The Bear is closed for business—the TV show, that is. The Bear, the restaurant, remains open at the end of the FX show’s final season, surviving a night from hell to live another day, spin its sandwich window off into a string of ghost kitchens running from Pilsen all the way out to Schaumburg, and host private events for friends and family. And when you’re there, you’re family, so grab a plate, pull up a chair, and join The A.V. Club as we dig into The Bear’s series finale, “The Original Beef Of Chicagoland.”
Saloni Gajjar
Hold while I put on my hater apron. The Bear’s final season left a bitter taste in my mouth even before that undercooked finale. I can see what they were going for by setting it all the same day, The Pitt-style—a pivotal day after Carmy quit, no less—but Christopher Storer’s execution left a lot to be desired. So much of it made no sense, whether it’s Sugar inviting her mother to drive over in a storm (with her young daughter in tow), Unc’s side quest with Elsie Fisher to secure air rights, or what looked like the most preposterous dining experiences for everyone who ate at The Bear that evening. But mostly, it’s a cowardly attempt to avoid figuring out how the characters or the show will move forward in Carmy’s absence and under Sydney’s leadership. Not to mention the total lack of meaningful stories for the pivotal supporting staff. Did the show really not care to give Emmy winner Liza Colón-Zayas a meatier arc?
It’s why the series finale pissed me off so much. It could’ve very well been a starting or even midway point for the season—a way to truly understand how Syd, Sugar, Richie, Tina, Marcus, and Ebra actually keep The Bear going. However, that would require a level of storytelling that Storer isn’t prepared to tackle. The episode’s writing was both predictable and flimsy, from how Carmy reveals the Michelin star news to his long-winded speech at the architecture firm. (Side note: The Bear has never been as unintentionally funny as when we learn why he’s at this interview.) And am I supposed to care about Eva’s birthday party, especially as the closing montage for this five-season-long “comedy”? Again, I get that, on paper, it felt like a wise way to bring everyone back together under one roof, but the shoddy execution took the emotion out of it. It’s a bummer for someone who loved seasons one and two, but by the end of “The Original Beef Of Chicagoland,” my reaction was pretty much the same as the woman whose response to Carmy’s annoying, verbose speech began with…”Okay?”
Danette Chavez
Season five’s “Caramel” offered a good final course for a meal (that is, show) that had already gone on for far too long. Which, of course, is why it was actually the penultimate episode of the series, immediately followed by the TV equivalent of the 23-layer chocolate cake at Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse. I have to echo some of Saloni’s frustration with the final season—there are still too many Faks in this world, please eliminate three—but I was also kind of resigned to such a drawn-out conclusion after watching season three, which is when the show really started to retrace its steps to diminishing effect. (There are too many seasons of The Bear; please eliminate three. Seriously, I am not a crackpot.)
I did find Carmy’s season-four epiphany about how little joy he derived from his rare talent bittersweet, especially after season two so thoughtfully parsed the importance of having both passion and purpose. Carmy and Richie turning out to be on opposite sides of that coin made for a compelling through-line, one that would be picked over in subsequent seasons, leaving little meat on the bone for this final installment. Maybe that’s why Christopher Storer packed “The Original Beef Of Chicagoland” with a bunch of reunions (here’s Josh Hartnett again, for some reason) along with hints of what the future holds for all the, ugh, “bears” of The Bear (the restaurant, not the show, but also the show, I guess). It was overly indulgent, just like dinner at a $190-a-head restaurant where they shuttle you off to the patio to drink in the rain, or the preceding three seasons of the series. But, and maybe I’m also just sugarcoating things, The Bear did serve as a showcase for exceptional talent on- and offscreen, and it’ll be an interesting show to revisit in five years, both for what it says about this era of cable TV (and FX in particular, assuming either of those still exist) and the way audiences consumed it (in terms of binge-watching and dissecting it). Was this one of the better series finales in recent years? No. Am I glad it’s over, leaving behind two quite good seasons of TV? Yes, chef.
Erik Adams
Well and concisely put, Saloni and Danette. And now: Bear with me as I tell a meandering story about work, personal expression, and passion, and how those things don’t always add up to fulfillment and satisfaction, but can certainly keep you going for, say, five years at a time. And if I can deliver all of this in a single shot, all the better.
