After years of heated discourse as to whether The Bear is actually the comedy it’s classified as at awards season (for the record: it’s not), the final season of the kitchen drama is now taking a leap into another genre: thriller.
At the end of the previous series, Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), The Bear’s own tortured Gordon Ramsay, decided for his own mental health — and of everyone around him — it would be better if he handed over control of the restaurant to sous chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and his sister Natalie (Abby Elliott). Which is all very noble, but as the opening episodes of the new series show, he cannot fully bring himself to walk away — and he’s becoming a backseat chef to Syd.
But Syd’s got bigger problems to worry about — namely, a not-so-subtle metaphorical and physical storm that is ravaging the restaurant. As pipes burst in the kitchen and widespread flooding sweeps The Bear (“at least the water damage matches the pattern on the wall,” Richie quips), and they hit rock bottom on their finances, how will they open for what looks like their last ever service?
With much of season four focusing around the countdown until the restaurant ran out of money and had to shut, some viewers might be questioning if this “one last service, against all odds” is a bit of a reheat — and they’d be right. “This time it’s different,” Richie says; but is it really? It becomes a glaring reminder of the repetitiveness of the show, which fired on all cylinders for the exceptional first and second seasons, but has sadly ended up rather running out of steam.
What is slightly different is that creator Christopher Storer has set the entire final season over one stressful day to give it that classic thriller concept. Storer and producer Josh Senior have also Trent Reznored the tunes, creating a pulsating electronica soundscape to back the high-anxiety plating of dishes like lamb tonnato: it’s The Pitt meets 24 meets… Kitchen Nightmares.
But this pivot-to-thriller move can’t plaster up the cracks that are literally appearing all over the kitchen. It’s a similar problem with the plot, which doesn’t really take us deeper into the characters’ psyches, like we’ve been privy to over the previous seasons. For all the self-help platitudes the crew constantly dole out to each other, there’s little here that makes a real emotional impact. This lack of depth makes it predictable in parts — no prizes for guessing what happens when the Fak brothers are on the roof above the kitchen and Syd says: “Nothing else can go wrong…”. The side quest of Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and co’s mission to buy back the “air rights” to the restaurant also becomes tedious quickly.
The Bear has made household names of White, Edebiri and Moss-Bachrach — who all give strong performances again in this outing — and fans will no doubt enjoy the ride up to the final episode, which wasn’t made available to reviewers in advance. Whether Storer has managed to pull off a satisfying or emotionally cathartic pay-off will be one thing; whether he should have called “time” at the kitchen earlier is more likely to be the lingering leftovers of this once-brilliant series.
