The Bear S04

After focusing Season 3 on the opening and running of their new restaurant, The Bear returns to the characters we love so much in its fourth season. The FX and Hulu series, streaming on JioHotstar, returns with Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), and Ritchie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) working to get their financial losses in order while staring down a possible closure of the restaurant in their future. However, if last season was about chaos, this season is all about growth. The culinary series, created by Christopher Storer, also addresses the show’s future within the narrative. Spoilers ahead for narrative plots! While the craziness of Season 3 has been dialled down, Season 4 of The Bear looks at the grim realities of running a restaurant. The Bear’s sandwich shop window never slows down, but the main high-end restaurant sees some roadblocks. There’s a literal running clock, showing how much money the establishment has until it needs to shut down without solid profits. Apart from the culinary obstacles, each character faces a crisis of faith. There’s a family wedding, a health scare, and a baby to welcome. But most importantly, all of the characters actually talk to each other about problems they’ve hidden deep all this time.

In an opening flashback, Carmen aka Carmy — played by the irrepressible Jeremy Allen White — is seen telling his late brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) about his vision for a restaurant. He says: “We could make it calm, we could make it delicious, we could play good music, people would want to come in there and celebrate… we could make people happy.” Carmy’s recipe for a winner of a restaurant pretty much sums up what The Bear has meant to us over the last three seasons — a series, that true to its audacious and intense DNA, throws its players into the frying pan of adversity, but the fact that they come up trumps at the end, is inspiring. In short, it is an uplifting experience. The Bear has always “made people happy”. Season 4 of the much-loved and highly feted series is now streaming on JioHotstar, and it hits the ground running, taking off from where the third season had ended. The reason could possibly be that they were shot back-to-back. It is a more confident and calmer season than its immediate predecessor, though the 20-episode arc across the two seasons — with a ‘to be continued’ thrown in — means that they are essentially two sides of the same coin.