The Bear Is Trapped

Carmy Berzatto is miserable. Protagonist of The Bear and head chef of a new Chicago restaurant by the same name, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) has been borderline-miserable for much of the FX on Hulu series’ first two seasons, but in its returning third season, Carmy’s attempts at excellence only make him feel worse. He cannot stop changing the new restaurant’s menu: First the duck goes with the apricot, then the cherry, then maybe back to the apricot, except now everything has to get thrown out and reconceived from the jump. He’s so anxious about not innovating and improving that he just keeps fiddling, and The Bear does not stop to signal whether the dish is even getting better or worse — it’s just Carmy, ignoring his business partner Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri), ignoring the restaurant’s budget, ignoring the fact that tables are all booked, ignoring his friends and his family. He’s terrified of losing this thing he’s built, so terrified that it’s hard to tell how many of his decisions are honest attempts at creativity-sparking pressure and how many basically self-sabotage.

The Bear was always going to find itself in this tricky place. Externally, its first season’s breakout success was followed by a second season that was even more beloved and acclaimed. Continuing the trend of extending and improving what came before was a tall order. Within the show, too, the story has arrived at a challenging, uneasy place. Seasons one and two were driven by desperation and forward momentum. The original Beef was falling down around Carmy and the gang, and in season one, every even slightly functional adjustment became an enormous victory. Season two centered the drama of building something from the ground up, an arc with enough inherent buoyancy and promise to counteract the show’s heavier emotional themes. In season three, the drama is about how hard it is to hold onto something — not to build or innovate or tear something down but to just keep something stable. And more often than not, especially in narrative storytelling, stability looks a lot like being stuck.

So while Carmy keeps running on a treadmill that gets faster and faster and yet never seems to take him anywhere, the rest of The Bear tries to keep up. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is inspired by his time at a local Michelin-starred institution, but he can’t get The Bear’s mood quite right, and his attempt to view it as a meditative philosophical endeavor keeps running up against Carmy’s quest for back-of-house superstardom. Natalie (Abby Elliott) is gamely trying to keep a grip on the place’s financial future, but she’s also very pregnant, and she cannot stop worrying about the emotional baggage she’s going to pass down. Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) has to keep up with the new pace of this kitchen. Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is grieving his mother. Everyone’s just trying to live in this new world where the restaurant of their dreams actually exists, and it’s hard to feel like things are moving ahead when the goal is mostly to keep what they have. So instead of looking forward, The Bear spends a lot of time staring backward and sideways.

The backward focus is both logical and tedious. Characters who did not previously have their own dedicated episodes in season two now get that opportunity but as a flashback rather than as character growth in the present day. There’s a running joke about “haunting,” which begins as a bit of minor-character playfulness and then, surprise, becomes a very serious theme. Natalie has to confront how her fears about parenting are rooted in her own relationship with her mother (Jamie Lee Curtis). But the bulk of this focus lies with Carmy, who is almost crippled by intrusive images and ideas from earlier parts of his life. His ex-girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon) now exists in his mind as the flawless and sympathetic partner he could not keep and does not deserve. An even more disruptive presence, Joel McHale, who appeared briefly in the earlier seasons as a particularly cruel head chef at one of Carmy’s previous restaurants, has now returned as a constant bugbear, a bad tooth in Carmy’s mouth he cannot stop touching. The role of McHale’s character — his impact on Carmy, the amount of damage he’s done — was made amply clear in the past seasons with a level of narrative restraint that expressed exactly how awful this guy was without rubbing it in too hard. Season three is perfectly willing to rub it in too hard. Every upsetting flash to the past is now twice as long, and it shows up twice as frequently in montages that emphasize and then overemphasize the point. If this season were more invested in saying things directly, it might allow Carmy to simply stare into the camera and say, “I am deeply traumatized by this former boss,” but instead it’s flashes of McHale returning again and again to make sure we’ve got the picture.

There’s an argument to be made that this is a case of form meeting function. Carmy can’t move ahead while he’s haunted by his past, both professionally and personally; the season also spins its wheels, covering the same ground and unable to reach somewhere new. He’s stuck, and so are we. At times, that’s a compelling, magnetic experience, especially when The Bear is willing to do more than just limn Jeremy Allen White’s profile in warm light and actually allows him to exchange dialogue with his colleagues and friends. For all its eye-grabbing focus on montage edits and heart-thumping crises, The Bear is still at its most glorious when two people sit and talk to each other. More than once in season three, the show remembers how to make that feel special. But just as often, the season is characterized by emotional constipation, as everyone tries to make themselves say things out loud and often cannot bring themselves to do it.

To take some of the pressure off of its constant retrospection, The Bear also nestles itself into a sideways version of reality. If it cannot let Carmy and Syd progress, it can still anchor the show more insistently in the present, which it does by taking an almost documentary approach to the show’s fictional space. Richie’s fine-dining establishment from season two is now explicitly called Ever, the real-life name of that restaurant. And while The Bear attributes this Ever to fictional head chef Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman), it also incorporates several legendary and up-and-coming real-life chefs, and their signature dishes, into the world of the show. As The Bear struggles to secure its spot in the landscape of important American food, The Bear insists on claiming its own place there with a roster of guest appearances that aims at celebratory and lands a little too close to smug. Once again, it’s as though The Bear no longer trusts its viewers to see its sublimated themes. Instead, Tina has to stroll through a farmers’ market and nod happily as a seller tells her that food that “grows together goes together.”

Despite its season-three missteps, though, The Bear is still one of the most interesting shows on TV. For every bit of preening self-congratulation, there’s another moment that can knock you sideways. For every overlong scene with the now-tiresome Fak brothers, there’s a lovely sequence where Oliver Platt’s Uncle Jimmy sits and just talks to Carmy or Syd, and the point of this whole endeavor comes back into focus for a moment. But excellence is a hard thing to attain and an even harder thing to keep, and The Bear’s grip has started to slip.