In my decades as a taco enthusiast, I have come to understand an immutable law of nature: Two tacos is not enough, but three tacos is just a bit too much. You know I’m right.
This dilemma forces the taco lover into an impossible position. Do we limit ourselves to two tacos and end up happy but unsatisfied, or get a third and later regret our gluttony?
FX/Hulu’s acclaimed series “The Bear” is the streaming-TV version of the Taco Dilemma. Its two pristine, near-perfect seasons left viewers delighted but desperate for more. The 10-episode third season, which appeared in full a couple of weeks ago, is the “more” — still good, still familiar, but just a little bit beyond what anybody needed.
“The Bear” first appeared in 2022 and became a word-of-mouth hit and eventually an Emmy-winning critical darling. It follows an ambitious chef, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), who moves home to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef joint following the suicide of this brother, then transforms the working-class restaurant into an upscale eatery — the titular Bear.
It grabbed attention thanks to its grueling depictions of kitchen life, which series creator Christopher Storer captured with both intimacy and cinematic flair, and its tender etchings of the soulful, damaged people drawn to that working environment by choice or by circumstance.
The second season ended with the Bear’s long-awaited public opening, and the return episode is some masterful throat-clearing. “Tomorrow” is a series of artful flashbacks that connects Carmy’s formative years in world-class kitchens, his trauma at the hands of an abusive New York chef (played by Joel McHale) and his creation of the dish that led his eventual sous chef, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), to seek him out.
Season three contains a couple more all-time great installments. Episode six, “Napkins,” provides a backstory for the line cook Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) while dramatizing the inhumanity of an economy that forces people to live paycheck to paycheck but makes the process of finding dignified work a Sisyphean ordeal.
Episode eight, “Ice Chips,” is the birth story for Carmy’s pregnant sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), which explores the complex ways mothers both nurture and terrorize their children well into adulthood. (Theirs is played by a riveting Jaime Lee Curtis.)
It feels like a bad sign, though, that the season’s best parts mostly take place outside the Bear. This also is a symptom of the too-much-ness. We, like the characters, have already spent a lot of time within those walls, and a restaurant kitchen is only so big.
Reportedly, Storer had imagined “The Bear” as a three-season show. Thanks to its popularity, he agreed to a fourth season, and as such, the 10 new episodes feel like a single season’s worth of story being stretched in order to fill two.
Plot elements that would have been season-shaped arcs are conspicuously unresolved: Will Carmy get back together with Claire (Molly Gordon)? Will Sidney take an ownership stake in the Bear or accept a job at a competing restaurant?
In exchange for momentum, we get too much of everything else — too much time with tangential characters who were great in small doses, too much detail about backstories that were more interesting when vague, too many celebrity cameos, too many ‘90s alt-rock needle drops (not something I ever thought I’d be complaining about). Those things worked before, so why not more, more, more?
Unlike fine dining, the digital economy does not incentivize scarcity. Why leave subpar songs off an album when a longer track list means more streaming revenue? Why edit your copy when the internet offers unlimited space for “content”? And why tell a tight story in one season when a show is drawing enough eyeballs and ad dollars to justify padding things out?
People who already love “The Bear” will find a lot to enjoy about the third season. A taco, after all, is still a taco. But just watch your calorie intake.