The Bear Season 4s biggest problem is time

Contains spoilers for The Bear Season 4.

In one of the early scenes of The Bear Season 4, chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) watches the time-loop classic Groundhog Day.

“What would you do if you were stuck in one place?” Bill Murray’s weatherman Phil Connor asks while Carmy looks on. “And every day was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered?”

It’s a sentiment that resonates with Carmy, who spent much of The Bear‘s underwhelming Season 3 trapped in a self-destructive loop of his own. He hyper-fixated on his professional traumas in toxic kitchens, his breakup with Claire (Molly Gordon), his dysfunctional family, and of course, the ever-present grief of losing his brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal). As if that wasn’t enough, The Bear received a middling review in the Chicago Tribune — basically a death knell for the restaurant. After all that, it’s easy to feel, like Groundhog Day‘s Phil, that nothing he does matters.

Still, the review is the kick in the chef’s whites Carmy needs to take steps towards self-improvement, with much of Season 4 focusing on him trying to make things right with Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Claire, and more.

Unfortunately, while Carmy looks to learn from his mistakes, The Bear finds itself in a Groundhog Day-style time loop all of its own. That’s because Season 4 falls right back into the pitfalls of Season 3 — and then some. Worst of all is a lack of general urgency, one that’s at odds with this season’s ticking-clock structure.

The Bear Season 4’s biggest problem is that damn clock.

Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach in “The Bear.”
Credit: FX

In Season 4, episode 1, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and his numbers guy, “Computer” (Brian Koppelman), bring a large countdown clock into The Bear’s kitchen. It’s set for 1440 hours, or 60 days. That amount of time represents the restaurant’s parachute as it loses money. By the time it reaches zero, The Bear will have to stop operations. (Unless it gets a Michelin star, which might be enough to turn things around.)

In theory, the clock serves as both a doomsday countdown and a motivator for The Bear’s staff to get it together. In reality, though, it becomes evidence of The Bear‘s ridiculously frustrating pacing problem, which has carried over from Season 3.

To recap: In Season 3, episode 2, Carmy tells Sydney she needs to sign a partnership agreement to make her an official restaurant partner. By the end of Season 3, she had yet to sign said agreement. In Season 3, episode 7, Sydney received a job offer from former Ever chef Adam (Adam Shapiro). Just like with the partnership agreement, Sydney did not give Adam a response by the end of Season 3.

These are huge plot points, with the potential for changing up the entire course of The Bear. You’d think they’d be a major focal point early on in Season 4, right? Right?

Wrong! It takes almost all of Season 4 for Sydney to get back to Adam, and it flat-out takes the entirety of Season 4 for her and Carmy to discuss the partnership agreement. It’s already aggravating enough as a viewer to be strung along for this long, even if you’re binge-watching The Bear all the way through. But the clock makes this aggravation so much worse, because it tells you exactly how much time it’s taken Sydney to come to these decisions. You’re telling me it takes her just under 60 days — more, when counting Season 3! — to make these important, time-sensitive career moves? I’m willing to suspend my disbelief to a certain extent, but for a TV show that has frequently been praised for its realistic depictions of restaurant work, Adam and Carmy giving Sydney this much time to decide rings false.

The timing problems even extend to smaller details that poke holes in the otherwise lived-in, grounded environment The Bear has built. For example, it takes Carmy 46 days to hold Sugar’s (Abby Elliott) baby for the first time. 46! Sure, the Berzattos are dysfunctional, but not dysfunctional enough that they wouldn’t go visit their newborn niece who lives in the same city. Elsewhere, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) only starts coaching servers Neil Fak (Matty Matheson) and Gary (Corey Hendrix) on how to properly walk through the restaurant on the clock’s final day. Why wasn’t this a restaurant priority beforehand?

Missteps like this make it clear The Bear is losing sight of the details — ironic, given Carmy and his staff’s pursuit of culinary perfection, where every component matters. But on a broader level, this season’s egregious timeline proves that The Bear is just punting its most crucial confrontations further down the line. Unfortunately, it can’t find much else of substance to sustain it in the meantime.

The Bear Season 4 gives its most interesting supporting characters nothing to do.

Ayo Edebiri and Liza Colón-Zayas in “The Bear.”
Credit: FX

What else does The Bear’s staff have cooking this season, you may ask? Not much.

Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) spends two months trying to plate pasta in under three minutes. So much for the spotlight she got in Season 3’s “Napkins.” Meanwhile, Marcus (Lionel Boyce) sells his mother’s house then considers reconnecting with his father. Do we get a deeper sense of his grief, or actually meet his father? No, like so much of The Bear‘s most fascinating threads, that’s a problem for next season.

The same goes Ebraheim’s (Edwin Lee Gibson) intriguing plotline this season, which sees him examining the idea of franchising The Beef. But once again, that’s something The Bear kicks into the undefined future.

Instead, we’re treated to more of the Fak family, who work fine in small doses but are absolute menaces in the larger roles they’ve been granted season over season. As The Bear continues to veer further into straight drama as opposed to the comedy it originally billed itself as, the show hopes these bumbling brothers and their penchant for overlapping talking and bad side hustles can bring some levity to the show. But crosstalk and yelling do not a comedy make, and The Bear‘s most obvious attempts to remind us it can be funny won’t make you laugh as much as make you need an Advil.

The Bear actually wrings its funniest moments from small frustrations, like Richie realizing a profound voicemail he’s leaving has been cut off, or Tina texting Sydney, “mama this pasta is killing me.” Here, we get shades of the very funny, very human comedy that buoyed Season 1 and much of Season 2, but they’re few and far between.

The Bear Season 4’s big standalone episodes are a mixed bag.

Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear.”
Credit: FX

Every season of The Bear features episodes that play with the show’s formula, from Season 1’s one-take “Review” to Season 2’s nightmarish Christmas flashback “Fishes.” The series has found particular success with character-centric episodes, too, like the Marcus-focused “Honeydew,” the Richie-focused “Forks,” and the Tina-focused “Napkins.” In Season 4, The Bear tries to recreate the success of these kinds of episodes, just as it did in Season 3. But it leaves us only with diminishing returns.

The strongest of the bunch is episode 4, written by Edebiri and Boyce and directed by Janicza Bravo. Here, Sydney’s trip to get her hair done leads her to bond with her hairdresser Chantel’s (Danielle Deadwyler) daughter TJ (Arion King). TJ’s middle school friend troubles become a lens through which Sydney examines her career dilemma, giving us some much-needed insight into a decision-making process that has so far been shrouded in mystery or flat-out abandoned. Of course, what would have made the episode stronger is seeing it have a faster impact on her choice — which, again, takes 60 days to make! — but it’s overall a welcome window into Sydney’s life beyond The Bear. Bonus points for the scene in which Sydney and TJ make Hamburger Helper together, a cooking sequence reminiscent of Sydney’s Season 2 omelette-making montage, both centered around elevating simple dishes and cooking for people you care about. The show could afford to have more like it.

If episode 4 feels like a sister episode to “Honeydew,” “Forks,” and “Napkins,” then Season 4, episode 7 feels like an attempt to create a cheerful companion to “Fishes.” In this 69-minute monster, the entire Berzatto clan attends Richie’s ex Tiff’s (Gillian Jacobs) wedding to Frank (Josh Hartnett). Thankfully, no forks go flying and no cars crash into living rooms. Unfortunately, though, the show veers far, far from that stress, instead crafting an overly saccharine love fest that doubles as a showcase of The Bear‘s biggest (and, frankly, most distracting) guest stars.

There are high highs, like a poignant discussion between Carmy and Lee (Bob Odenkirk) about Mikey, or Richie and Frank’s panic about their father/stepfather dynamic. But mostly, it’s an episode of low lows, including more unfunny Fak drama and an interminable sequence involving everyone hiding under a table. Much of the dialogue in the latter sounds like a bunch of platitudes hurled back and forth. That problem extends across the rest of the season, to the point that some characters, like Claire or new hire Jessica (Sarah Ramos), sound like self-help books in human form.

The season’s last Very Special Episode is its finale, a tightly contained argument in the back alley behind The Bear, where Carmy, Sydney, and Richie finally let loose about all their grievances. It’s cathartic and gripping and gritty — everything The Bear has been missing for the past two seasons. As excellent as it is, it’s also deeply frustrating. These issues should have come to a head long, long ago. Instead, The Bear has been spinning its wheels for 10 episodes and 60 whole days, creating the illusion of progress with a lot of sound and fury, but very little payoff.

For a show that won’t let us forget that “every second counts,” The Bear commits a cardinal sin: It wastes its own characters’ time.

All episodes of The Bear Season 4 are now streaming on Hulu.