‘The Bear’ Season 4 Review: A simpler dish, served family style

“It’s not fancy. But it’s good,” Sydney Adamu says about a new dish strategy in the opening stretch of The Bear‘s fourth season. She’s talking about the food, sure, but also the show itself, now plating a cleaner, less fussy version of its once-anarchic self. This is The Bear at its most self-aware, perhaps even self-correcting, A series that, after seasons of scorched-earth chaos and haute-TV maximalism, finally decides to breathe and trust the ingredients.

With ten episodes now available on FX and Hulu, Christopher Storer’s The Bear returns. And if Season 2 was about transformation and Season 3 about its existential cost, then Season 4 is a regrouping. The show is still fast, still funny, still tense. But it’s no longer obsessed with topping itself. Like Carmy dialing back the complexity of his mise en place, the show scales down its ambitions to find clarity in the familiar. And while that clarity doesn’t always lead to revelation, it often tastes like something better: comfort with character, intention in theme, and enough restraint to let its secret sauce reduce.

Back to the line.

From the start, The Bear made itself essential television by dramatizing the visceral pressures of food service as a metaphor for personal collapse. It cooked trauma into texture. Grief into pacing. Love into mise en scène. The cramped, grease-slicked back-of-house in Season 1 became a proving ground for artistry in Season 2, where each character’s arc was plated with the same obsessive care Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White, still lightning-cold and fireplace-warm) gave his dishes. And when that perfectionism metastasized in Season 3 by spiraling into a parade of dead ends and disconnected detours, the show began to feel like it was chasing Michelin stars in the wrong medium.

The Bear Season 4, refreshingly, is not trying to be the best meal of your life. It just wants to be satisfying. The shift is subtle but intentional. There’s a return to ensemble dynamics, a softening of the need to explode. Where Season 3 often pushed characters into isolated episodes that functioned more as showcases than story, this season draws the kitchen staff back into each other’s orbit.

Slower burn, richer sauce.

Carmy, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Syd (Ayo Edebiri) are still reeling from the messes they made of their restaurant but also their lives. The Bear, the sleek fine-dining venture built on the bones of The Beef, is still on the brink, now facing the fallout of a crushing Tribune review and a looming financial expiration date. But the narrative heat has been turned down to a simmer. There’s no “Fishes” this year. No bottle episode-as-symphony.

Instead, we get steady, human-sized developments: Sydney braiding a young cousin’s hair while negotiating career choices; Richie pulling off an absurd hospitality stunt involving fake snow; Marcus (Lionel Boyce) retreating from ambition to recover his footing. Sugar (Abby Elliott), still caught between spreadsheets and baby bottles, gets a little more room to breathe. Even the seasonal guest-star extravaganza (still bloated, but now more self-parody than self-serious) knows it’s a remix of a hit single, not a spiritual successor.

Less heat. More humanity.

That’s not to say the show has fixed all its pacing issues. The first few episodes simmer slowly at times, even unevenly, setting emotional timers that take several hours to go off. Some plot lines remain stranded in place, particularly the professional choices Syd and Marcus continue to stew over. Others, like Tina’s search for purpose or Carmy’s evolving sense of failure, are more hinted at than articulated. But the show’s tonal restraint makes even its unresolved elements feel intentional, like courses in a menu you don’t quite understand yet but trust will amount to something.

If The Bear has always flirted with the literary idea of being “about” food, Season 4 is the first to really chew on that metaphor. There are fewer montages of perfectly seared protein and fewer declarations about flavor profiles or platings. But the spirit of cooking, of making something that matters, even if no one notices…that’s back in the bones. The kitchen here isn’t a torture chamber or a therapy session. It’s a genuine workplace. And a community. And a sacred mess.

Still caught in the walk-in.

Yet for all its recalibration, the show can’t fully let go of Carmy’s inner monologue as organizing principle. He still broods, still loops through past unresolved misery. The script tries to address this fatigue directly when one character even questions if there’s anything left for him to say. But it’s unclear whether the show believes him. For every scene that gestures at a possible pivot, there’s another reminding us of how much we’re still circling the same emotional drain.

In fact, the first episode essentially lampshades this effect by directly likening its main star to Bill Murray’s time loop doom in Groundhog Day. A fun wink, but at a certain point, “I meant to do that” comes across like an excuse for repetitive beats.

What’s cooking beneath the surface.

FX’s marketing describes this season as one where the team must “adapt, adjust, and overcome,” and that ethos extends beyond the narrative. This is Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo (of BoJack Horseman and Undone) choosing subtraction over spectacle. There are still crisp edits, killer needle drops from Josh Senior, and Hiro Murai’s cinematic fingerprints, but the bravado now takes a backseat to vulnerability. Even the food itself (once bathed in erotic light) is more function than fetish.

The question becomes: how long can The Bear keep us interested in one man’s breakdown, reheated across multiple seasons? In some ways, that tension mirrors the show’s position in the prestige-TV landscape. Once a critical darling for its kinetic verité and raw vulnerability, The Bear now feels increasingly aware of its reputation. Its awards cachet. It’s place in the hallowed conversation by a particularly dusty watercoolers.

Course corrections.

That the show still delivers something emotionally nourishing despite this self-consciousness is a credit to the team’s instincts. As well as FX’s willingness to back creators without forcing them into cliffhangers or franchise bloat. You get the sense that The Bear could end here as a complete, four-course meal. You also get the sense it could go on for years and quietly fade out, like the smell of onions after a long night’s prep.

By the end of The Bear Season 4, the knives are still sharp, but no longer aimed at our throats. Characters pause more often. They speak softer. They screw up, then try again. In other words, they’re a little more likable. There are no grand epiphanies or earth-shaking shifts. Just slow, deliberate turns toward something more sustainable.

So yes, The Bear started out as a kitchen drama disguised as an occasionally pretentious grief odyssey. But it now resembles something simpler, humbler, and maybe even more honest. A show about what it takes to keep showing up, every day, for the people you’ve chosen and the work you can’t quite quit. It’s not always fancy. But it’s good.

All ten episodes of The Bear Season 4 are available now to stream on Hulu. Watch the trailer here.