The Bear Season Three: Where's The Beef?
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes (576 words)
This review contains spoilers.
Season three of The Bear opens with an ethereal episode that gets inside Carmy’s chaotic head. It is almost completely instrumental and follows a stream of consciousness arc, highlighting and emphasizing vignettes from the show’s other two seasons, as well as providing some background context to Carmy’s character.
It serves as an odd start to a new season of a show that is known for chaos, anxiety, and trauma and the season does not quite even out from there.
The characters are thrown right back into the storylines from season two: Carmy and Ritchie stand off in a cold war, Sugar sees her pregnancy to term, and the rest of the Bear crew slowly work to make the restaurant a success. Sydney is given significant screen time as she works through whether to sign an official partnership agreement with Carmy — and therefore tie her to the restaurant — or jump ship when a new offer presents itself. Claire and Pete are hardly seen; Donna comes back briefly; and Mikey is almost entirely absent except for one extended scene later in the season.
As other observers have pointed out, the new season is uneven. Eater called it a “mess” and The New York Times was not much kinder. What ails this new season is a sense of incompleteness, a lack of urgency and clarity, and stagnant character development. New arcs are constantly being created while very few are being resolved. By the finale, this means that we are left with more questions than answers and disappointment in an otherwise acclaimed show.
Take for instance the subplot of the Chicago Tribune’s food review, which is portrayed as a make or break moment for the restaurant. If the paper gives it a good review, all is well. But if it pans The Bear, it is lights out (quite literally, as Cicero threatens Carmy with closure if things don’t start breaking even soon). But even in the finale episode we are not told what the review says, only that it is published.
Other unresolved plots, to the point of complete frustration for the audience, is the standoff between Carmy and Richie and the nonexistent relationship between Carmy and Claire. The entire season beats around the bushes: will Carmy and Richie smooth things over? Will Carmy and Claire get back together? Season three does not answer either question and does very little to even address them.
Sydney’s back and forth over a job offer at a new upscale restaurant is also dragged out across the season, only to be “resolved” through a panic attack in the season’s closing scenes (of course, we do not know what she decides).
Despite these limitations, and there are plenty this season, The Bear is setting itself up well for an excellent, and perhaps final, fourth season. Leaving so many plots unresolved is frustrating in the short term, but watching it play out in the last season will almost certainly make for excellent television once again.
The third season could more accurately be viewed as a half season that initiates plots that will come full circle in the end. In a similar way, season one was really an extended pilot episode for everything that came after it and was more than the sum of its parts. Season three is just-so, neither excelling nor faceplanting. It is a set-up job that can only be viewed as one half of whatever comes next.