The Bear is first and foremost a show about craft—its joys, its agonies, its destructive and redemptive powers—so let’s talk about the craft of the sequel. There are basically two ways a sequel can extend an original story. It can move horizontally, or it can move vertically. “Horizontally” and “vertically” are sophisticated narrative terms that I’m basically making up for the purposes of this article, but the types of storytelling they indicate are fundamental; they’ll be familiar even if you’ve never thought about them before. And with the fourth season of The Bear, Christopher Storer’s beloved comedy-drama about Chicago chefs and their weird third cousins, set to drop on June 25, I think the most important question for the future of the show is which of these two directions it means to move in.
Here’s what I mean by horizontal and vertical. Sequels that expand horizontally do so by introducing new stuff. They invent new characters. They take us to new settings. They imagine new conflicts. They work by broadening the story’s horizons. Sequels that expand vertically do so by exploring the stuff that’s already there. They delve into backstories. They illuminate histories. They find blank spaces in the existing plot and concoct narratives to fill them in. They work by deepening the story’s roots. Of course, most good sequels expand in both directions at once: You will go to the Dagobah system is a horizontal expansion, and I am your father is a vertical one. But almost all sequels do most of their storytelling in one direction or the other, and it’s usually not hard to say which.
Through its first three seasons, The Bear must have been one of the most vertically oriented shows in the history of American television. In its world, everything is backstory. Even the first season is essentially a sequel. From the moment we meet Carmy—the brilliant, troubled, young chef, played by Jeremy Allen White, who’s the closest thing this ensemble-driven series has to a protagonist—we’re already living in an aftermath. Carmy’s brother, a restaurant owner named Mikey, has died by suicide, leaving behind a traumatized family and a grief-stricken crew at the restaurant, which Carmy has inherited. Carmy’s quest to save the restaurant doubles as a struggle to come to terms with his brother’s death. What’s more, his return to Chicago represents a headlong plunge back into the chaotic world of his childhood, a world he became a chef in large part to escape. Even the restaurant’s name, the Original Beef of Chicagoland, suggests a tie to some deep-seated foundational pain.
The story of the first season ostensibly revolves around Carmy’s attempt to run the Beef, a ramshackle neighborhood sandwich shop, like one of the high-end fine-dining restaurants where he’s previously worked. But for us, the more compelling drama lies in the deep web of preexisting relationships. Who are all these people, and why do they all seem to hate each other one minute and love each other the next? One of the reasons Ayo Edebiri’s character, the newly hired sous-chef Sydney, is such a joy to watch in those early episodes is that she’s as new to this world as we are. She’s a horizontal element in an otherwise inescapably vertical universe. She doesn’t carry the same crushing burden of backstory. (That will come later.)
In Season 2, The Bear becomes, if anything, even more vertical. Every new experience becomes a means of uncovering new layers of the past. When Carmy flirts with a woman at the grocery store, she turns out to be his childhood crush. When Marcus, the gentle-eyed pastry chef played by Lionel Boyce, travels to Copenhagen to study at a renowned restaurant, it’s one of Carmy’s former colleagues who meets him in the kitchen. The same pattern repeats in the lovely sequence when Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Mikey’s rough-edged best friend and Carmy’s maître d’, goes to stage at Ever, a fine-dining restaurant owned, inevitably, by Carmy’s old mentor.
There’s a sign in the kitchen at Ever that reads EVERY SECOND COUNTS, a phrase whose contradictory double meaning—hurry, but also appreciate each moment—becomes a kind of mantra for the show. It’s a fitting refrain for a series that’s obsessed with images of time passing (days being crossed off a calendar, hands moving on a clock). But the unspoken question often seems to be: How can we count the seconds if time keeps running backward?
The first two seasons of The Bear made for genuinely surprising and moving TV. They struck a tone—call it Freudian screwball, a sort of mash-up of comic frenzy and primal pain, often stemming from the same relationship—that was raw, jarring, and utterly riveting. The filmmaking was daring, and the acting felt high-stakes even when the insights veered toward standard trauma-plot fare, and even when the story beats (a monologue at a 12-step meeting, an emotionally frenzied family Thanksgiving) felt a little too stale for such an innovative menu. You’d go, “Well, this is getting kind of cringe,” and then three seconds later, you’d be weeping as Moss-Bachrach sped down the road singing along to Taylor Swift.
And because The Bear was so electric, it didn’t even feel all that surprising when the show became a low-key cultural phenomenon. Yes, The Bear was a small-scale production; sure, it was more psychologically intricate than most of what captures the zeitgeist these days. Compared to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it might as well have been Gertrude Stein. But like a sandwich at the Beef, it had sauce. It felt totally natural that the show turned Edebiri and White into stars. It felt strangely inevitable that an artistically ambitious FX series made Matty Matheson into a left-field style icon. It felt right that a show about sad people yelling in aprons made a $100 German T-shirt one of the hottest menswear items of the decade.
After Season 2, The Bear seemed unstoppable. And then … then Season 3 happened. Look, it’s probably an exaggeration to say that Season 3 is a dud. In many ways, it’s as good as the first two seasons. The actors are still wonderful. The stress is still searing. The chemistry still leaps off the screen. But to many people, me included, the season seemed to hit a wall, and I think the biggest reason is that The Bear became trapped in its own verticality. It seemed to stop moving forward almost completely while spending more and more of its energy fleshing out minor characters’ complex pasts. The show’s emphasis on repetition and family history makes sense given its focus on the psychology of trauma, but television has its own psychology, and it needs novelty and progress to stay alive.
It didn’t help that Season 3 literally slowed to a crawl for long stretches, devoting large chunks of episodes to real-time conversations that served mostly to reinforce stuff we already knew. Carmy has trouble communicating? Carmy’s troubled mom hurts her children even though she loves them? We got it the first two times. Even the introduction of a new life—the baby that Carmy’s sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), delivered in the finale—was used mostly as a way to explore Natalie’s relationship with her mother. The whole season felt mildly if not fatally stagnant. If it had been a restaurant, you’d be willing to go back, but you’d be worried it was going downhill.
Well, now we’re back in the parking lot. And cards on the table: I really want the meal to be good. If The Bear is going to recapture the magic of its first two seasons, I think it has to find a way to be more horizontal. The show can’t keep mining its characters’ emotional histories to the exclusion of everything else. We need it to give us something new. If for no other reason, we need it because in 2025, it seems fatally insular for a show about the restaurant industry, a show in which many of the characters are immigrants, to focus solely on private pain. As Season 4 debuts, masked ICE agents are raiding restaurant kitchens. If there are no atheists in foxholes, I’m not sure that there are backstories under MAGA rule. I’m not asking The Bear to become overtly political, but I’d love for it to look up a little more clearly at the world around it. It’s hard for a show to reflect the times when the times are changing so fast, but that’s all the more reason to try. Every second counts, after all.
