Morning, folks. I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday weekend. I spent some time in Maryland with my fiancée's family boiling and cracking crab legs, which I now have down to a perfect science. (Pro tip: Split the leg at the joint and then pull.)
All that food prep—and extra time to catch up on TV—kept my mind on The Bear's season 4 finale, which I still feel is wildly misunderstood. There's no rhyme or reason to The Bear season 4's critical reception. Some critics feel that the FX series is treading water and it's time for the series to end completely. Others argue that season 4 finally showed the characters putting in emotional work—something that fans complained wasn't happening in season 3. If you'd like a more measured take, Esquire's senior entertainment editor, Brady Langmann, wrote that he loved season 4's finale—even if the journey there was a bit rocky.
Here's the thing: season 4 is anti-TV. What do I mean by that? Most characters in The Bear do not match our expectations of how TV characters are supposed to act. And that season 4 finale, when Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) decides to leave the restaurant? Audiences are not accustomed to such levels of plot derailment. It's as if Dr. Robby in The Pitt quit medicine and took up knitting, or Coach Taylor in Friday Night lights put down his whistle and started an accounting job. When our favorite characters forfeit their identity entirely, our first reaction is to meet it with derision. But take a step back and think about Carmen's decision from another angle. What is he supposed to do?
He's destined to work in the kitchen, according to Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Ritchie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). He's a goddamn rock star in there, after all. Carmy doing his thing in the kitchen is the whole crux of The Bear. Keeping Carmy married to the stove is the TV thing to do. But the season 4 finale is anti-TV. Carmy comes to a natural conclusion: The only way to find the space to heal is to step away from an environment that is clearly unhealthy for him… which is a very human way to deal with his mental health. It might not make for saucy TV, but it is entirely believable.
Now, it's possible that Carmy returns to the kitchen next season. TV shows often try to lure away their main protagonists from what they love, only to bring them right back to the site of the chaos. For a recent example: Janine Teagues (Quinta Brunson) briefly leaving her teaching gig to join the school district staff in Abbott Elementary. But those arcs never usually last long before our characters are right back where they started.
Carmy threatening to derail everything that audiences love about The Bear—i.e., the crazy kitchen and dysfunctional family bickering—is diabolical, anti-TV work. If the best part of The Bear is how human and real the show feels, there's nothing more honest than a character virtually agreeing with the audience that his life is not sustainable. Even The Pitt, which was praised for its accurate depiction of emergency healthcare work, couldn't help but veer into a fantasy realm where the Pittsburgh medical center became a microcosm for all of America's problems in just one fifteen-hour shift. That's not a dig on the HBO drama's amazing first season—that's just TV.
Sure, The Bear often features outsized monologues and award-worthy acting as much as any Emmy-contending TV drama. If The Bear wasn't interested in entertaining you, it'd be a humorless slog. But Carmy's decision to leave the kitchen at the end of season 4 doesn't feel like a gimmick designed to whet your palette for season 5. If series creator Chris Storer wanted to do that, he would've just locked Carmy in the kitchen again.
At the heart of all the Berzatto family craziness and Michelin star-chasing antics is a deeply human story about how we process grief. We can bicker all day about how much plot needs to happen per episode for people to feel like a TV show is moving at the right pace, but some of the most celebrated episodes of The Bear—"Fishes," "Napkins," "Forks"—are also the ones that slowed down the chaos of the kitchen for a break.
If you found yourself screaming at the TV in season 3 for Carmen to put in the work, well, he's certainly doing it now. He's just not sorting out his problems in a way we're used to seeing from our TV characters. Usually, characters come to miraculous revelations about their life after just one therapy session. A wise, old relative may help them see the light like they're The Oracle in The Matrix. Hell, characters on Ted Lasso worked through their problems in half-hour installments as if it was as simple as flipping a switch in their brain. The Bear is certainly capable of this kind of schmaltz—especially in season 4. (I'm looking at you, Sugar and Francie Fak.) I won't pretend like it's a perfect TV show. But The Bear is at its best when it ignores those cliché TV flourishes.
So, as someone who also went through a crisis of falling out of love with their career and then moving on to find that passion in another field (fun fact: I used to be an audio engineer), I very much resonated with Carmy's inner turmoil. Maybe he would be better off as a culinary professor, or something else entirely. Take it from me: it is possible to change, even if it feels like it's not what you're supposed to do. Jeremy Allen White is supposed to be in the kitchen. That's The Bear. Well, the season 4 finale reminds us that there's more to a character than the plot of the show, because there's more to a person than where they work. For TV, that's entirely new territory. And it's damn exciting.
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