New challenges arise for chef Carmy and the staff at the fledgling restaurant in the fourth season of The Bear
The wait is over, and it’s time to get back into the kitchen for the highly anticipated fourth season of The Bear. The critically acclaimed series (winner of 21 Emmys, five Golden Globes and five Critics Choice Awards) takes viewers back to Chicago, where brilliant-but-tortured chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) has successfully transformed his family-run sandwich shop — The Original Beef of Chicagoland — into a high-end culinary destination dubbed The Bear.
Putting his heart and soul — and let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of bucks he borrowed from Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) — into the place was only the beginning. Now, the real work begins. In fact, the new season will bring an array of new challenges to Carmy and his team — particularly Sydney ( Ayo Edebiri), who finds herself at a crossroads as she’s forced to make a monumental decision about her future with The Bear after receiving an intriguing offer to run another restaurant.
“With new challenges around every corner, the team must adapt, adjust and overcome,” teases the fourth season’s synopsis. “This season, the pursuit of excellence isn’t just about getting better — it’s about deciding what’s worth holding on to.”
The previous season finale left a number of questions unanswered. Will the increasingly reluctant Uncle Jimmy continue to keep pumping money into the restaurant? That seems unlikely, judging from a scene in the trailer. “That clock is telling you how much money we have left,” Jimmy tells Carmy. “When that shows zero, this restaurant needs to cease operations.”
Will the all-important Chicago Tribune review be the panacea the restaurant so desperately needs? As the trailer indicates, it certainly wasn’t the home run they were expecting. “The offerings were substantially different on each visit,” reads the review, offering a critical counterpoint to Carmy’s insistence on changing up the menu each day. “Consistency seems to be the weak link here,” the review adds.
These and other questions will be answered, although specific plot points for the new season are being kept tightly under wwraps. That said, FX CEO John Landgraf dropped some hints during a recent interview with Puck.
According to Landgraf, the third season — which wasn’t nearly as well received as the previous seasons — is actually the first half of a two-season story arc.
“It is a very deeply personal show. That’s part of why it’s great,” Landgraf said, referencing the third season, in which Carmy felt unable to move forward. “There are a lot of reasons it’s great, but one of them is the relationship between the creator [Christopher Storer], the author and the characters, and he’s been stuck a lot at times in his life, and he wanted to make a season about stuckness. I’ve been doing this a long time. I was well aware that stuckness is not necessarily the most riveting [thing to watch]. But I also think there are so many things in that [season] that are just absolute masterpieces. And I will say, knowing what I do know about the upcoming season, for those that have stayed with it, they’re going to be really well rewarded. Because after stuckness comes unstuckness.”
During the first three seasons, The Bear has benefited from guest-starring appearances by the likes of Bob Odenkirk, John Mulaney, Sarah Ramos, Alex Moffat, Jon Bernthal, Olivia Colman, Joel McHale, Sarah Paulson, John Cena and Jamie Lee Curtis, who delivered a devastating performance as Carmy’s emotionally unstable mother.
“And that’s one of the joys of being on the show,” White mused in an interview with Esquire. “I think Chris has a sixth sense about these kind of things — he knows exactly who to put on the show. We’ve been so lucky so far, and I’m hopeful we will have some more familiar faces in the next season.”
The season premiere of The Bear begins streaming Wednesday, June 25, on Disney+