The Bear

Did the final season of FX’s The Bear serve up the perfect last bite or are diners and viewers alike left wishing for more? Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Syd (Ayo Edebiri), and the rest of the kitchen staff are back in action as they face down their final day of service. It’s now streaming on Hulu. If you like seriously funny dramas, check out these episodes: ‘Widow’s Bay’ is an island in the scream https://www.npr.org/2026/06/16/nx-s1-5855729/widows-bay-is-an-island-in-the-scream We are united in our love of ‘Pluribus’ https://www.npr.org/2025/11/11/nx-s1-5604271/we-are-united-in-our-love-of-pluribus Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support Pop Culture Happy Hour+ https://plus.npr.org/happy See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:43Speaker 01

  The fifth and final season of The Bear is here, and it is a scaled-back, scaled-down dish focused on the fundamentals that highlight the quality of its basic ingredients.

• 0:52Linda Holmes?

  Most of the season takes place over the course of a single day as the crew prepares for a make-or-break evening of service amid an escalating series of catastrophes. I'm Linda Holmes.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  And I'm Glen Weldon. Joining us today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi. Hey, Roxana.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Hey, thank you for having me.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Of course. So, the final season of FX and Hulu's prodigious Emmy magnet, The Bear, 21 statuettes and counting, thank you very much, takes place during a day-long thunderstorm as the restaurant gets hit with wave after wave of crises during prep. A burst pipe, a busted roof, a broken reservation system, dwindling supplies, and the usual interpersonal drang to go with all that sturm. The dynamic between Sid and Carmy, for example, is more strained than ever because Carmy is quitting the restaurant game. They're played, of course, by Ayoadebri and Jeremy Allen White.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  I'm just trying to be-

• 1:45Speaker 05

  That's bizarre, babe. What are you trying to-

• 1:47Speaker 04

  I'm trying to be helpful and do a good job.

• 1:48Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm sorry. I misread that.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Sorry, I-

• 1:53Speaker 05

  No, I'm sorry. I didn't, um-

• 1:57Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  Too much?

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Me, I, like.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  I'm overcompensating, yeah.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I have even mentioned that there is one guest who seems an awful lot like the Michelin critic they've been watching out for. How could they have picked this night of all nights? The Bear is streaming on Hulu and we're gonna be talking about it all, the whole of season five, including the finale, so you know, know that. Linda, you reviewed this last season for NPR, what'd you think?

• 2:20Linda Holmes?

  You know, I really liked this season for the most part. I will get to my two notes. I think the first note is that it is a little slow in the beginning. I think the first three episodes or so, all of which are short. I think they all read a little bit like one long scene. And this is sort of the earlier in the day part where it's raining, it's dark, it's gray, everything is dimly lit. There's this score that they have that's sort of this, to me, melancholy tension kind of thing. It made it feel slow and heavy to me. That's my one beef. But then, once they get into the service itself, I think those episodes are really good. I very much enjoyed it. I loved seeing all the restaurant people working together again.

• 3:05Linda Holmes?

  They've done a lot of these one-off episodes and I've enjoyed a lot of those for what they are. They've been great. You know, the episode where they go off and Sid is with her cousin and her cousin's daughter, great episode. Some of the flashback episodes, they're great. But I was really happy that they focused back in the restaurant. I had a great time. But then, and this is where we get to the point where we're discussing the whole season, so I should say that one more time. At the very end, in the finale, Carmy decides to become an intern at an architecture firm. Now, listen, I know that they did, and I didn't remember this until someone reminded me, but I know that they did show Carmy walking around the Frank Lloyd Wright house a season ago. Nevertheless, this kind of comes out of nowhere for me.

• 3:50Linda Holmes?

