Liza Colón-Zayas as Tina and Ayo Edebiri as Sydney, in season five of The Bear.Supplied
I’ve always felt there’s a cruelty to making a person finish their plate before they can leave the table. Sometimes, the meal is simply too big. Other times, the bites left on the plate are subpar. Why not let the memory of a good meal stand, rather than choke the rest down for the sake of a clean finish?
With apologies for adding another food metaphor to the endless food metaphors that pepper (sorry!) reviews of The Bear: that’s how it felt watching the show’s fifth and final season. This is a show that should have quit before it got bloated (sorry!). It’s not that its ending was bad – frankly, that would have almost been more satisfying — but rather that it was, well, bland (sorry again!).
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Season 4 ended with The Bear and its crew getting an ultimatum – turn around the finances, or close – and Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) revealing to chef de cuisine Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) that he’s decided to quit the restaurant, and the restaurant industry. Season 5 begins with a storm, Chicago being battered by a Biblical downpour that wreaks havoc on The Bear’s physical structure while doing the same to its employees, who are forced to contend with reduced staffing, reduced budgets and restricted ingredient lists as the restaurant tries to draw cash-flow blood from a stone ahead of dinner service.
Meanwhile, cook Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) has concocted a plan to franchise The Bear’s sandwich window, The Beef, while financier Cicero (Oliver Platt) is going broke keeping the restaurant open and enlists Computer (Ben Koppelman) and new character Cheese (Elsie Fisher) to help figure out ways to keep it afloat.
Jeremy Allen White as Carmen and Lionel Boyce as Marcus.Supplied
It’s a high-stakes setup that plays out one scene at a time over the final season – a great narrative choice, since it puts the show’s action back in the kitchen, which is where it first found its extremely compelling footing. Unfortunately, despite all this, Season 5 doesn’t really reach a running pace until its penultimate episode – the dinner service itself – choosing instead to oscillate sharply between workplace drama and character development in short, social media reel-friendly vignettes that are so awkwardly stitched together, they sometimes feel as though they were pulled from different episodes.
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The show’s large ensemble cast, in as fine form as ever, does their best with storytelling that’s often so clearly trying to wrap things up in a tidy bow, it becomes ham-fisted. The script’s frequent winks at viewers – referencing how fans of the show took up “yes, chef” as ordinary vernacular, for instance, or the will-they-won’t-they theories about Carmy and Syd that took over social media – are so corny, it’s almost hard to believe this is the same show that brought us Season 2’s breathtaking sixth episode, Fishes.
Speaking of Season 2 – the show’s best, and maybe one of the best sophomore TV offerings of the 2000s – it was then that The Bear shifted somewhat, from a laser focus on Carmy to a more fleshed-out look at its supporting players. And while this shift in focus eventually turned into a lack of focus, it did add needed depth to Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the show’s failson-turned-FOH pro. And in Season 5, while every other character gets a super-saccharine goodbye – the show’s final scenes are literally an assembled group shot of all its key characters, at a birthday party – Richie is still granted a fittingly poignant farewell. In a season of disappointment, it’s gratifying to see at least one storyline get its just desserts (sorry!).