'The Bear' Season 4 Review: A simpler dish, served family style – InBetweenDrafts

“It’s not fancy. Nevertheless it’s good,” Sydney Adamu says a couple of new dish technique within the opening stretch of The Bear‘s fourth season. She’s speaking in regards to the meals, certain, but in addition the present itself, now plating a cleaner, much less fussy model of its as soon as-anarchic self. That is The Bear at its most self-conscious, even perhaps self-correcting, A sequence that, after seasons of scorched-earth chaos and haute-TV maximalism, lastly decides to breathe and belief the substances.

With ten episodes now accessible on FX and Hulu, Christopher Storer’s The Bear returns. And if Season 2 was about transformation and Season 3 about its existential price, then Season 4 is a regrouping. The present remains to be quick, nonetheless humorous, nonetheless tense. Nevertheless it’s now not obsessive about topping itself. Like Carmy dialing again the complexity of his mise en place, the present scales down its ambitions to search out readability within the acquainted. And whereas that readability doesn’t all the time result in revelation, it typically tastes like one thing higher: consolation with character, intention in theme, and sufficient restraint to let its secret sauce cut back.

Again to the road.

From the beginning, The Bear made itself important tv by dramatizing the visceral pressures of meals service as a metaphor for private collapse. It cooked trauma into texture. Grief into pacing. Love into mise en scène. The cramped, grease-slicked again-of-home in Season 1 turned a proving floor for artistry in Season 2, the place every character’s arc was plated with the identical obsessive care Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White, nonetheless lightning-chilly and hearth-heat) gave his dishes. And when that perfectionism metastasized in Season 3 by spiraling right into a parade of lifeless ends and disconnected detours, the present started to really feel prefer it was chasing Michelin stars within the flawed medium.

The Bear Season 4, refreshingly, isn’t making an attempt to be one of the best meal of your life. It simply desires to be satisfying. The shift is delicate however intentional. There’s a return to ensemble dynamics, a softening of the necessity to explode. The place Season 3 typically pushed characters into remoted episodes that functioned extra as showcases than story, this season attracts the kitchen workers again into one another’s orbit.

Slower burn, richer sauce.

Carmy, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Syd (Ayo Edebiri) are nonetheless reeling from the messes they fabricated from their restaurant but in addition their lives. The Bear, the modern effective-eating enterprise constructed on the bones of The Beef, remains to be on the brink, now dealing with the fallout of a crushing Tribune assessment and a looming monetary expiration date. However the narrative warmth has been turned right down to a simmer. There’s no “Fishes” this 12 months. No bottle episode-as-symphony.

As a substitute, we get regular, human-sized developments: Sydney braiding a younger cousin’s hair whereas negotiating profession selections; Richie pulling off an absurd hospitality stunt involving faux snow; Marcus (Lionel Boyce) retreating from ambition to get better his footing. Sugar (Abby Elliott), nonetheless caught between spreadsheets and child bottles, will get a little bit extra room to breathe. Even the seasonal visitor-star extravaganza (nonetheless bloated, however now extra self-parody than self-severe) is aware of it’s a remix of a success single, not a non secular successor.

Much less warmth. Extra humanity.

That’s to not say the present has mounted all its pacing points. The primary few episodes simmer slowly at instances, even erratically, setting emotional timers that take a number of hours to go off. Some plot strains stay stranded in place, notably the skilled selections Syd and Marcus proceed to stew over. Others, like Tina’s seek for function or Carmy’s evolving sense of failure, are extra hinted at than articulated. However the present’s tonal restraint makes even its unresolved components really feel intentional, like programs in a menu you don’t fairly perceive but however belief will quantity to one thing.

If The Bear has all the time flirted with the literary thought of being “about” meals, Season 4 is the primary to essentially chew on that metaphor. There are fewer montages of completely seared protein and fewer declarations about taste profiles or platings. However the spirit of cooking, of constructing one thing that issues, even when nobody notices…that’s again within the bones. The kitchen right here isn’t a torture chamber or a remedy session. It’s a real office. And a group. And a sacred mess.

Nonetheless caught within the stroll-in.

But for all its recalibration, the present can’t totally let go of Carmy’s inside monologue as organizing precept. He nonetheless broods, nonetheless loops by way of previous unresolved distress. The script tries to handle this fatigue immediately when one character even questions if there’s something left for him to say. Nevertheless it’s unclear whether or not the present believes him. For each scene that gestures at a doable pivot, there’s one other reminding us of how a lot we’re nonetheless circling the identical emotional drain.

Actually, the primary episode basically lampshades this impact by immediately likening its important star to Invoice Murray’s time loop doom in Groundhog Day. A enjoyable wink, however at a sure level, “I meant to try this” comes throughout like an excuse for repetitive beats.

What’s cooking beneath the floor.

FX’s advertising describes this season as one the place the crew should “adapt, regulate, and overcome,” and that ethos extends past the narrative. That is Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo (of BoJack Horseman and Undone) selecting subtraction over spectacle. There are nonetheless crisp edits, killer needle drops from Josh Senior, and Hiro Murai’s cinematic fingerprints, however the bravado now takes a backseat to vulnerability. Even the meals itself (as soon as bathed in erotic mild) is extra operate than fetish.

The query turns into: how lengthy can The Bear preserve us keen on one man’s breakdown, reheated throughout a number of seasons? In some methods, that pressure mirrors the present’s place within the status-TV panorama. As soon as a essential darling for its kinetic verité and uncooked vulnerability, The Bear now feels more and more conscious of its repute. Its awards cachet. It’s place within the hallowed dialog by a very dusty watercoolers.

Course corrections.

That the present nonetheless delivers one thing emotionally nourishing regardless of this self-consciousness is a credit score to the crew’s instincts. In addition to FX’s willingness to again creators with out forcing them into cliffhangers or franchise bloat. You get the sense that The Bear might finish right here as an entire, 4-course meal. You additionally get the sense it might go on for years and quietly fade out, just like the odor of onions after an extended evening’s prep.

By the tip of The Bear Season 4, the knives are nonetheless sharp, however now not geared toward our throats. Characters pause extra typically. They converse softer. They screw up, then attempt once more. In different phrases, they’re a little bit extra likable. There are not any grand epiphanies or earth-shaking shifts. Simply sluggish, deliberate turns towards one thing extra sustainable.

So sure, The Bear began out as a kitchen drama disguised as an sometimes pretentious grief odyssey. Nevertheless it now resembles one thing simpler, humbler, and perhaps much more sincere. A present about what it takes to maintain displaying up, each day, for the individuals you’ve chosen and the work you may’t fairly give up. It’s not all the time fancy. Nevertheless it’s good.

All ten episodes of The Bear Season 4 can be found now to stream on Hulu. Watch the trailer here.

(*4*)

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