Season 4 of The Bear picked up after Carmy and Sydney received a lackluster restaurant review — but did the premiere hint at the show’s conclusion?
Hulu released the new season on Wednesday, June 25, which picked up after Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) received a negative critique in the Chicago Tribune about The Bear. The write up included calling out the establishment’s “dissonance” while praising Ebraheim’s (Edwin Lee Gibson) sandwich window.
Carmy was still determined to help The Bear succeed while Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) was unsure whether to stay or to go work with Adam Shapiro. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), meanwhile, was coming into the new and elevated version of himself but it takes a toll on his bond with his daughter.
Sydney gave Carmy a pep talk about being “less miserable” and to stop with the “dysfunction” before Cicero (Oliver Platt) gave them some new terms. They have 1440 hours — a.k.a two months — to either improve operations or close the restaurant down for good.
The Bear then went through some improvements including a robot for deliveries and several employees from Ever who help things run smoothly. Meanwhile in a flashback, Mikey (Jon Bernthal) heard about Carmy’s idea for a restaurant for the first time.
Since its premiere in 2021, The Bear has released a new season every year. There have been questions, however, about how long the show would run due to the busy schedules of cast members like White, 34, Edebiri, 29, and Moss-Bachrach, 48.
Moss-Bachrach previously opened up about how the cast filmed an extended amount of episodes between seasons 3 and 4.
“When we went in to start season 3, we weren’t going in to make season 3 and 4,” he recalled during a July 2024 episode of the “Talk Easy With Sam Fragoso” podcast. “But it swelled and our episodes got quite big — over an hour.”
The extra footage allowed for the cast to start season 4 production immediately, with Moss-Bachrach adding, “Some of these episodes we’re splitting [and we] are not making it into two seasons and now we are going to be making 15 or 16 episodes instead of 10. But we’re gonna do it all at the same time.”
The actor recalled challenges that came from capturing so much footage at once.
“I would come in at the beginning of the day and shoot a scene from late in season 4 and then shoot a scene from early season 4 and then shoot a scene late in season 3,” Moss-Bachrach explained. “Jeremy, Ayo and I are in a constant state of rereading through the seasons and trying to remember where your person is at.”
Moss-Bachrach elaborated on filming the two-season arc in a separate conversation with Mr. Porter that same month, saying, “We shot about 18 episodes, but everything shifts. In the past, what was one episode on the page has been split into two. I just lose myself in the messiness and chaos of it. I like getting taken by a wave that’s bigger than you thought it was, tumbled around and spit out the other end.”
The chairman of FX Content and FX Productions, John Landgraf, previously called it “accurate” when Deadline asked him in September 2024 if he still didn’t know whether there would be more seasons of the hit Hulu series.
The Bear is currently streaming on Hulu.
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