Series Review – The Bear Season 4
Creator: Christopher Storer
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Abby Elliott
Year: 2025
The Bear has a problem. It’s too good at anxiety.
Season 1 was electric. Tight, propulsive, a panic attack in television form. The kitchen chaos. Carmy’s perfectionism. The yelling. YES CHEF. NO CHEF. It was stressful and brilliant and unlike anything else on TV.
Season 2 expanded the world while keeping the intensity. The episode “Fishes” — the holiday flashback — was maybe the best episode of television that year.
Season 3 started to wobble. More characters. More subplots. The Carmy and Claire stuff that didn’t really land. It was still good but you could feel the strain of turning a limited series premise into an ongoing show.
Season 4 continues that trajectory. It’s good. There are great moments. But the magic is dissipating.
Here’s the thing. The show is about a restaurant. The restaurant opened. It’s. Fine. The existential crisis that drove the first two seasons — will they survive, can Carmy become the chef his brother believed he could be, can this family of broken people build something together — has been resolved. The stakes now are. Will the restaurant get a Michelin star? Will Carmy’s relationships improve? Will various supporting characters achieve their personal goals?
These are fine stakes. But they’re not the same as survival stakes. When everything was falling apart in Season 1, every episode felt urgent. Now that things are mostly together, the urgency is manufactured. There are crises but they feel like complications rather than catastrophes.
Jeremy Allen White is still remarkable. He’s playing Carmy as someone who got what he wanted and realized it wasn’t enough. That’s interesting! But the show doesn’t know how to dramatize “successful but unfulfilled” as well as it dramatized “desperate and failing.”
Ayo Edebiri gets more to do and she’s wonderful. The Sydney and Carmy dynamic remains the heart of the show. But they keep teasing romantic tension between them and I really hope they don’t go there. Professional partnerships don’t have to become romance. Please let them be colleagues who respect each other.
The famous guest stars are getting to be a bit much. Every episode has someone you recognize showing up for a scene or two. It’s distracting. It makes the world feel smaller instead of bigger.
I’m not quitting the show. I’ll watch Season 5 if they make it. But I’m watching out of loyalty now rather than excitement. The meal is still good. It’s just not as good as when they were hungry.
My rating: ★★★☆☆