  And I felt this way last season too, that I didn't think they really persuaded me that Carmy leaving restaurants was a good idea. And I think they want you to feel like it's a healthy idea. I don't know if I think this is gonna help him at all. I think if you don't deal with your stuff, he's... As far as I know, not done any one on one therapy. I think if you don't deal with your stuff, you can easily become just the same messy person in a different job. I did not find that a satisfying ending for him personally. It feels to me a little bit like Carmy will just go get some job and that's all they really did. And then he has this long scene where he speaks at great length about that last service and how it went and his whole life and it's very philosophical. And I assumed he was pitching

• 4:35Linda Holmes?

  a book to this woman who was played by Bonnie Hunt. And then at the end of this long speech, she's like, you're here to talk about an architecture firm internship. And then that's the end of it. And they don't ever really say like, did he get that job for some reason, even though he's totally unqualified and gave that speech? I didn't feel like that was satisfying at all. But listen, the Richie stuff I think is fantastic. I have loved the character of Richie, who is Carmy's not literally cousin, but you know, spiritual cousin, who became such a really great hospitality guy. The Richie wins for me were fantastic. It felt inevitable. They were going to get their Michelin star. They ended up getting two. I thought that was very satisfying.

• 5:20Linda Holmes?

  Although I wanted to see Richie find out they got the stars. We didn't get to see that. But overall, I enjoyed this season a lot with the slow first episodes and the WTF architecture kind of caveats.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Okay, Roxanna, you also wrote about this for Vulture, one specific aspect of it, which we'll get to. But what was your overall impression?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  I also am generally pro. I mean, I think the thing about the first season, which worked so well for me is that it is just a restaurant. It is a claustrophobic restaurant with a lot of people who have decided that they don't care about anything because that's the only way to get by in this world, coming together to like make sandwiches. It's fine. It's very small scale. I think it is as ideologically satisfying about the nature of work as like any of our other great workplace shows. So I love season one. I think it could have been a standalone one. Season, limited series that never became anything else. And five is very much a companion piece to one, right?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  It is a season that is again, just about like, okay, if we're all trapped in the same restaurant, and now we have a different perspective on work, what changes? And so I've always had like, a little bit of a tension with how much this show is like, you should work at a place that treats you like family, because I don't agree with that.

• 6:46Linda Holmes?

  I get that.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  But in terms of like, hitting the beats that I wanted it to hit, it was all sort of there, right? Like Richie realizes that he doesn't need to give a life-changing speech before every service. He just needs to be reliable and there for his employees. Fac, who is this character played by Matty Matheson, who has mostly just been sort of like, the wacky sidekick, gets a moment where he connects with guests as well. Everybody sort of has this like, look, you grew moment. And I think a lot of that really works. There is again, a reference to Michael Mann, which is something that personally for me is very fulfilling.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  But yeah, the Karmi architecture thing, I think we have to talk about a little bit. Because in a season that I appreciated for sort of de-centering Karmi and spending more time with the ensemble and like, the collective, I'm not sure, I don't know, I don't know if he talks himself out of the architecture internship by the end of that scene with Bonnie. And we're supposed to understand that he goes back to restaurants. I don't know, I think he needed to do like, a year of woodworking or something. I think that he needed to just leave restaurants, but also not become an architect. So that ending, I am gonna be sort of quibbling over. But for the most part, I think, good.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, I think there's a reason we're all gonna hit this Karmian architect thing so much. It's because of where it comes. It comes at the very, very end, which means it colors absolutely everything that came before.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  And it has this extra weight that It really shouldn't have. I mean, I agree that the dialed in approach really serves the show. It puts the focus where it needs to be now. We are getting to the end of the book. We turn the page, we see white space at the bottom of the next page. We're like, oh crap. And so everything that happens takes on extra weight, extra meaning. So the writers are stacking the deck in a, what I found was a kind of a ludicrously over the top way. This thunderstorm that goes on for a day, I mean, it had me headed to the National Weather Service to be like, how long can thunderstorms actually last? Under very specific circumstances, they can last hours and hours. But you stack the deck for a very important reason, to give them these tiny victories that you mentioned

