Television

Mission UnBearable #1

LN Lupa

01 Jul 2025 — 4 min read

dinner-with-weendre

Season 4 Episode 1: “Groundhogs”

Unfortunately, since reviewing the 2025 Best Novel Hugo nominees, I’ve become addicted to negativity. For that reason, I’m introducing a new 10-part limited series here on the blog: Mission UnBearable, an episode-by-episode review of the new (final?) season of The Bear. You might ask “Why would you review a show you stopped liking years ago in minute, grinding detail?” Read on to discover the engine of my self-destructive perversity.

Let us establish a baseline mutual understanding early: The Bear is a show that plays on FX and Hulu. In the first season, it was about Carmy Berzatto, a fancy chef, who must come home to Chicago and run his family’s grungy beef sandwich restaurant when his brother suddenly dies. Later seasons pivot around Carmy’s struggle to transform the Beef into an upscale fine-dining establishment called The Bear.

When I watched season 1 of The Bear, I was on the same page as everybody else: what a great show! Sure, the season ended with a baffling magical realist fumble that made no damn sense, but I could understand that. There’s no way to make food service appear a sustainable, enjoyable, or indeed ethical field without introducing some element of the improbable. Restaurant work is bad work, and barring a profound rearrangement of all human society on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, it will remain thus.

Anyway, those halcyon days of yore are so joever--The Bear’s been on a downslide since season 2, and each concurrent season summoned a grander and more ostentatious eyeroll from yours truly.

Everything changed when the grand ambitions attacked. In season 1, style supported a humble and effective substance--the now rarely-seen-on-tv blue-collar workplace. The relentless pace of food service, the ramping torment of online order systems, the ouroboros daily routines that make it a perfect field for functional addicts: the show pictured them all in a sympathetic yet unsentimental light that was lovely, sad, and cold, much like the city of Chicago. When we ended season 1 with the discovery of Mikey’s magical tomato money, we should have just stopped.

But god help us, the show returned under Carmy’s new regime, his single-minded goal of making the Beef sandwich-hole into The Bear, a Michelin-worthy dining establishment. Fuck, man, there were already so many shows about capital-C Chefs. I don’t need insights into the mind of people who work at Noma--there’s a whole cuisine press industrial complex to tell me how I must YES whoever is the next big CHEF. I wished for The Bear to show me the people I know from food service, who work hard every day doing thankless grindwork for ungrateful assholes, and who are themselves often also assholes. What was lovely was to see those characters framed within the beautiful style of the show, high-quality visual craft finally/finely applied to real-adjacent people. But the style of the show became a substitute for substance, style commenting on style, Carmy’s fancy food and ambitions glorified as an end unto themselves, valuable because they are valued, unlike the people, the food, or the very premises of the Chicago Beef sandwich-hole. Beautifully composed molecular gastronomical plates get the airy montage treatment we all know from Chef’s Table.

Jeez looeez, the montages in this show. I swear, half the episodes in season 3 were just montages. Girl, you are not Sergei Eisenstein: Sergei Eisenstein had something to say! Montage upon montage, telling us usually bonk-on-the-head obvious things like “Carmy is stressed” and scored with songs that deliver the most humorously overdetermined lyrical double-down on the screen content. If I had started playing a drinking game back in season 2 to guess which late-80s, early-90s alt rock song would play as we cut to credits each episode, I’d be awaiting a liver transplant today. If the final episode of the show doesn’t end with an excruciatingly poignant and literal Wilco needle drop, I’ll bake a cake shaped like a shoe and eat it in front of you all.

In this regard, episode 1 of the final season did not disappoint. There were multiple showy cuts into aimless conversations so dull and stilted they slid off the front of my brain like a rotten tomato (because of food service, I have been pelted by actual physical rotten tomatoes, rotten tomato bits ground into my scalp and rotten juices dripping acidly into my eyes and nose; that’s what fun in food service is like). Oliver Platt showed up to remind us about material constraints on human ambition, another critical element of food service which happily the show still recalls, and then we had a looooooooooooooooong montage to let us know that it’s hard to make money in fine dining and Carmy and the gang are stressed about it. Dawg, no way, that’s crazy!

I’m going to watch the rest of the show. I can’t quash the perverse hope that this is all a tremendously well-executed con. The show’s flaws are so intensely Carmy’s flaws--his obsession with style and high-falutin’ prestige standards and his conviction that more devotion to work and precision will yield a worthwhile perfection--that some part of me believes the writers know Carmy is wrong about everything in life in the most annoying way possible and is going to pull the rug out from under that imaginary pretentious fuck right at the end.

If this isn’t proven true by the finale, though, then the show's writers possess such an exceptional lack of self-awareness that they may qualify as philosophical zombies.

After all this, I must insist that I don’t hate The Bear (though I might at the end of this review series). It merely depresses me. If you want to talk to somebody who hates The Bear, though, have I got the guy for you!