What if you threw a party and everyone RSVP’d yes? It’s a scenario that arises more than once in the latest season of The Bear, the foodiecore dramedy about Chicagoland restaurants and the troubled souls who run them. In one scene from the Season 4 premiere episode, “Groundhogs,” for example, The Bear’s hyperefficient Chef Jess (Sarah Ramos) tells maître d’ Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) to consider overbooking their restaurant by a couple of tables each night. That way, they avoid losing precious money on no-shows.
“What if everyone shows?” Richie frets.
“They call that a Champagne problem,” Jess responds.
Later in the new season, the Champagne flows freely at a wedding as a different version of this problem unfolds. The extended-length, cameo-laden seventh episode, “Bears,” is set entirely at the nuptials of Richie’s ex-wife, Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs). Her new man, Frank (Josh Hartnett), is lovely, wealthy—and high-key pretty anxious about the gangbusters attendance at this life event. In the world of hospitality, attracting critical masses to meaningful shindigs is a top objective. But it’s also a primary fear.
“I just hope everybody’s vibing,” Frank says, all but tugging his collar, because there sure are “a lot of Berzattos here.” He is referring to the many members of the sprawling, brawling, big-tent family that’s central to both the Bear the establishment and The Bear the series. One of them, a cousin by marriage and adoption named Stevie (John Mulaney), smiles wide at the mention. “Everyone came!” Stevie observes, and we know that he knows exactly what can happen when that happens.
Two seasons ago—also in an extended-length, cameo-laden episode, a flashback called “Fishes”—Stevie was one of many characters seated at the Berzatto table as a formal family feast turned into some bona fide dinner theater. Everything was on the menu that night: those titular fishes, a little handmade Sprite, passive aggression and aggressive aggression (both involving three armed and dangerous words: Are you OK?), not to mention a drunk matriarch crashing a car through a wall. You know, all the usual holiday merriment.
Tiffany was present that night, too, nauseated as hell—not by the antics, per se, but because she was pregnant with her and Richie’s daughter, Eva. All these years later, as she greets the skittish Chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) at her wedding by reminding him that “functions are dysfunctional,” we know that she knows of what she speaks. And we can only hope that her own function avoids repeating the patterns of a family she both does and doesn’t belong to.
In “Bears,” Tiffany isn’t a regular bride. Tiffany is a chill bride. She wears mismatched earrings, baby. She doesn’t just invite her ex-husband, Richie, in good faith: She also invites his whole found-family crew, tossing around plus-ones like they’re confetti. Disarmingly, she tells Carmy that “I don’t know 75 percent of the people here,” that “I’m just trying to keep it as mellow as possible,” and that “there aren’t going to be any speeches—no speeches.” But as we come to learn in the episode, this partly sunny behavior masks some legit pain.
In a scene between Tiffany and Stevie’s wife, Cousin Michelle (Sarah Paulson), Tiffany notes that not everyone came to her wedding after all: Her own mother, too preoccupied by some new dude out in Boulder, had sent her regrets. With all this in mind, I felt nervous for the bride, who didn’t deserve whatever chaotic mess of a Berzatto-soaked wedding day she surely had coming.
But my fear, much like Frank’s, was unwarranted. When it came time to pull off a wedding, The Bear indulged in all the classic traditions. “Bears” contains the key game-day elements known to all superstitious brides: something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. And while the episode that results isn’t perfect, it does serve up satisfying amounts of wedded bliss.
The something old is the show’s setting itself: Across literature, film, and TV history, there’s nothing quite like a wedding to bring characters and plots into one festive, charged space. (Just ask Jane Austen or Jesse Armstrong about that. Poor Connor Roy!) There’s also the episode’s now familiar form—an installment longer and meatier than the others—which has turned into a predictable event: “Fishes” and the Richie-forward “Forks,” both in Season 2. And plotwise, “Bears” honors the past—past love, past lives, time passed under tables—even on a day devoted to the future.
Which brings me to the something new. The most conspicuously shiny new bauble in “Bears” is undoubtedly Brie Larson as Francine fuckin’ Fak. A vividly high-strung, nigh-Dunst-like performance! Although if I’m being honest, it’s also a casting coup and story line that I struggled to fully enjoy. (I cannot tell a lie: Watching the Fak-Berzatto frenemies with benefits so comedically bicker reminded me of the way I sometimes felt during Season 3 of The Bear or any time that Computer is on the screen—as if someone is elbowing me expectantly and saying wellnowwaddayathinkaboutthat?) Ultimately, all the bits that I liked best in “Bears” were the ones that stacked the something new on existing, crumbling foundations and, in doing so, helped characters rebuild.
In “Fishes,” Carmy’s mother, DD (Jamie Lee Curtis), greets him back home with a guilt trip: “Once a year, that’s all we get him,” she declares. “He’s too fancy for us now; it’s fine.” In “Bears,” it’s Tiffany who welcomes him to the wedding by granting him preemptive permission to “cruise whenever you want” because “I’ve already seen you,” a gracious acknowledgment that any second she gets with Carmy still counts. In “Fishes,” Lee (Bob Odenkirk) is a real prick; in “Bears,” his and Carmy’s conversation, in which he shares the pride the late Mikey (Jon Bernthal) took in Carmy, is a necessary salve. As for Richie, last season, he was running his mouth about Hollywood directors and Zen gardens and fortresses of solitude; now, he’s still going on about the Hollywood directors and Zen gardens, but this time he’s zagged to realize that maybe he’s the sand. He and Syd once hated each other, and now she’s his plus-one.
What is something borrowed in “Bears”? Well, the episode certainly seeks to borrow its viewers’ time, patience, spatial awareness, and sense of disbelief with its surreal under-the-table scene, in which characters crawl in and gather round and talk one by one about their biggest fears and the constraints of reality—all to soothe (?) Richie’s young daughter, who doesn’t like to dance. Absurd? Yes. Fondant-grade levels of saccharine? Also yes. But dammit, that’s what weddings are all about.
As a chill bride, Tiffany wears a blue-ribbon headband. But the more striking something blue in “Bears” is far less perky than that. It’s the way her face crumples with some combination of regret and relief when she dances with Richie. It’s the way Uncle Cicero needles Richie for fumbling the bag so badly, and Richie can only agree. It’s the way the Francie-Sugar fracas, over the top as it may be, did kinda make me reflect back on that one friend who got away. It’s seeing DD get to chat with someone who hasn’t spent a lifetime trying to tune out the sound of her voice. It’s knowing that one of the pivotal parts of Frank’s wedding day—hearing that Eva is always gushing about her stepdad—was just one of Richie’s well-practiced, well-intended white lies.
Still, “Bears” features a wedding with a lot more happy endings and hopeful beginnings than I’d expected. Maybe that’s why the episode is unafraid of the moments that run melancholy and why some of those notes are the most resonant ones of the show’s fourth season. The Bear is at its best when it engages with the trade-offs of abundance and all the ways opportunity can devolve into overwhelm. With success comes high expectations that get let down, in the form of a Chicago Tribune restaurant review at the start of the season that isn’t so much bad as it is disappointed, which always feels worse. Chef Sydney is such a fresh talent that she earns the luxury—but also the paralysis—of having a big fork-in-the-road decision to make. Carmy’s experience of true love is that it feels like discomfort.
These are Champagne problems, maybe, but that doesn’t mean they go down easy. When everyone wants to be at the party, entertaining them all starts resembling work.