• 9:04Speaker 01

  in your review, Lynda. When they come, they feel so joyous and so earned and legit because they rest. And here I'd push back a little bit, Roxanna, on all this time we spent with these characters, even those seasons that missed the mark, you know, for human relationships of any kind, time spent with someone matters, even if they're not always at their best. It still invests you. It makes you feel for them. And that investment is so powerful here, and it's used powerfully here because I was hopeful, but I was legit worried at the same time. When Carmy drops that plate, I didn't know where the show was going to take it. And now intellectually, I knew they're not going to end on abject failure. That would not be fun. But I didn't think there were any guarantees. And I felt like

• 9:47Speaker 01

  we were on a knife edge. Same thing when Fax steps out to the table where the person they think is the Michelin critic is sitting at. And we're like, is he going to screw this up? What's going to happen? There's real tension there because it could go either way. And you watch them, as you mentioned, Roxanna, they each take a breath and deescalate. And so we get a sense of exactly what you said, how differently this place is going to run under Sid than it would under Carmy. I didn't feel that as strongly. Lynda, pick up some of your same, is it really that bad? Was he really so terrible? Or was it this place? Some of those questions remain. All right. Well, we've got a lot more to talk about, including this last season's use of music. So we'll be back after this.

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• 11:49Speaker 01

  So we're back. Roxanne, in your Vulture piece, you talked about how this pared-back quality of this last season intersects with how the show used music, and I wanted to give you a chance to unpack that a bit.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I am unimpressed with this season's score. I mean, I understand that they want to make this less sprawling than previous seasons. In season one, this was a show about a restaurant. My issue with seasons three and four is it becomes a show about fine dining in general and the industry in general, and I think it loses the focus that one and two had. And so I think to go back to that feeling, we get this score, which is not from the same composers as the previous season. This is from Christian Lundberg, who is doing the score for Bleeding Fingers music. It was produced by Hans Zimmer.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  It sounds video game like a lot of the time. It is sort of doing like, to Linda's point, at first, this like very melancholy, foreboding thing, and then it's almost like video game pump up music.

• 12:55Linda Holmes?

  Yes.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  And there was something about that that did not work for me. And I understand.

• 13:06Linda Holmes?

  Very repetitive, for one thing.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Very repetitive. Can we get some counting crows in here is all I'm trying to say. So that was one of the things that I thought was just like a little bit too much of a step back from what the show has previously been. But I think this show often just like gilds the lily, right? Not one Michelin star, but two Michelin stars.

• 13:29Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  You know, I think it sometimes operates too much in these extremes, one way or another.

• 13:36Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Could be a way for us to talk about this architecture speech. But yeah, there is this thing that I was missing, listening to the show. I was missing the sense that these characters are in a larger world.

• 13:49Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, and I think, you know, you talk about how they sometimes are doing these really extreme things. And I think you see that with, you know, the show trying to do to me that Carmy speech is very much like, here's your Emmy moment.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 14:02Linda Holmes?

  Which is kind of an unfair thing to say, because people also write big monologues for lots of reasons, right? People love a big emotional monologue. It may be that the fact that Carmy has had a couple of big emotional monologues in the past, you know, set up a certain need for a big emotional monologue in this one. But for me, some of the moments that were so powerful in this are things that are much smaller. There is a scene where DeeDee, who is Carmy and Sugar's mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. And that has been a complicated character narratively, in that sometimes it has felt just like big, big, big. But also, there are some moments with her that have been, I think, very effective. And in this season, there is a moment when she comes to the restaurant.

• 14:44Linda Holmes?

