Hi,
Last week I released a podcast called “The Bear is Great and You Are Wrong”. I genuinely try not to be that confrontational but recently, there have been a few pieces of media that I feel like should be getting universal praise that I see people complaining about. The Bear is one of those pieces of media.
I genuinely think the fourth season of The Bear is as good, if not better than the first two seasons (we all know it’s better than the third season, even I liked that one too). The way the series culminates in Season 4, Episode 10 where Carmy and Ritchie finally start hashing out why they’ve always resented each other. I honestly think that scene is a masterpiece. It even comes off the heels of a phenomenal scene between Syd and Carm (which we’ll get to).
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The Bear first premiered in July 2022 and it took me nearly five months before I actually watched it. I had heard it was pretty good but I wasn’t rushing to get to it. At the end of the year, I was tallying the results for the Post Show Recaps (RIP) Top 10 TV Shows of the Year list and this little FX show kept getting votes. In an effort to make sure that my co-hosts don’t know what’s coming but there’s always someone who has watched every show, I binged The Bear in case it made the list. Turns out, our listeners thought it was the 9th best show of 2022 (sandwiched between Yellowjackets and The Sandman).
And yeah, I got it. I’ve never really worked in a kitchen, at least not as my full-time or part-time job. But I’ve been in close enough proximity to know that it can feel exactly like that. It’s hectic. It’s greasy. It’s frantic. But hey, hopefully the food’s good. It was that energy, combined with the thing that probably draws me into a TV show more than anything else — there was darkness beneath the surface.
Carmy clearly had a lot going on and Jeremy Allen White played the performance with a quiet mastery that only the best face actors can pull off. The weight of everything that happened with his family was weighing on him. And as someone who dealt with tumultuous times with my family and who found some serenity in being away from it at times, I related heavily with our protagonist. Carmy then being the one who comes back and has to try to pick up all the pieces, even as what was left behind was a complete mess, made for a spectacular season of TV. It came back the next year and knocked it out of the park again.
And then Season 3 happened. The show had always been rumored to have a three season arc but now, the showrunners were extending that out. You could feel it in Season 3. We get a cliffhanger that I’ll admit felt like it could have been the end of an episode rather than a season. It felt like everyone was saying “what happened to this show?”
But to me, the show had growth. And frankly, people don’t really like change. I’ve heard people miss the hectic nature of The Beef. The plotting of the fine dining restaurant felt like a pace that didn’t excite. The Faks were on the screen too much. On and on and on.
I remember being on a podcast and saying that I was sure that Season 4 would come out and in hindsight, everyone would go back and say, “Season 3 wasn’t that bad”. Then I’d pull out some tape recorder and prove that they HATED it at the time and I was the one that was right!?
That’s not exactly how it’s panned out. It feels like people like Season 4 more than Season 3, but they don’t like it more than the first two seasons. But here’s why they’re wrong.
First, the idea of Carmy working in a fine dining restaurant is the most fully realized version of the long-standing metaphor between restaurants and trauma. Fine dining, especially at the level Carmy is used to, is rooted in discipline, repetition, control. You do the same tasks day in, day out: the same knife cuts, the same sauces, the same dishes executed with absolute precision. It is about muscle memory, not improvisation. You suppress your emotions and your personal life for the sake of perfection because that’s what the diner wants. It is, in so many ways, a mirror for the way people, especially men, cope with trauma: by compartmentalizing, controlling, and pushing forward without acknowledging pain.
Carmy is someone who never got the tools to process what he’s been through. His mother, though she loved him, was emotionally chaotic and manipulative. His brother’s suicide left him with a tangled mess of grief and guilt. Every relationship in Carmy's life is marked by silence or volatility. The structure of fine dining offers him the illusion of stability. If he can just control the food, maybe he can control the chaos. Maybe he can keep everything else from falling apart.
But this is also where the metaphor turns against him. Working in a high-end restaurant demands perfection at all costs. It leaves no room for vulnerability or flexibility. You can't pause service to talk about your feelings or have a breakdown in the walk-in. So even as Carmy tries to find healing by transforming The Bear into something new, by attempting connection with Claire, he is still trapped in an industry and environment that reinforces the very behaviors keeping him stuck.
Earlier in the season, Carmy stops by his mom’s house to drop something off, and she persuades him to stay. Then she unloads on him. In some ways, it’s heartfelt. She’s trying to express that she wants to change, that she wants to be better for him. But on the other hand, she’s dumping all of this emotional weight onto Carmy, asking him to hold her progress, her regret. And how does he respond? He makes her lunch.
The brilliance of this scene is in how murky it is. Is his mom being kind by acknowledging the harm she’s done and expressing a desire to change? Or is she just saying the right things without actually doing the work, shifting the emotional burden back onto Carmy in the process? I think it’s both. And that feeling. that limbo between hope and skepticism, is deeply familiar to me. It’s something I feel all the time with my brother. At what point in his healing journey will I trust him again? It often feels like I should before I actually can.
In the finale, when Syd learns that Carm is stepping away from the restaurant, it’s framed as a necessary sacrifice. He believes The Bear can’t survive if he stays. She’s the one holding it together now. But in essence, he’s repeating the same pattern his mother followed: handing off emotional responsibility under the guise of love or necessity. Just as his mom burdened him with her need to change without doing the full work herself, Carm is leaving Syd to carry the weight of his dreams, his mess, his absence and offering her the restaurant but also the pressure, the instability, and the unresolved emotions he can't yet face.
Then he and Richie finally have it out, and I think it’s the best scene in the history of the show. Carmy resents Richie for having a close relationship with Mikey, while Richie resents Carmy for building a successful career away from the chaos. But neither of them fully understands how painful the other’s position was. Richie may have been Mikey’s best friend, but he couldn’t save him. And Carmy is haunted by the fact that he didn’t even try. He wasn’t there at all. Their argument is raw and heartbreaking, not just because of what they say, but because of everything they’ve never said until now.
And I get that some people think this conversation should have happened in Season 1 but it didn’t. It happened now. And it carries the weight of every episode we’ve seen since then. We haven’t even talked about Marcus’s journey or Tina’s journey or Ebrhamin’s journey. I could write whole articles on each of those stories and why I think they are phenomenal.
But the Carm story is perfect and anybody who says otherwise is wrong.
From,
Grace
YES!! I agree 100%. I am so excited to see where they go in season 5. I love the layers to each character and how deeply the show can make me think and feel.