‘The Bear’ Season 4 Episode 1 Recap: Groundhog Day

I’ll admit: I felt pretty low about my life after I invested so much time lovingly recapping The Bear‘s second season only to have Slate drop its eviscerating takedown right after the third season dropped, a season which, let’s face it, disappointed even the most devout Bear Heads. But, then again, who knows: Maybe there were some real psychos out there that loved Season 3? But was it true what Slate’s writer, Jack Hamilton, said — was it really “Not a good show”? 

I won’t go that far yet.

I had read online criticisms from prickly critics and disgruntled fans about Season 3’s heavy reliance on episodes full of dead-end flashbacks and detouring sub-plots about minor characters. These are valid complaints, so much so that I found myself drifting off after being bludgeoned by smash-cuts of spinning clocks, boiling pots of red sauce, and dishes breaking, only to realize that I had watched an entire 35-minute episode and that the only plot advancement was that there were 17 Fak brothers who all liked to goose each other with wood spoons or fake ghosts or some other buffoonery. I had to admit: It was clear that by the fourth episode of the third season, The Bear had, effectively, lost the plot. And by the time John Cena showed up and started mugging his way through Episode 5, I’d asked the editor of this fine publication for permission to stop recapping the show, saying that I did not want to waste my time joining the pile-on of hate. There was enough pain in the world.  

But I finished the job. It was a grueling final three days of recapping that required me to drink five pots of coffee and three Celsius’s and submerge myself into multiple cold plunge tubs. After it was over, I promised myself and my patient family that there would be “no more Bear Show” ever again. 

Obviously, I couldn’t in good conscience tap out that easily. I have chosen to re-engage with the fourth season, fresh-faced, clear-eyed, and ready to forgive the show for its past mistakes, confident that its creators, producers, and writers had learned a valuable lesson and course-corrected. I could also make a solid case that some of the invective the show bought on last year was possibly borne out of how exhilarating the first season had felt. Was it fair to punish something for being too great? 

So let’s break out the forks and start anew with Season 4, Episode 1. 

Off we go. 

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And the first scene is…a flashback. Great start! 

In this sequence, we’re revisited by dearly-departed Mike Bearzatto (Jon Bernthal), having the usual Chicago super-goombah heart-to-heart with kid brother Carmy as he slowly stirs a Sunday sauce. Mikey badgers him about putting too much garlic in the sauce. Then, about stirring the sauce (he can “hear it sticking!”). And then he gets annoyed when Carmy tells him he’d like to open a restaurant with him. 

Jon Bernthal is an actor whom I very much enjoy, but he tends to play a role that requires him to make what I shall forever call the  “GIT DA FUK OUTTA HEE-YA WIT DAT SHIT” face as evidenced here:

You see? I mean, great face, don’t get me wrong. 

But Mikey finally softened on the restaurant idea, and Carmy told him they should call the restaurant (drumroll/ta-da) — “Mikey’s.” Then there’s a pause, a reflective stare, an impish grin, and Mikey finally responds, “I think I got a better one…” 

Given the show’s over-reliance on needle drops, I was surprised one wasn’t inserted right here, like, maybe something predictably grungey or from Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps album or Pavement, or I’d take David Byrne’s “Glass, Concrete, and Stone” again. Instead, we find Carmy asleep on the couch as Groundhog Day plays on the TV, so we get some of the dialogue from that film which, as you all probably know, is about the insanity of living the same miserable day over and over and over again, until its grumpy Pennsylvania weatherman Phil Connors finally has the spell broken once he realizes that he can’t treat people like shit anymore and must learn to love people. 

Like Carmy. You get it. Carmy is the cursed Pennsylvania weatherman. 

Carmy wakes up a little stunned, still processing the bad but not quite devastating review that ran in the Chicago Tribune, which we were led to believe at the end of last season was life-changing or – please, God – plot-changing. But instead, the review won’t torpedo The Bear into irrelevancy, nor will it fast-track it toward a Michelin star. No, instead, we get an overworked headline that tries very hard to explain what went wrong:

Fast forward to back in the restaurant’s kitchen, where we find Carmy in his classic superhero uniform: the white t-shirt meant to show off his bulging arms and crappy tattoos and pot-burn scars at his station waiting for the first of his employees to arrive so he can half-heartedly apologize. It’s Syd (Ayo Edibiri), of course. They stare at each other confrontationally for a few seconds until Carmy starts to do that silly little swirly sign language over his heart, which is meant to substitute for actual human-sounding words that would create less distance between them. She doesn’t have it, steps in, demands he speak about his feelings, and begins apologizing for how he’s run the restaurant. He takes the blame for the review. She appears to accept it but is also deeply skeptical about his sincerity and sanity. 

One by one, the rest of the crew starts to file in, each taking the blame for the lousy review. By now, it’s clear that the writers on the show are using the Trib review as a proxy to deflect the criticism laid upon their feet after Season 3. This sort of meta “screw all the haters” way of saying “sorry, not sorry” reminds me of how Lena Dunham used to make it known that she read all the reviews about Girls by writing storylines that would often be direct responses to the show’s critics. 

So now what. Well, on the TV show The Bear, some legit bad news is thrust upon the staff. Uncle Cicero (Oliver Platt) and Computer (Billions creator Brian Koppelman) are there to let everyone know that the restaurant is tanking faster than even they’d suspected and, unless there’s a miraculous turn-around, they will have to shut down the restaurant and start selling as much of it back as possible to recoup some of their investment. 

As a way of motivating the staff in the nerdiest-mobster way possible, Computer hooks up a digital clock to loom over them in the kitchen as a constant reminder of their fates if they don’t get their shit together quickly.  

But Cousin Richie’s got a plan. Despite the money crunch, he hired the front-of-house ninjas he staged with from Ever to get The Bear Michelin-ready.

THE BEAR SEASON 4 EPISODE 1: LEFTOVERS

QUESTIONS I STILL HAVE: Will any of the major characters die? To make things interesting the rest of the season, in the next episode, I’d like to see Claire Bear bust into the kitchen and torture Carmy in front of the entire staff and then impale his head with a golf club as he lays twitching on the floor. Nobody’s done that yet, right?

MIDDLE-AGED DAD NEEDLE DROP: “That’s The Way” by Led Zeppelin. Highly underrated moody acoustic track off of Led Zeppelin III which I always thought deserved a spot on the 1990 box set. (Only middle-aged dads know how legendary the Led Zeppelin box set was.) 

CARMY ARM PORN: The Diesel

A.J. Daulerio is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor. He is also the founder of The Small Bow, a recovery newsletter.