This post contains spoilers for Season 3 of The Bear.
The premiere episode of The Bear’s third season opens largely without dialogue, showing the direct aftermath of the hectic meltdown that found chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) trapped in the walk-in fridge on the opening night of his new restaurant at the end of Season 2. It’s only 14 minutes in that the first present-day words are spoken—and they are, surprisingly, an apology. Not a defensive dismissal of any wrongdoing, not a jokey quip from the bumbling handymen, not a familiar host of expletives comically launched from the next room over as yet another expensive kitchen appliance breaks. No—in its latest batch of episodes, newly released on Hulu, the hit FX series is attempting something different.
When the first season of The Bear was nominated for (and won) the Best Comedy Series awards at the most recent Emmy and Golden Globe awards, fans debated whether the show belonged in that category or should’ve been classified as a drama. The confusion is understandable: Though The Bear has a runtime (30 to 40 minutes), an ensemble cast, and a pacing more typical of comedies, it is not exactly firing off a joke a minute, and it is, at its core, concerned with what feels like no less than three interchangeable tragedies at once. Take, for example, last season’s crown jewel, Episode 6, “Fishes,” which made a splash as not only the show’s most exacting episode yet, but also its most gimmicky. It was the culmination of everything that distinguished The Bear: familial trauma, stylized chaos in the form of loud and fast crosstalk, extreme close-ups separated by incredibly quick cuts, and a haunting kitchen timer—all reaching a boiling point at an overstimulating Christmas dinner where Jon Bernthal is threatening to throw a fork at Bob Odenkirk as John Mulaney looks on, a completely bananas sentence made possible by the show’s popularity among viewers, critics, and Hollywood A-listers.
The episode has its moments of hilarity, but it’s mostly devastating, a description that aptly sums up The Bear’s place on the genre spectrum now more than ever. Season 3 turns the ethos of “Fishes” into a full 10-episode run, as the series increasingly flashes back, abandons the humor while cranking up the agita, and breaks format, forming halves and near-wholes of episodes as long nonchronological montages that double as lore-building. Those first 14 minutes of Episode 1, for instance, offer an abbreviated run-through of Carmy’s experience working in kitchens, his decision to move to New York, and how his life turned upside down when he got the call that his brother, Mikey, had died, leaving Carmy the restaurant that will eventually become the Bear. Plenty of other backstories and glimpses of the past are sprinkled throughout the season, interspersed with hazy glimpses into the future; a particular highlight in this vein is Episode 6, “Napkins,” which focuses on sous-chef Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), with direction by the show’s own Ayo Edebiri, who plays Sydney.
To be clear: This season of The Bear is markedly less funny than before, trading in profane jests in favor of fraught ruminations on the unnerving questions that lie beneath the humor. The stakes are higher for our chefs, after all. The Bear feels like it was born on thin ice during a heat wave, and the pressure is on to not only survive, but to thrive. Where there were once plenty of moments of dark and slapstick humor to cut through the stress of running a restaurant, there are now a host of characters grappling with the question of whether they are equipped to see their new venture through its rough periods. These are not easy obstacles, either—at one point, the finances go so awry in Carmy’s quest to secure a Michelin star that a character who goes by “the Computer” is called in as a lifeline.
Finances aren’t the only thing plaguing the restaurant and its crew. This season goes deeper on the idea of inheritance that has always been foundational to the series, with Carmy inheriting the restaurant and all of the familial trauma that comes with it back in Season 1. Workplace trauma and toxicity can also be inherited, as exemplified by Carmy’s clear descent into villainy of the bad-manager variety. As Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi, one of the many famous chefs who make a cameo this season, puts it, “The greatest mistake is working for a bad boss, such that what it unlocks in you is the culture you choose to create.”
But there are still plenty of family issues to work through, too. The show also approaches inheritance through parenting, as we see chef de cuisine Sydney interact more closely with her father (Robert Townsend), while front-of-house manager Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) tries to teach all the new lessons he’s learned to his daughter, and pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) confronts the reality of his mother’s ailments. And then, of course, there’s Carmy’s sister and business partner, Natalie (Abby Elliott), who is pregnant and more terrified of passing down the baggage from their volatile mother to her infant than she is of birth complications. One of the season’s few episodes that follows a more conventional format is “Ice Chips,” a standout 40 minutes that traps Natalie in a hospital room with her mother, Donna, when the former goes into labor, forcing her to finally confront Donna about the various ways her mother traumatized her as a child.
In many ways, The Bear’s latest season is the same circus of agita and the beauty of human connection it has always been. It’s still chock-full of A-lister cameos, though they don’t feel as stunty here as they did last season, since many of these stars are real chefs. There are still some jokes, with the Fak brothers (Matty Matheson and Ricky Staffieri) being the main source of riffs, though it sometimes feels like they commit too much to the bit. Sydney and Carmy are still, probably, going to be shipped by fans who take for granted their complex friendship. And the food, as always, still looks stellar.
But The Bear, like the in-show restaurant, is clearly undergoing a transformation, one that may prove that the fans who were perplexed by the show’s inclusion in the comedy awards categories were right. And it’s not an entirely successful transformation: While this season finally fills in certain gaps, like the immediate moments surrounding Mikey’s death, it leaves a lot of other threads untied. Sydney is posed with a major decision that never gets made; it is intentionally left unclear what the critical reception is to the Bear (are the flashes of reviews of the restaurant real or a part of Carmy’s deepening psychosis?); and some of the bridges that Carmy burned while locked in that fridge are still smoking. Like so many other works that dangle the next part in front of us before they’ve even wrapped up the current installment, The Bear takes the easy way, concluding the season with a “To Be Continued.” Is there still plenty of story left for another one (or two) seasons? Absolutely. Is ending Season 3 this way still a bit of a cop-out? To put it simply: Yes, chef.