The Bear Season 3: Review

I’ve never had a show make me feel this damn anxious. Not like horror movie anxious, where your stomach drops when you anticipate the next jump scare, or you see something pop up in the mirror for a second. No, this is the dread that you feel when you’re gonna get some bad news; someone’s gotta get laid off, and it might be you. You have work coming up, and you just know that today will be particularly terrible. Family’s coming over, and you have nothing to make for dinner. It’s the purest form of dread, the essence of the worst nightmares that hit us all at one point or another. This show, in it’s short amount of time, has done that to me on numerous occasions, and it got me again. It’s been out for about a week now, hopefully enough time for anyone to have gotten through it, and if not then that sucks, I’m gonna talk about it anyways. Despite a couple little flaws, this remains one of the most thrilling, interesting, wholly unique shows currently airing. The casting, the writing, the cinematography, the editing, every piece of the puzzle matches up perfectly to create a picture of (barely) controlled chaos.

First, let’s start with the few drawbacks I had with this season. There were a couple episodes that I felt, while important to the story, the landing was a little bit rocky. The opening episode, “Tomorrow”, was filled with a lot of flashbacks that helped paint a helpful portrait of Carmy’s culinary experience, along with fleshing out his neglect to attend to Mikey’s funeral, but the pacing felt a little bit all over the place with too much going on, especially for the return to the series after the wait from season 2. “Ice Chips”, on the other hand, did not have much of anything happening. The complicated picture of Nat and Donna’s relationship, and how it has changed and stayed the same since “Fishes” was nice to see, but it seemed as if they did not take it as far as it could go, always seeming to straddle a line between craziness and blandness. The ending with Donna and the Faks was very nice, though. Other than that, it is just small gripes such as the repeated cuts to black for about a half second throughout the season, which stagger the episodes in a way that completely takes me out of it. I also was not thrilled with the season ending on not one, but two cliffhangers, with Sydney’s impending decision and Cicero’s possible shut-down of The Bear both looming over the end credits. The shots lean a little bit too heavily on extreme close-ups of the characters sometimes, which may have been intended to make it a bit more personal but feels a bit cheap at times, particularly when it is jumping between characters during this. On the bright side, that’s pretty much all the issues I have with the season, so it’s onto the good. 

Let’s talk about the character’s relationships. Watching Sydney and Carmy unravel from each other slowly but surely, as the latter undoes and works around the former the entire season, is masterful. You can feel her breaking bit by bit in every episode from the second they gather back in the kitchen for the second episode, “Next”. On the other side, seeing Carmy and Richie bicker endlessly each time they share a scene together works as a beautiful icebreaker for some of the most stressful moments, aside from during “Doors”. Their climactic fight brings the episode to a head as things keep threatening to boil over, although it does settle to a simmer after for the remainder of the season. Just when you think things are gonna get bad in the finale “Forever”, it goes about as nicely as it can between the two, with exactly zero interaction. It seems both have grown up and moved on in a personal sense, seeing each other only professionally from this point forward. Thinking back on it, Carmy is the only one who suffers serious relationship issues regarding fresh ones this season. 

I love every character in this show. They feel so real and fleshed out; the expansion of the Fak family is nice and makes me feel like I know all of them (featuring a wonderful guest appearance from John Cena as Sammy Fak), and the expanded role for the main Fak is welcome as a palate cleanser as everybody else’s plot gets more serious. His bit in “Doors” where he pours the soup for the customers and walks back to the kitchen, soup in hand, was very nice in the midst of an episode that had my heart jumping out of my chest. Tina is given an even more expanded role, including having a whole episode on her backstory that successfully brought me to tears, and featured another outstanding guest appearance from Jon Bernthal. I do wish there was more Gary, as he was always very pleasant and interesting in the short amount of time he was given on-screen. Oliver Platt continues to steal every scene he appears in, with just enough comedy to balance out the usually bad news he is delivering about the restaurant. Natalie is still sweet and lovely in all of her appearances, being one of the only characters to not get into a spat with anyone else during the series, even when she is stuck dealing with Donna. 

Carmy is who he is, you hate everything he does and how he is treating the people around him, and yet you can’t help but root for him to succeed. Marcus, aside from the funeral scene, is relegated a little bit more to the sidelines from the previous seasons which is a shame. I feel like they could have gone further with his coping, and an episode showing his background could’ve gone a long way. At the same time, it’s nice to see a bit more Ebra, after his role was sadly reduced last season. But forever and always, the two really anchoring this show for me, are Sydney and Richie. I have just absolutely loved seeing Richie’s transformation from the beginning of the series. He may not have any “Forks” level episodes in this season, but you can still see him shedding more and more of the walls he had present when the show begun, and his reunion with the crew at Ever is really nice. Sydney is the emotional core of the series, and from the moment she was introduced, has been the easiest and most fun character to root for. You can feel the yearning for success in everything she does and all of the ideas she has, but unlike Carmy, she does not sacrifice the feelings of the people around her to be able to reach these goals. She is constantly being fucked over by him, and still manages to show up to work everyday to have her ideas stepped on and bent. We all wish we could be more like Sydney. I do wish there was a little bit more Pete, though. This whole article may have turned out to be me just praising all of the characters, but that’s pretty fitting for a show with such a beautifully constructed ecosystem of performers at their peak.

It’s hard to find a whole lot wrong with this show. Even the things that I did not love still worked pretty good, and I had to be pretty nitpicky to be able to make a list of stuff for this. While it may not top the second season for me, which is a straight up perfect season of television, this is more than a worthy successor. The Bear is a completely different animal compared to any other show you will see on television this year, or any year. Incredibly tense, hilarious, heartfelt, smart, dark, drab, dreary, a billion other d-words, I could spend hours praising this for every little thing. But in the end, it’s probably just best if you watched it for yourself.