at times the show feels like it is daring the audience not to like it. This episode may not land for everyone but I thought it was stunningly impressive the way they were able to edit together this montage and weave a narrative through it. 

Episode 2 goes in the opposite direction from the score-heavy montage to essentially a one act play. “Next” (the title of the episode) is almost entirely one scene where characters come in and out of the kitchen and just talk. This feels like a new take on what The Bear does best. We get to see our main characters interact and talk over each other and fight like siblings and it’s stressful and hysterical at the same time. These long scenes of dialogue highlight the impossibly high caliber of both writing and acting this show has to offer and remind us this is what the core of The Bear is: these people we love, talking (yelling) in a room (kitchen).

The other side of the coin from haunting is legacy. What do we leave behind both intentionally and unintentionally? So many of the characters this season have legacy on the mind. Carmy, Syd, and Marcus discuss what they want their legacy to be both in terms of the restaurant and also in their personal lives (in an episode aptly titled “Legacy”). Nat and Richie ponder parenthood and what you pass on to your children, by choice and inadvertently. Syd and Marcus consider what they received from their own parents. Only so much of our legacy is within our control and trying to control it also shapes it. Carmy explains to Marcus how chefs and restaurants all become part of the same “family tree”.

Carmy: They would talk a lot about legacy.

Marcus: What, like, the dishes they made?

Carmy: Yeah. But also, like, um… who they would work with, you know, and what they would go on to do. Like, um, something would start somewhere, and then, uh, people would take that thing and then they would take it somewhere else. So, all these parts of an original restaurant, they would end up at a new restaurant, and that kind of thing. That would happen over and over again. And then all these parts of all these restaurants, they would sort of… You know, they would find each other. And then new people would take those parts and they would put ’em into their restaurant. And the whole thing, it would, um… It would start to happen all over again.

This quote is almost the thesis of the entire season. As the restaurant The Bear desperately searches for its identity, we spend large swaths of time in Carmy’s formative experiences. The experiences he has with other chefs in other restaurants in other places, all different and unique and educational. The experiences that influenced the chef and the person he is and that will bleed into the restaurant he creates. When asked specifically about his legacy, Carmy says, “If I were gonna leave something behind, I would want it to be panic-less, you know? Anxiety-free. And I think in order to do that, I would have to be square with everything, you know? And everybody. Um. Like, to make it good, I’d have to filter out the bad.” But that’s not really who Carmy is and that’s not what he’s projecting. In the same way Nat and Richie worry that their children will get the worst parts of them or that they might perpetuate the cycles of trauma that they themselves experienced, Carmy’s restaurant is his baby. And he isn’t trying hard enough to shield it from his own trauma. In fact, he’s actively passing it down, taking the worst parts of what he picked up from the restaurant family tree and spreading them to even more branches. When Carmy first began work on the restaurant, it seemed like he wanted to take the kitchen in the opposite direction of the brutal workplaces of his past. But somehow he has fallen back into that pattern, one that benefits no one, not even himself. Maybe this ruthless system is, in his mind, the best model he can think of for success. And he needs success more than anything right now. The only other person on the same page as Carmy is Marcus who tells him at the end of episode 2 what he needs most after his mother’s death is for the place to work. “Take us there, Bear.” Both men understand the same thing. Marcus was at the restaurant when his mother died. Carmy burned bridges with almost everyone in his life trying to get it off the ground. If this restaurant is going to cost them so much personally, it better be the very best it can be. It might be the only thing they have left and left to pass down.

The mantra inherited from kitchen to kitchen in the show is “Every Second Counts”. A sign with this phrase hangs in the background of many scenes and the show often cuts to shots of clocks to further emphasize the point. Time is everything in the kitchen. But for a show so obsessed with time, this season doesn’t make the best use of it. The show’s creator, Christopher Storer, has said he initially envisioned the series as a 3 season run, but the network then ordered 4 seasons. I’m not a person who believes in too much of a good thing so this isn’t necessarily a complaint on my part, but there are definitely moments in this season where you can feel them stretching. Some montages are overlong, certain scenes repeat, and, ultimately, the plot doesn’t cover too much ground. In some moments, the season shows that time doesn’t need to be the enemy. Having to push back the finish line can be solved by looking backwards in one-off episodes like “Napkins” which explores Tina’s backstory, a true high point of the season, or zeroing in on a precise point in time like Natalie in labor in “Ice Chips”, a less successful but still powerful episode. But there are definitely moments where time feels wasted in stylistic choices when it could be better spent digging deeper into other characters. They don’t all need to be full blown solo episodes, but even just a few more scenes of Marcus processing his grief might have felt more substantive than the filler they opted for.

There is genuinely so much I want to say about this season of television. Sydney’s journey this season and her relationship with Carmy, Natalie and her mom in “Ice Chips”, the scene we get of Mikey in Tina’s flashback episode, the minimal appearance of Claire… I could go on and on. It is like Olivia Colman’s character, Chef Terry, says to Carmy in the final episode about her experience in restaurants throughout the years, “People don’t remember the food… it’s the people they remember.” This isn’t a season where you will remember specific episodes (for the most part) but rather specific scenes and moments with the characters. The little moments are really what make this show so special. It is also a season that, more than any other, feels like a love letter to chefs and restaurants. We see shots throughout of real restaurants and kitchens and the people who work there. The last episode, in particular, gives real chefs a chance to monologue about their history and share musings on the industry and their passions. And, spoiler alert, they’re not all as intense and crazy as our time with Carmy may have us believe chefs are. 

The online discourse about the season, or any show or movie for that matter, convinces us that every opinion has to be extreme. Something is either incredible or terrible. And when something is as highly praised and awarded as The Bear has been, people are just itching for a chance to take it down. We’ve lost the capacity for nuance. As a whole, this was probably the weakest season of the show. It was a little bit aimless and had less narrative structure and propulsion. Maybe intentionally so to mirror the journey and mindset of the characters, but opting for prestige and “artsiness” sometimes came at the cost of emotional connection, something The Bear typically does so well. That being said, I still very much enjoyed watching this season. I like that the creators took some risks. Some of them worked and some of them didn’t but I also think every viewer will have their own feelings on the levels of success for those choices. A weak season of a great show is still a good season. There is still so much to like here from the acting to the writing to the tone that can make you laugh and cry and send your blood pressure through the roof in the same moment. Maybe the show doesn’t always know exactly what it wants to be and spends some time experimenting with that this season. But even with any new flourishes, it can’t escape the powerful heart that is always beating under the surface, reminding us why we fell in love with the show in the first place. I would never think twice about recommending this show to anyone. The 4th and final season was shot back to back with this one so it could be coming sooner than we think. Can’t wait to get back in the kitchen!

2024 Count: 18 seasons/specials, 31 movies