Carmy and Crew are deeper and bolder in a season rife with flashbacks and panic attacks.
“Faster and cleaner, chef”, comes a gentle albeit ominous rebuke. A voice of similar experience posits, “We cook to nurture people”. Two real-life sandwich shop legends dole out sarnie wisdom over a Beastie Boys soundtrack. The Bear is back, and it is star-studded and all the wiser for it. If you liked the flashbacks and only somewhat fictional fine-dining worldbuilding of that season 2 was less restrained with, watch season 3. It works
Daniel Boloud asks if prodigious chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) can “hear the music’, and whether this is an intended reference to a certain Oscar-winning 2023 film about the father of the nuclear bomb or not, we become faced with a genius operation that has escaped the control of its creator and is starting to cause real problems.
Carmen Berzatto is, yet again, caught up in the millimetric, literally: He has quite the meltdown over mild differences in earthenware and his not-quite-sidekick, Sydney (Ayo Edeberi), is seen bearing more of the emotional brunt than she should have to. She is his partner and not, as she sternly reminds him, his babysitter. Carmen’s overwhelming emotional repression remains the unsurmountable obstacle it rose to in the Season 2 Finale and we see him unravelling at more than a couple of points in the ten episodes in this season.
Addiction has been a refrain throughout The Bear’s run thus far, from Michael, Carmy’s older brother, losing his life to it, to Carmy’s own addiction to his work and perfection. Carmen quits smoking this season, and there’s a parable somewhere within his quitting about the transference of addiction onto his recently-imploded relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon). A lot of people recount getting sober, find sobriety and lose it within Season 3 and we walk away with life lessons, should we need them.
It must be said, as before, that, still, the funniest thing about this show being in the ‘Best Comedy’ Awards category, is that anyone would see it as a comedy. The wit is sardonic, at best, and the quips are as pithy as they are emblematic of trauma and character conflict. To the rescue here are the duo of spiritual pandas in the form of the Fack brothers. Matty Matheson’s Neal is is joined by his brother Ted, and the adorable ineptitude is balanced well with a childlike willingness to be the saviour of a situation. More Faks make one-off appearances and the casting direction here is unimpeachable.
Abby Elliot, who I remember for being glorified set furniture on SNL, brings to Natalie ‘Sugar’ Berzatto a weathered charm that makes her role as the de-facto matriarch less authoritarian and more a glimpse into the motherhood that lurks in the ever-nearing immediate future. Motherhood is a theme that takes up an entire episode, and a returning Jamie Lee Curtis delivers a spectacular and tragic performance that goes very much nowhere very quickly.
That is a feeling with some bits of this season, where individual stories, while getting their affective points across, lack the snappy closure that the rigid episodic nature of the previous two seasons had us used to. As a fan of the show, one can only hope that this is a shift in form and not a dropping of the ball, because when it works, this season of The Bear really does make every second count
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