OVERVIEW
The Bear returns for a third season with no time jump, picking up the morning after the restaurant’s opening night. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) now has to figure out what the Bear actually is, now that it exists. Created and largely written by Christopher Storer, with Joanna Calo joining as co-showrunner. Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Lionel Boyce, Liza Colón-Zayas, and Abby Elliott all return. The season premiered June 26, 2024 on FX on Hulu, all ten episodes at once.
BACKGROUND
Since its first season, The Bear has competed in the comedy categories at the Emmys and Golden Globes because its producers file it there, where the field is less daunting than drama. It is a common enough move, one that Barry and Atlanta both used in their runs, and the Television Academy has no rule against it. For a while it worked well. The Bear swept the comedy field and set records doing it, becoming the most-nominated comedy in Emmy history with 23 nominations for season 2, passing the mark 30 Rock had held since 2009. Then, at the 2024 Emmys, it lost Best Comedy Series to Hacks in an upset that few saw coming, which the trades read as voters quietly signaling they had finally had enough of it.
The irony is that the show’s actual comedy, the Fak family material added largely to protect its awards eligibility, is among the weakest writing it has produced. Season 3 was shot back-to-back with the already-greenlit fourth season, which may explain a great deal about how it feels. Storer wrote eight of the ten episodes himself. Edebiri directed the sixth, “Napkins,” after joining the Directors Guild.
EXECUTION
The first two seasons of The Bear worked because they were built around a clear problem with a clear deadline. Season 1 was about keeping a failing diner alive. Season 2 was about whether the renovation would be finished in time for opening night. Both seasons knew exactly what they were counting down to. Season 3 opens the morning after that opening, and the question it has to answer is harder and vaguer: now that the restaurant exists, what is it for? The show does not always find a satisfying answer, and ten episodes of circling that question without fully landing on one starts to wear.
Carmy is depressed and largely paralyzed through most of the season. Jeremy Allen White plays it without a false note, but the show gives him so little to do beyond being depressed that you spend long stretches wishing someone would walk him out of the frame. Depression as subject matter is not a problem. A character this shut down stops generating story, and the show around him feels it. Sydney ends up carrying the season’s actual forward momentum. Her arc, navigating the same pressures Carmy faced two seasons ago, is the most coherent story the season tells, and her final scene is one of the few moments that genuinely earns what it is reaching for.
The season does have a quiet rhythm the previous two did not attempt. The opener has a long, unhurried food montage that sets a more meditative register, and it works. A new line cook, in one small scene, asks to be called by her real name rather than a kitchen nickname. It is the kind of detail the show handles better than almost anyone, specific enough to feel like something that actually happened to someone. A recurring bit where one character persistently coaches another through an uncomfortable breathing exercise manages to be both funny and genuinely strange in ways the show does not usually go for.
But the season’s best hour is not any of that. “Napkins,” the sixth episode, directed by Edebiri, follows Tina (Colón-Zayas) through a run of demeaning job interviews before she ever set foot in the Beef. It works as a standalone, completely removed from the restaurant and the main cast, and it is the most emotionally direct thing the season attempts. The interviewers are excruciating in that particular way that only comes from memory rather than invention. The conversation between Tina and Michael is the warmest the season gets anywhere. It complicates a few things about how Tina was established in season 1, but the episode is too good to argue with on those grounds.
Marcus, one of the richer characters from the first two seasons, nearly disappears. The expanded Fak storyline, including a John Cena cameo that lands about as well as you would expect, fills time that could have gone to him, to Sydney, to anyone with an arc worth following. Several scenes run two or three minutes past the point they have finished making, as if nobody was certain where the cut should go.
AFTERTASTE
Shooting two seasons back-to-back almost certainly explains some of this. What is here still has the show’s visual intelligence, strong performances throughout, and “Napkins” alone justifies the time. But season 2 felt like every episode had somewhere it needed to get to. Season 3 is more patient and less certain, and patience without somewhere to go is just waiting.