Why has one of the critics' and the public's favorite series fallen into disgrace?

BarcelonaWhen The bear premiered on Disney+ in June 2022, it quickly won over most critics and viewers alike. It was the series of the moment: everyone was talking about this drama set in a restaurant and its lead actor, Jeremy Allen White, who played a fine-dining chef taking over the family sandwich shop. Although he had already participated in long-running shows like Shameless, The bear propelled Allen White into the big leagues and made him one of the most talked-about actors. After the experts' praise came the awards: at the 2023 Emmy Awards, it swept the most important categories. Of course, curiously, despite being clearly a drama or, at best, a dramedy, the platform submitted it in the comedy category, and all the awards it has accumulated so far are for this genre.

This Friday, The bear says goodbye definitively to its audience with the premiere of its fifth season, but unlike a few years ago, it no longer monopolizes the conversation and has lost the fervor it generated. What happened for it to practically fall from grace in the span of a couple of years? The beginning of the decline started with the premiere of the third season. After two widely celebrated installments, critics received the third with some coolness. In the review of the second season for ARA, Eulàlia Iglesias already pointed out some of its problems and specifically highlighted the sixth episode, titled Fishes. "This episode also responds to one of the worst obsessions of contemporary audiovisual fiction, especially serials. That mania of giving an origin story to absolutely everything and everyone, a dramatic resource that, at times, rather than injecting complexity into the characters, reduces their psychology to a specific family trauma," said Iglesias, who also noted that the fiction fell into the trap of glorifying work self-exploitation.

A progressive decline

"From being one of the best television series of all time, it has become a rushed, unfocused and half-baked series. The third season of the culinary drama is a great disappointment. Has it become a victim of its own success?", wondered the critic of the "Guardian Stuart Heritage. Another TV columnist for the Guardian, Rebeca Nicholson, assured in her review that the third season was "incredibly frustrating". "The bear takes a step back in a rudderless third season that relies too much on star power", read the headline of the review of Variety.The specialized magazine's opinion hit the nail on the head, pointing out one of the series' problems: the large number of cameos it accumulated as it became more popular. The opinions of other major Anglo-Saxon media, such as the "New York Times, used more or less the same arguments. "Overall, it's a more frustrating season. It lacks a bit of the warmth that was seen more frequently in the early seasons, and the humor has focused more on characters or relief interludes designed specifically for that purpose. This is not what we would normally expect from a series that has been classified, for awards purposes, as a comedy," explained critic Daniel Fienberg in a debate proposed by The Hollywood Reporter. However, it should be noted that other headers, such as Los Angeles Times or RIGHT NOW, they praised the new chapters. In fact, Mònica Planas assured that the third season transported the viewer "to a higher level of the narrative".

With the fourth season, the lukewarm reviews continued. "For this critic, the third season only magnified the flaws that The bear has had since its inception: an emphasis on mood and atmosphere over plot, and a refusal to shift the focus from a textbook tortured genius like Carmy to the interesting people surrounding him. But with these flaws, The bear faces a a trial by fire in the fourth season", the specialist of " remarkedVariety, which assured that there had been a timid improvement compared to the previous delivery. "The fourth season exacerbates the stagnation that occurred during the third season so much that it will surely make all fans, except the least demanding, impatient. The series still looks delicious. But, literally, it has lost the plot," said the critic from the "Times.

At the 2025 ceremony, corresponding to the third season, the series went home empty-handed despite vying for awards in the most important categories (best comedy series, best lead actor, best lead actress, best supporting actor, best supporting actress, and best direction).

Setting aside criticism, the natural course of a series' life is to lose viewers and attention as it adds seasons, especially if the fiction lasts a long time. Few productions experience the opposite. An exceptional case would be "}Game of Thrones, which gained fans as it approached the end.

The bear also exemplifies one of the great dissonances in how series are consumed today. At a time when there is an oversupply of products, every week we have the best series of the year when it is not the best series in history. But, often, the fury subsides as quickly as the bubbles in cava, following the logic of capitalist consumption. The bear is not the only one to have suffered this phenomenon: other fictions such as The Handmaid's Tale or the oldest Heroes have lived through similar situations.