After the highs of the second season, it is quite disappointing how “The Bear’s” third season has begun to take a slight tumble. Instead of being a new dish, it is the same old dish, reheated with some extra ingredients thrown in just so it tastes slightly different.
“The Bear ended its second season with “The Bear’s” opening night, a dinner for the crew’s friends and family. In the front of the house, everything ran smoothly, while in the back, a hellscape blazed.
Accidentally trapped in the walk-in refrigerator, Carmen (Jeremy Allen White) loses himself to his insecurities and says terrible things to Richard (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and his girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon).
A line cook disappears during service and is caught smoking meth behind the restaurant, while Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) take over leadership to commandeer the crew until service ends due to Carmen being stuck in the refrigerator.
The third season bravely experiments with the television format of serials, with its first episode being entirely flashbacks from the first two seasons and new scenes, with maybe only 15 short lines of dialogue.
The second episode, “The Bear” starts properly and delves into the fallout from “friends and family night,” and it quickly becomes apparent that the show is losing focus.
Prestige acting
“The Bear’s” third season amplifies the strengths of its first two seasons, along with all their weaknesses.
Not missing a mark, the cast once again delivers a bravura performance fit for the kind of prestige television “The Bear” requires. The third season will not be eligible for next year’s Emmy Awards, but it will certainly influence the nominations for the second season due to the performance everyone brought for the show’s third outing.
For instance, in this season’s sixth episode, Napkins, the flashback episode features Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) and Jon Bernthal returning as Mikey. Set several years before his suicide, the episode is an intimate look at both characters with a very strong, award-worthy scene.
Like last season, Bernthal only appears for a single episode, and the way he plays his character in this season, where he uses the facade of happiness and optimism to mask his cavernous depression and sadness, is so masterful that he may be nominated for his performance in last season’s Christmas episode. The same goes for Colon-Zayas and the rest of the cast.
A side tangent to the above. Napkins was Edebiri’s directorial debut, and she does a great job, which also points to some sort of award nomination, like the shot direction where Tina is fired by her company being filmed to look like a firing squad execution.
These moments with the main characters, as great as they are, are also the act of pouring salt on the wound, which brings us to where cracks in “The Bear” have appeared.
Cumbersome cameos
There is an overbearing amount of guest stars in this season, to the point that it becomes a guessing game for who will turn up in each subsequent episode.
In the second season, there is a singular episode that introduces a multitude of new characters played by famous actors in guest appearances. It focused on an explosive Christmas flashback involving the Berzattos and their extended family and is arguably one of the best episodes in the entire series.
For the third season, the guest star element becomes a hamfisted gimmick in each episode. In the fifth episode, John Cena quite literally wanders into “The Bear” as Sammy, the brother of the existing two Fak brothers.
Instead of being a quick funny cameo for Cena to flex his comedic muscles, it becomes distracting as the scenes whiplash between his antics in the front of the house and “The Bear’s” crew having their finances scrutinized in the back of the house.
The episode before this has Josh Hartnett appearing in a guest role as Frank, the fiancee of Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs).
Somewhat ambushing Richie when he drops Eva—his and Tiff’s daughter—off at Frank’s home, the two men share an awkward conversation over the situation of Frank marrying Tiff and becoming the stepfather to Eva.
As good as Hartnett and Bachrach are, why does this scene exist? It does nothing except take screen time away from other more important elements that could have benefited from the stolen time.
Subtract the excess fat
These are a tiny drop in the “Deadpool-ification” of “The Bear,” where cameos are pointless additions that serve no purpose. While the aforementioned Christmas episode was full of guest stars, it was also a form of layered storytelling that expanded on many things, such as Carmy and Mikey’s deep insecurity and mental illness, along with the latter’s depression, and how all of their problems came from their manic, bipolar, and suicidal mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis).
On that note, Carmen’s insecurities and self-destructive tendencies have overstayed their welcome. The last episode for this season shows that he might be making progress in healing, but the viewer has to endure nine episodes of him not only hurting himself but his co-workers and family before we get to that point.
The kicker is that we have already seen this in the previous two seasons. Every time Carmen is on the verge of overcoming his trauma and mental illness, series creator Christopher Storer makes a hard pivot, and Carmen jumps back into the same rabbit hole. This in turn affects how the other characters are written, as they work for Carmen, and his sabotaging himself also sabotages them.
In the first episode’s fleeting flashback vignettes, the verbally and mentally abusive chef David Fields (Joel McHale) lambasts one of Carmen’s dishes, telling him that he is doing too much and that he should “subtract.” Rather ironically, the show needs to start taking its advice. Wherever “The Bear” is headed in its fourth season, it desperately needs to find its way out of the woods first.
