{"id":657316,"date":"2026-06-25T10:27:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T10:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657316\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T10:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T10:27:12","slug":"no-chef-the-bear-was-a-phenomenon-then-everyone-fell-out-of-love-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657316\/","title":{"rendered":"No, chef: The Bear was a phenomenon \u2013 then everyone fell out of love with it"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Restaurants, they say, are a tricky investment \u2013 many go under within a year of opening. To that end, FX\u2019s hit restaurant dramedy The Bear<\/a> has probably done well to stick it out for four. The show, which follows tortured kitchen savant \u201cCarmy\u201d Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), and his efforts to save his dead brother\u2019s beef sandwich restaurant, was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 2022 \u2013 that rare TV series that transcends mere critical buzz and becomes something identifiable by shorthand. Even those who hadn\u2019t sampled The Bear might well have recognised its tone \u2013 the frantic, sweaty stoveside arguments \u2013 or its jargon. (\u201cYes, chef!\u201d and \u201cCorner!\u201d may well be the closest thing we have to old-style TV catchphrases, D\u2019ohs and Bazingas having long ago slid out of vogue.) <\/p>\n

The initial effusive reaction held firm through The Bear\u2019s second season, and before long it was sweeping the industry\u2019s biggest awards ceremonies; its cast, especially White, Ayo Edebiri, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach<\/a>, graduated to a new strata of fame. Before you could say \u201cbrigade de cuisine\u201d, The Bear was part of the establishment, a TV staple that shows like Family Guy or It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia could parody at length and trust their audience to catch the reference. At some point, though, the imported cheesewheels came off. Season three saw the critics sour; their love affair with The Bear entered a state of bed death. A drop-off in viewership followed for season four; a one-off \u201cspecial episode\u201d that aired earlier this year seemed to come and go without acknowledgement.<\/p>\n

The Bear\u2019s fifth and final season, released this week, thereby occupies a strange sort of cultural real estate. It is a show that has outlived its own relevance in record time. (This is thanks, in part, to its new-season-every-summer model, in an age when most of television operates at an interminable slow cook<\/a>.) But has the series actually done anything to turn viewers away? I seem to be one of the few people who have consistently enjoyed the later seasons of The Bear; when it comes to performance, writing, and tone-setting, Christopher Storer\u2019s show remains one of the best things on TV. So what exactly is the issue?<\/p>\n

\"JeremyJeremy Allen White in ‘The Bear’ (FX)<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the cast. On the face of it, it seems a remarkable boon that The Bear has managed to tie down its Emmy-winning cast as they\u2019ve all blown up. Moss-Bachrach is now a blockbuster guy, rebuilt in CGI as the Fantastic Four\u2019s Ben \u201cThe Thing\u201d Grimm. Edebiri has worked with auteurs like James L Brooks (Ella McCay), Luca Guadagnino (After the Hunt) and Bong Joon Ho (the forthcoming Ally), while making inroads as a voice actor in big-deal projects like Inside Out 2 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. White, meanwhile, has enjoyed a conventional movie-star slipstream \u2013 in-between stints as an underwear model and \u201cinternet boyfriend\u201d \u2013 repackaging Carmy\u2019s whipped-dog anguish in films such as the wrestling weepie The Iron Claw, the Boss biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin sequel The Social Reckoning.<\/p>\n

And yet the unifying fact of most of these films is that they are, by and large, crap. Moss-Bachrach\u2019s work on Fantastic Four: First Steps was a big nothing. White\u2019s Springsteen film was insipid and pointless, and his humiliating turn in this year\u2019s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, playing a steroidic space worm with daddy issues, was a much-mocked calamity. Even Edebiri, who shone in the comedy Bottoms (2023) and whose natural charisma made her feel like The Bear\u2019s surest bet, has also struggled to pick the right projects. (Ella McCay? A total fiasco. After the Hunt? Beyond her range, and not a great film in any case.) For all three of them \u2013 and indeed everyone else in the regular cast \u2013 The Bear remains the strongest material they\u2019ve had to work with. But by now, they\u2019ve been exposed to the world in less flattering lights.<\/p>\n

Away from the central trio, guest stars were initially one of The Bear\u2019s great strengths: celebrities such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Olivia Colman, Will Poulter, Bob Odenkirk, and the comedian John Mulaney all featured in what initially seemed like judicious one-off guest spots. But then the show brought them back (who could blame them, really), some of them repeatedly, and they\u2019ve started to steal focus \u2013 jostling the sense of immersion and eating into time that could be spent on characters we actually care about.<\/p>\n

\"Magnetic:Magnetic: Ayo Edebiri as Sydney in ‘The Bear’ (FX)<\/p>\n

To some extent, there is also a flaw built into The Bear\u2019s central premise: how do you go from a show about a failing sandwich shop to a show about haute cuisine? It\u2019s a hard change to reconcile, and The Bear has never quite managed it. (We are somehow supposed to believe that this Michelin-courting fine-dining establishment still serves sloppy beef sarnies during lunch hours.) Now, it\u2019s admirably ambitious for a hit TV show to so resist the idea of a status quo. But the changes have often been alienating: the scrappy, ramshackle restaurant of season one was surely a livelier setting than the cold, sleek redesign of season three onwards. As the calibre of food has increased, so has the series\u2019 fascination with it: some later episodes devote too much screen time to glossy shots of impeccable dishes, what is often referred to as \u201cfood porn\u201d. <\/p>\n

The characters, too, have changed, their various arcs having wended in a way that might be true to life, but lacks narrative thrust. It\u2019s telling, perhaps, that the show\u2019s fanbase seems to have wildly divergent expectations over what, exactly, is the endgame, down to something as fundamental as whether Carmy and Syd (Edebiri) are being set up as eventual love interests. The ships are at sea.<\/p>\n

\"KeepKeep Carmy and carry on: Jeremy Allen White in ‘The Bear’ season five (FX)<\/p>\n

That said, with its set of strong, likeable characters, and a setting made for procedural television, The Bear has the bones of a first-rate hang-out show. But it\u2019s never leant into this, instead devouring its way through narrative ideas that lesser shows would have savoured.<\/p>\n

In time, I suspect that The Bear will be appreciated in waves: the initial enthusiasm has given way to disappointment, but that will soon correct to an appropriate fondness. This was never a show that redefined television, but simply one that did the fundamentals very, very well. There have been more intelligent TV shows, more inventive TV shows, and funnier TV shows, to air during The Bear\u2019s run. But not everything has to be lobster thermidor; there are pleasures to be found in a well-made beef sandwich. And for four years, The Bear may have been the best beef sandwich around.<\/p>\n

The final season of \u2018The Bear\u2019 is available to stream from 26 June on Disney+ in the UK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-657316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}