I lost a job I really loved four years ago. I worked alongside people I considered more friends and family than coworkers. We were often pitted against seemingly insurmountable odds, but we kept doing the work because we believed in it and cared about it, even when that care wasn’t reciprocated. (And it very rarely was.) But the people who made the decisions believed that all of our devotion was overruled by a simple matter of location. Given the choice between losing our jobs or moving across the country, we chose the former. We walked away even though we still really cared about the work and had poured so much of our lives into it. Hell, the work was my life, the only thing I felt like I could do well; with hindsight, I see that I made a lot of disastrous decisions because of that. But staying in Chicago wasn’t one of them.
And then, like a month later, the TV universe temporarily recentered itself around an unremarkable Italian beef place a stone’s throw away from the office we’d just been pushed out of. Everybody was talking about The Bear. We could’ve had an inside track on The Bear.
So you’ll forgive me for always feeling a little ambivalent about a show whose level of craft is undeniable and whose resonance with its audience is readily apparent, but one that I’ll always associate with an extremely difficult period in my life when I wasn’t always super game to sit down for half an hour of characters screaming at each other. (And now, my completely unfair assessment of The Bear’s popularity: The people who most value its intensity and tension have never worked in a restaurant.) So imagine my surprise at how engaging I found the first seven episodes of this season, how compelled I felt by the tick-tock of one momentous day in the life of a restaurant, how urgent this all suddenly felt after a couple of wilderness seasons where The Bear’s ambition and sense of its own importance got the best of Christopher Storer, Joanna Calo, and an extremely talented cast.
Sure it shortchanges the supporting players, and everyone constantly says exactly what’s on their minds in an obvious, smash-you-over-the-head fashion that probably wouldn’t be the case if the season’s entire story weren’t condensed into a single square on the calendar. But damn if I didn’t feel the sense of triumph, thrill at the arrival of Chicago meteorologist extraordinaire Tom Skilling, and shed tears for characters I’ve never felt much affinity for before this season. Ebon Moss-Bachrach, you have worked miracles with Richie. If, in real life, I walked into my local and saw him holding court at the bar, I would do an immediate Abe Simpson 180. But that jagoff had me electrified for the first seven episodes of season five.
And then that goodwill almost completely evaporated over the next hour. To be honest, my enthusiasm began to wane as soon as I saw the runtime; there are crucial lessons in rhythm and timing to be gleaned from the fact that “The Original Beef Of Chicagoland” is only nine minutes longer than “Caramel,” and yet the former feels like it lasts an eternity compared to the latter. It makes sense for The Bear to slow down on its way out, but watching these two episodes back to back is like getting a shot of adrenaline to the heart and then being told you have to sit on your hands and keep quiet for the next 61 minutes. The bulk of season five finally got me to buy into The Bear’s hype, but the bookends around it—beginning with last month’s “Gary”—just reinforced why I’d developed a distaste for the show over time.
I do not begrudge The Bear a little celebration upon its completion, particularly if so many of the actors who’d put in face time on the show were willing to come back for close-ups so fleeting, I questioned at first whether that was actually Gillian Jacobs hugging Eva after she blew out her 100 candles. (Rewatching the scene just now, I think I was just too busy clocking every other actor while they were singing “Happy Birthday To You.”) But to get there, season five has to blow past the perfectly good, less artificially heartstring-pulling blowout at the end of “Caramel,” when everybody parades out the backdoor for cigarettes, beers, and a collective exhalation. If I were in the therapy session Carmy seems to be in while Jeremy Allen White campaigns for one more Bear Emmy, I’d say this preference suggests that I still have some work-life issues to sort out. But that would be ignoring the sincerely tender moments that Carm, Nat, and Marcus each get to share with the parents who’ve been delivered to The Bear by fate and the dramatic, narrative, and emotional necessities of a quasi-real-time final season. Though I do have to agree with Saloni: If nobody thinks twice about the potentially disastrous outcome of Donna driving her infant granddaughter across town during a torrential downpour, have we truly learned nothing from 47 episodes of The Bear?
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