  With Sugar's baby and hangs out in the office. And then Pete, Sugar's husband, comes in and talks to her. And it reminded me, which I had not thought about in a long time, of the moment several seasons ago, when she was going to come to the restaurant. But she wouldn't come in. And Pete ran into her and really wanted her to come in and she wouldn't. And I thought that Pete coming back there to the office and seeing her and being so glad for her, for Sugar, for everybody. And then, you know, Dee Dee kind of going over all of Carmy's notebooks from his work and really coming to kind of get a better understanding of what he has done with his

• 15:28Linda Holmes?

  life in the time that they've been like, not estranged, but like, you know, tense. I thought that was so satisfying. There's a sequence where Richie and Sid are kind of negotiating how to get through conflict between them, which also was a big thing in season one. And I think it is so satisfying. You can see both of them being like, I really want to make this work. And earnestly trying to solve conflict together. And I thought that was so effective. And if you compare that to like, listen, there were big things too. The Carmy Sidney hug, yes, I'm not made of stone over here, right?

• 16:11Linda Holmes?

  Very effective, very lovely, very earned, I think. But it's a lot of the smaller things. It's a lot of the things where it just felt like, you know, yeah. And listen, the Michelin guy turns out not to be the Michelin guy, right? The Michelin guy was the guy they suggested was the Michelin guy previously. Who had shown up on a different night entirely. And then he just kind of disappeared and it was like, who was that guy? And then when this guy came in and they thought he was the Michelin guy, I was not surprised by the fake out, but I thought it was fun that it turned out it really was the guy they said it was quite a while ago. So anyway, I'm positive, I'm pro.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Justice for Pete, right? Pete was always a mensch. I mean, he's always a mensch. He, his menschiness.

• 16:54Linda Holmes?

  Husband, man.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Came to the fore, played by Chris Witaske. Great. I'm glad he got a moment to just bask in it. I do want to talk about how this season was bookended. Both the final episode, which feels like an epilogue with that speech, and the episode that dropped before the final season, Gary, which was a flashback episode featuring Richie and Mikey, Evan Moss-Backrak and Jon Bernthal. That felt like the acting exercise it was. I mean, I get why it's there. It's there to show how lost Richie was back then and how he was in a bad place because he loved someone who clearly hated himself and how that curdles absolutely everything. But it highlighted for me something that that speech at the end kind of highlights too, which is that every so often in this show,

• 17:37Speaker 01

  I pick up a faint whiff of condescension toward the people the show is about. And I think of that as a kind of very young actorly, very young writerly thing of like, to show our understanding of the working man. And Gary, which is the name of that episode, felt like the acting exercise it was. It was written by Bernthal and Moss-Backrak. And yeah, let's give voice to the common man. Let's be Clifford Odets. And yet, at some point in your life, bro, you probably took a movement class where you probably studied wind dance and you probably personified a ruffling breeze. So can we just pump the brakes a little bit? You know what I'm saying? And in the epilogue, where Carmy goes to this job interview, I think both the writer and the actor are taking Carmy's baseline. You know, he's mad at a few words.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  He's laconic, he's introverted, he doesn't always express himself completely clearly, but he's not this completely inarticulate. Stanley Kowalski, who shows up for that interview, I like art, I like colors. You like colors? What are you, a toddler? What's going on there?

• 18:37Linda Holmes?

  Well, I think what they were trying for in that monologue is that he starts off like that. And then as he talks, he becomes more and more confident and he sort of works through it as he says it. And he becomes more articulate as he goes through that speech. I have occasionally sensed a little bit of what you're talking about, Glenn. But I think. I chalked it up more to the show's general tendency to get puffed up than to to the condescension you're talking about specifically, because I think it has always been a little bit vulnerable to, you know, vanishing up its own nose, as I said in the review. And I think there's always been that risk. And I'm not sure exactly how to feel about

• 19:19Linda Holmes?

  that. The other thing I thought about when I watched this episode was that it reminded me of how I felt about the end of Hacks, which was, I would have just ended it, or at least could have just ended it on the second to last episode, which is the professional triumph, right? The conclusion to kind of the professional story, right? And both of those shows went ahead and did an epilogue, as you say, with a lot of big feelings and a lot of sort of character stuff that I felt like I didn't necessarily need, because a lot of those really small and lovely moments that I was talking about don't happen in that epilogue. That's more the home of the bigger stuff. They happen in the, particularly in the second to last episode, where they are kind of working through all their stuff.

