'The Bear': The Family You Love
The fourth season of The Bear (Disney+) drives voracious consumption. It's helped by the optimal episode length and the desire to get to the episode, which, by tradition, each season offers a double dose of fiction that takes us to the emotional core of the series. Because from that unsurpassed and famous Christmas celebration in the second season, you know that the ensemble show is guaranteed with a masterful script and production. The Bear is much more than the story told in the text. It's everything implicit in the silences, glances, and close-ups. If you haven't even started the first season, summer is a great time to test yourself with this pressure-cooker series. Choose the coolest hours to try it, because the drama raises the temperature and your heart rate. If you've devoured the first three seasons and ended up saturated with the Berzattos, give them another chance because all the characters are making a great effort to transform and can't stay halfway through their evolution. And if you've already devoured the last season and are longing for the fifth to premiere, you might be eager to share your thoughts.
The fourth installment begins with Uncle Jimmy taking a stopwatch into the kitchen of The Bear That starts a countdown. Fearing the continued loss of money on the investment in the family restaurant, he sets a limit. 1,440 hours that we'll watch tick by at top speed, aware that the clock also works for the spectators. We read the decreasing number of digits as a spectacle that should guarantee us action.
The Bear It's no longer what it used to be, but not as a production flaw, but rather due to the series' own need to never be the same. The Berzattos' drama needs to experiment with narratives, resources, and points of view. However, the plot has changed. We're not talking about the story of a restaurant and a gastronomic show in extreme close-up. We're dealing with the emotional journey of a highly dysfunctional family that, despite the profound pain they cause each other, always needs to maintain an extreme bond. This latest season overuses two resources. The first is the overlapping arguments between the protagonists, a singularity that has ended up falling into stereotype. And the second is a reiteration of the characters' scenes of deep meditation that end up coming across as pretentious and empty.
The intensity has shifted from the kitchen to exploring the protagonists' inner selves, who strive to evolve and improve, in a kind of collective psychological catharsis. The ending is misleading and rushed in a season that has sought more emotional flourish than a clear narrative destination. But it makes you love the Berzatto clan so much that you need to walk that path with them to ensure that one day they'll be okay.