‘The Bear’ Season 3: Tastes Great, Less Satisfying
The first two seasons of The Bear had style and visual flashiness in spades, but each also had a grounding story arc. Season 1: Carmy returns to Chicago after the suicide of his brother, Michael (Jon Bernthal), to save the family restaurant — then an old-school sandwich shop called The Beef — while developing it further. Season 2: The Beef gets a chaotic and expensive reboot as The Bear, with the number of days remaining in its renovation counting down at the beginning of each episode. Each question was resolved — The Beef stayed afloat, The Bear made its opening — while the next was stalled.
Season 3, by contrast, is incremental and a test of patience. A fine restaurant tries to level up (and, again, stop losing money). Conflicts that existed persist. Carmy pushes and punishes herself (he quits smoking, to have a few minutes a day for work). Syd bottles up her fears and doubts. We begin the season wondering whether Carmy will make amends with Claire, whether Syd will sign her partnership agreement, whether the Bear’s patron, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), will pull the plug. By the time the season ends with “To Be Continued,” we’re still wondering.
But it would be simplistic to say that the problem is a lack of plot action. In fact, the two best episodes, both in the second half of the season, do little or no to move the overall story forward.
“Napkins,” directed by Edebiri, is a flashback for Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), who becomes a chef after losing her office job and falling into the friendly chaos of the Beef, where she commiserates with Michael. “This place, it sucks,” he says. “But I swear, there are days when it’s so much fun.”
In “Ice Chips,” Carmy’s pregnant sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), goes into labor and is forced to turn to the last person she wants in a crisis — her mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), the booze-and-cigarette volcano who erupted in the flashback from last season’s “Fishes.” The bitterness between them isn’t forgotten, but they reach a kind of understanding; in Donna’s intense gaze, you see a mother looking at a daughter and seeing the future and the past, her own life represented outside of her.
