Jeremy Allen White and Carmy Berzatto.
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Season 3 of The bear is available now from FX on Hulu. The overview below contains details of the season.
The bear is a show about scars and ghosts, because in so many ways it is a show about consequences and grief. Of course, not all scars are visible and not all ghosts are dead.
Early in the excellent third season, we find Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) alone in the dark, the morning after the tryout night at his new restaurant, staring at an old scar on his palm and thinking about people who aren't there. People who have died, but also people he has hurt, people he doesn't know how to talk to, people who have changed him for better or for worse.
The episode unfolds from there not in a straight line, but as a looping, layered look at multiple pieces of Carmy’s life, stacked on top of each other like a stack of pancakes that you can slice through and expose at once. One of them is this difficult morning after he got locked in the walk-in refrigerator. Some are about events in his family—Mikey’s death, and saying goodbye to Nat when he moved to New York years ago. Some are about Claire (Molly Gordon), whom he kisses in brief flashes. But mostly we see Carmy’s experiences in various kitchens in Chicago, on the East and West Coasts, and in Copenhagen. We see him and Luca (Will Poulter) working for chef Terry (Olivia Colman). We see him learning from chefs Daniel Boulud, Rene Redzepi, and Thomas Keller, all appearing as themselves. We see more of the damage done to him by the cruel New York chef played by Joel McHale.
While it doesn't offer the same pleasures we're used to, like seeing this large cast shouting back and forth, the episode is an example of The bear's greatest strength. Despite its success, the show is always creatively restless. This is not a conventional TV episode, let alone a conventional season opener. It's moody and disorienting, it doesn't advance the plot much, and it may take a few views to understand where you are. If episodes dropped one by one, this opener could leave an audience cold. But with multiple episodes available at once, including a much more typical second episode where the restaurant tries to prepare for the real opening night, creator Christopher Storer and the rest of the creative team can get away with this kind of experimentation, so they do it .
Ebon Moss-Bachrach as cousin Richie.
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The same goes for the episodes that distance themselves from Carmy and Sydney and Richie, even though those three characters are so beloved and fascinating. There are no epics this season on the scale of season two's brilliant “Forks” and “Fishes,” but there are more intimate opportunities to visit with the rest of the cast. Ayo Edebiri (who plays Sydney) directs “Napkins,” a standout episode about Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas). It's not without reason that 'Napkins' also features the strongest scene the show has ever done with Mikey (Jon Bernthal), The bearThe Greatest Ghost of Them All. Abby Elliott and Jamie Lee Curtis hold “Ice Chips,” in which Nat's mother, Donna — also, in her own way, a ghost — isn't the person Nat wants by her side as she prepares to give birth, but Donna is the one she has.
It's this constant push-push-push against the obvious next move that The bear compelling. What got so much praise in the first season was The Beef's dirty, loving screams, so they ditched it for the team's move to fine dining in Season 2, which opened up new possibilities for stories of learning and self-actualization.
And now that The Bear exists and can serve food, the focus shifts again. Because what's at stake, especially in the latter part of this third season, are questions of creativity and excellence. There is, in the real world, one urge to de-romanticize abusive behaviors that have long been written off as part of an initiation process you have to go through to make it big. And The bear dives headlong into its own exploration of toxicity and hard work without ever crossing the line into didactic posturing. Instead, it returns to the two big guns that give it the gravitas and emotional scale it maintained in its first two seasons: scars and ghosts.
Carmy’s ghosts in the industry are good and bad. He’s worked for Chef Terry, who’s kind and creates an environment of high standards but humane treatment — and her restaurant, Ever, has transformed Richie’s life, too. But Carmy has also worked for the violent nightmare of a boss played by Joel McHale. The scars of that job are in his fear and self-flagellation, but also in small habits like the neatly cut label tape he affixes to deli containers and the handles of saucepans.
It would be nice to believe that Carmy could never become Joel McHale. But when he reveals his list of “non-negotiables” for The Bear, it’s not so much the items on the list as the manner in which he delivers it – like an impatient authoritarian – that seems ominous. He’s become obsessed with getting a Michelin star, declaring that the menu will change every day, upending the economics of the business and the work done by Sydney, Richie, Nat, Tina, Marcus and everyone else who works there.
Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu.
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This is also a very strong season for Sydney and Richie. Edebiri perfectly captures Sydney’s reluctance to commit to Carmy, as his obsessive focus on quality and performance becomes self-destructive. And Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who discovered he was born to serve food while appearing in Ever , tries to protect his dining room and his right to run it. It’s their complicated love for Carmy (and each other), and his for them, that gives all of this such emotional urgency. After all, the idea of Carmy becoming one of Sydney’s unhappy ghosts is almost too much to bear, and the lack of reconciliation after Carmy and Richie’s bitter fight through the front door casts a shadow over any success they may have together. (Claire’s character, who even felt underwritten last season, is a much less effective emotional lever, especially now, when she’s almost entirely spoken about but never seen.)
There are, of course, things about the season that don't work so well, though most of them feel less like failure than excess. There's a little too much of the Fak family, headed by Neil, played by Matty Matheson. Neil is a brilliant creation, brilliantly played, and when he participates in conversations with the entire staff, his presence is crucial in getting the balance of those scenes right. But as the Faks multiply over the course of this season, they get a little crazy, and are also the source of the only guest appearance from a lot of greats in the show's history who have ever strayed into the sense of stunt casting – into seemingly doing something just to do it.
Matty Matheson as Neil Fak.
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We also get less and less return from the frequent appearances of real chefs at the end of this season. A Lesson on Thomas Keller's Carmy goes on too long, and a late-season gathering of real chefs, while it has its pleasures, also feels indulgent. It's understandable that the show wants to make a spectacle of how loved it is by the real food world and how many celebrity chefs want to talk their way into episodes. But it should come as no surprise The bear gets its best acting from actors. And detouring into celebrity cameos is hard at a time when time with the main cast feels precious and the story is gaining momentum.
Speaking of which, this isn't really a season; it's half a season. It ends with a cliffhanger: 'To be continued'. It resolves neither the main storylines nor the emotional tangle created in these ten episodes. That's a choice the people behind the show made, and it honestly seems like a dangerous choice for a project that likely won't return for months. Due to the exceptional acting and writing, they may be able to get away with how anticlimactic it is (so different from the big thunders of the past two seasons), but it might have been better to some resolution to something.
All in all, this remains a hugely creative, daring show that is full of both expected and unexpected pleasures. The fact that it doesn’t repeat its successes, but tries to reshape itself each time, is perhaps like Carmy’s ever-changing menu: it may lead to a certain number of failures, but it’s a way to show and share what can be done.
