Rarely has a television show fallen in the public’s estimation over the course of five seasons like The Bear. Like everyone else, I enjoyed the first season a lot and was blown away by the second season, which I’m pretty sure stands as one of my all-time favorite TV seasons. And like everyone else, I was annoyed by the drawn-out third season and underwhelmed by the wheel-spinning fourth season.
I’m not someone with abundant patience for TV. If I get bored, I jump off pretty quickly. I left Stranger Things after the start of the second season and never looked back, for instance. But no matter how self-referential and thinly paced The Bear got, I never stopped loving those characters—particularly Cousin Richie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. These are characters, and actors, I would follow anywhere.
So I was thrilled to discover that the fifth and final season of The Bear is good. Seven episodes track the restaurant staff over the course of a single night, and this is the rare case where I’d encourage viewers to binge as many of those first seven episodes as is possible in a single evening. I almost wish the fifth season came in the form of a movie, because the gravity of that one night is so powerful that it weakens a bit when it comes time to end one episode and start another. The eighth and final episode is a different tone entirely and can be watched separately, maybe the night after a binge.
Folks online have their gripes about season five, but I think the creators landed the plane. Every one of the characters changed in a meaningful way, the themes of the series were wrapped up neatly, and there was enough ambiguity baked into some of the ending to give fans room to impose their own hopes and dreams onto the story.
Do I have quibbles? Yes, definitely. But was I swooning over watching a group of charming, competent people solve problems in a fast-paced, stressful environment? Absolutely. After a couple of seasons in the wilderness, I think The Bear came home to achieve exactly what it needed to do.
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