• 20:04Linda Holmes?

  There's stuff in the epilogue that I really like. I really like how they handled this kind of buddyship that popped up between Marcus, played by Lionel Boyce, and Luca, played by Will Poulter. I liked that friendship. I thought it was very funny that Marcus turned out to be the one who was hoarding spoons. I thought that was cute. I don't know that it had a big point, but I thought it was a funny detail. I did enjoy the fact that the big pitch to Carmy for the franchising turned out to be unnecessary. So there's a lot in the epilogue that I like, but I wonder if they should have left it at the end of service, you know?

• 20:41Speaker 03

  I could see that. I am glad that you brought that up, Glenn, because I do think Gary is maybe the worst episode of the series for me. I think that it is all of the show's worst impulses rolled together.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. And I felt like that, too. I think a lot of the stuff that's dogged, especially seasons three and four, is all the meta stuff, you know, all the cameos from actual chefs, all the celebrity cameos. I think this season channeled the meta stuff and in really effective, very funny way with the personification of the Mitchells. The Mitchells are a couple who get taken from the restaurant into the kitchen and they are just like, well, mainly the dude is like, yes, chef. Now that is making fun of the fans of the show in a kind of a pointed way. That's not blistering. It's just like, yeah, that's annoying when you hear somebody who's not a chef say, yes, chef, but I'm not going to get mad at it. It's like, yeah, it didn't make any sense to me that Sid would pull Luca to talk to them when this is after Marcus has just won a food and wine award.

• 21:37Linda Holmes?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Marcus, you pull Marcus from the line to talk to these people because that's what they want to see. And that didn't make any sense to me, but I think that's a channeling. And the other good thing about this is that, you know, with this show ending, the people in our lives, our loved ones are only going to have to endure us complaining that this show is not a comedy just a couple more times for the Emmys because the Emmy nominations voting cutoff, you know, season four is eligible this year in 2026. Season five will be eligible next year in 2027.

• 22:04Linda Holmes?

  But you know what? This season was significantly funnier than the last couple of seasons. There was more comedy in it and there was a lot more comedy in it that did not rely around the facts. For a couple of seasons, I felt like it was all super heavy and then the facts would come in and be goofy and bless Matty Matheson. I get it. Like there was a lot of funny stuff that he did and his buddies did, but this season had more stuff that I thought was really funny that went on between the core cast of the show. I think Eben Moss's background is very funny and does some really good comedic work. Io Debré is the best reactor in television.

• 22:45Linda Holmes?

  I love to just watch her face when these people are doing things that make her, you know, baffled or whatever. So I am closer to being okay with this show calling itself a comedy this season than I was particularly for the last couple of seasons.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  I do think it's hard when you put it up against something like Hacks or against something like Widows Bay, although I'm not really sure that Widows Bay is a comedy. I think it's just a further sign of we have begun to lose genre strictness with the streaming show.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Let's get rid of the binary.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're destroying the boundaries. I do think the moment that I laughed most is when Karmie tells Richie that they're stuck in the walk-in again, because that felt like, you know, I don't love to be like, that felt unscripted, because it probably would not. But they sold it with a level of authentic shock, which I really enjoyed. And then they wrestled each other, which I also really enjoyed. So, yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Well, you can hear the affection in our voices. I mean, the bear is over. It's not the last time we're going to be talking about it. There's another Emmy season coming, and we're going to be talking about this show yet again. But that brings us to the end of our show. Roxana Hadadi, Linda Holmes, thank you so much for being here.

• 24:04Linda Holmes?

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Should have said, yes, chef, but I understand why you didn't. This episode was produced by Lennon Sherburne. Hafsa Fatima and my cats have been edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy, and Halokhiman provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

• 24:25Speaker 06

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