“The Bear” review: Jeremy Allen White's culinary hit recaptures its fire in season 4
- - - "The Bear" review: Jeremy Allen White's culinary hit recaptures its fire in season 4
Kristen BaldwinJune 26, 2025 at 1:15 AM
Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in 'The Bear' season 4
In season 4 of The Bear, chef Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) states the obvious. "I'm not great with consistency," he tells chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), his exceptionally talented and long-suffering partner at the titular restaurant. This is not news to Syd, nor to fans of The Bear itself. After amassing acclaim with two excellent seasons, the Chicago-set culinary dramedy (don't @ me) from creator Christopher Storer stumbled in 2024 with a slow and self-indulgent third outing.
Lots of great shows make mistakes; fewer can course correct their way out of disappointment. Thankfully, The Bear is one of them. Though not quite at the level of the sublime second season, the new episodes put Carmen and company back on track by allowing them to confront, at long last, "the f---ing elephant in the f---ing restaurant."
As the trailer reveals, the Chicago Tribune review was not a rave, and when we rejoin our chefs at The Bear, everyone is feeling a little stuck. Carmen, having fallen asleep on the couch, literally wakes up to Groundhog Day playing on his living room TV, while Sydney still can't decide what to do about the job offer from Adam Shapiro. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is struggling to find the perfect inspirational words for his pre-service speeches to the staff, but nothing sounds right.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jeremy Allen White in 'The Bear' season 4
That stasis is broken, though, when Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and Computer (Brian Koppelman) arrive one morning and put a literal countdown clock in the kitchen. If The Bear can't turn things around and start making money by the time the clock hits zero, the restaurant "needs to cease operations," Jimmy explains. With this season's looming deadline in place, Richie recruits the house staff from Ever — Jessica (Sara Ramos), Garrett (Andrew Lopez), and Rene (Rene Gube) — to serve as a kind of culinary Avengers and help bring order to the operation's chaos. But as you may have guessed by now, Carmy and his kitchen family will not be able to make their restaurant a success until they figure out who they are outside its four walls.
Initially, the return of the Ever staff made me nervous; one of last season's biggest weaknesses was an overreliance on callbacks to The Bear's greatest hits. This year, though, the show strikes a much better balance between fan service (fun with the Faks!) and forward story momentum. The new episodes have just enough of what we want from the show: those exciting, fast-paced dinner-service scenes, a carefully curated Gen X soundtrack (R.E.M., Talk Talk, The Pretenders, Bryan Ferry), and moments of classic Bear cacophony, with Richie and Carmen barking at each other while Carmy's sister, Sugar (Abby Elliott), hisses at them to lower their f---ing voices already.
Still, season 4 is at its best when the yelling stops and the cousins are forced to listen — and be heard. Clocks are everywhere: The large black box counting down the seconds until The Bear runs out of money; a flashing "12:00" on a home range; the digital timer Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) uses as she tries to finish a pasta dish in under three minutes. This type of imagery has always been a big motif in The Bear (every second counts, after all), and now it extends beyond the kitchen, as the characters start to understand that it's not just the restaurant that's running out of time — it's all of us, every day. The realization pushes several of them, Carmen included, to say the really scary stuff out loud — to Syd, to Richie, and yes, even to his estranged mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis).
The cameo-packed, super-sized episode is becoming a Bear tradition, and this season's takes place at a festive gathering where lots of Berzattos are in attendance. Though the celebrity sightings are fun, the most powerful moment in the 69-minute installment comes when two people, Carmen and a relative who shall remain nameless for spoiler reasons, have a quiet conversation in an empty room. They talk about guilt, about Carmen's late brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), and about the importance of not "keeping everything so locked up." The episode — which also features a payoff to a long-running mystery and an impromptu family therapy session courtesy of Richie's daughter, Eva (Annabelle Toomey) — is a beautiful complement to the pandemonium of the Emmy-winning "Fishes" from season 2. Alluding to that Christmas catastrophe, Carmy's relative urges the young chef to stop being so hard on himself for fleeing his family's dysfunction: "Sometimes to break patterns, you gotta break patterns, man."
Ayo Edebiri and Liza Colón-Zayas in 'The Bear' season 4
A simple conversation is also the centerpiece of the season's most unexpected and delightful episode, written by Edebiri and Lionel Boyce, who plays The Bear's introspective pastry chef, Marcus. In it, Syd finds herself babysitting a friend's tween daughter, TJ (Arion King, a star in the making), and the two spend the afternoon talking about a sleepover TJ isn't sure she should attend. By the end of their time together, Syd's able to sort through key questions she has about her own career.
Edebiri is a phenomenally talented comedic actress; she can turn a reaction shot into a punchline with one exasperated nod. None of us may be able to agree on whether The Bear is a comedy or a drama (I fall in the latter camp), but few would dispute that it's currently the best-acted show on TV. White continues to find new ways to embody Carmy's inner turmoil and miserable mien, and Moss-Bachrach makes Richie's hurt so palpable that when he lashes out, we feel it like a punch to the gut. Storer ensures that everyone in the stellar (and expansive) ensemble gets some time to shine, highlighting the earnest ambition of line cook Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson); the gentle way Sugar gets through to Carmen in his darker moments; Tina's maternal wisdom; and the chattering comic relief of the Fak brothers (Matty Matheson and Ricky Staffieri).
Though this season is a big improvement over the meandering, montage-filled season that preceded it, The Bear still grapples with pacing problems. The super-sized episode mentioned above definitely would have benefitted from more time in the editing bay, and Storer still allows himself to take the show on tangents. Sometimes, these narrative adventures work (see: Kate Berlant, as a woman in Carmy's Al-Anon group, absolutely crushing an episode-opening monologue). More often, they slow things down (see: Carmy, in that same episode, taking a field trip to a museum... for some reason).
"People go to restaurants to be taken care of," muses Carmen in the season four premiere. There's a tragic kind of symmetry in the way Carmen Berzatto, a guy who grew up in household devoid of nurturing, later devotes his life to caring for strangers. The kid may not be great with consistency, but he's making some real progress. Grade: B+
All 10 episodes of The Bear season 4 are streaming now on Hulu.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: AOL Entertainment
