‘It isn’t hard to see where things went wrong’: how The Bear went off the boil

Bear with … Ricky Staffieri as Ted Fak, Jeremy Allen White as Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto, Matty Matheson as Neil Fak. Photograph: Chuck Hodes/Photographer: Chuck Hodes

Before we begin, it’s important to point out that The Bear is one of my favourite shows of all time. If you ever need to look for a perfect season of television, I will always point you to The Bear’s first eight episodes. That season was incredibly stylish, overwhelmingly propulsive and filled with characters you found yourself rooting for. More than anything, though, it was about something. The first season of The Bear was about leaving home, returning changed and trying to fit back in. This thumped through every scene of every episode. It was stunning.

While season two allowed itself to unspool a little, it was still driven by an unbeatably strong engine, in the countdown to the opening of a new restaurant. There was still such momentum that, like everyone else, I wolfed it down in one go. Season three couldn’t come quick enough.

Now it’s here, but something is wrong. For a show that made its name on stress and momentum, the third season of The Bear is alarmingly unfocused. It has 10 largely directionless episodes of television that feel like they exist purely for the purpose of existing. Worse still, it doesn’t seem to be about anything. In season one, Carmy returned home. In season two, he built the restaurant of his dreams. In season three, not a single person seems to know what comes next.

You may have already heard about the season’s opening episode, entitled Tomorrow, and how divisive it is. On the surface, it seems almost grotesquely indulgent; a 35-minute, ambient-soundtracked “previously on” recap that tells the story of The Bear in clips and montages which somehow feels longer than the first two seasons in full. However, now that I’ve seen the whole of season three, I’m inclined to go easy on it. The episode is, in effect, the season in microcosm. It’s stylish but fragmented, full of vaguely formed micro-stories that fail to congeal into anything particularly satisfying.

With the perspective of a fan, it isn’t hard to see where things went wrong. Its creator, Christopher Storer, has always been a remarkably fast worker – season one was greenlit in October 2021 and debuted in June 2022, and season two was greenlit in July 2022 and debuted in June 2023 – but now he really finds himself up against it.

The show has been such a runaway success that it took its three stars and blasted them into the stratosphere. Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Ayo Edebiri were previously three respected and under-recognised actors, and The Bear transformed them into sensations. White broke the internet by stripping down to his pants for a commercial, Edebiri stars in the year’s biggest film, Inside Out 2, and Moss-Bachrach is about to become one of the Fantastic Four. As such, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Storer is churning out episodes as quickly as he can because he knows that it’s only a matter of time before he loses them for good.

Indeed, earlier this year it was reported that The Bear had secretly been greenlit for a fourth season that would shoot back-to-back with season three. Those episodes have now been shot, which means that Storer has essentially written 20 episodes of television in just over six months. That is phenomenally fast. For reference, the final 10-episode season of Succession alone took 17 months from greenlight to broadcast.

Sadly, the haste shows. The episodes in season three all feel underbaked, like ideas that haven’t been allowed to fully bloom. Several are montages that only hint at character development. One is a series of thematically unlinked one-on-one conversations that feel more like a writing exercise than part of the best TV show of the decade. Some episodes hint at story – the restaurant has been reviewed! Sydney might leave! – before everything deflates and gets kicked down the road for another episode to deal with.

What is so frustrating is that The Bear – the messy, scrappy Bear we all fell in love with – is still in there sometimes. You can see it. There are scenes where lots of characters with opposing world views shout over each other while an alternative guitar hit from the 1990s plays out in full in the background. When this happens, The Bear is as thrilling as ever. But that only makes it all the more heartbreaking when it fades away.

The Bear has always fundamentally been about change. The scrappy, messy, stressful sandwich shop of season one was abandoned for season two, which was about creation and renewal. But in the rush to constantly reinvent itself, it feels as if a vital part of the equation has been left behind. The show moved on before it had time to figure out what it wanted to be next. Season four won’t be out for another year. Let’s hope Storer can slow down and take his time with getting this next batch right. It’s what The Bear deserves.

The Bear is on Disney+