I’m going to ruin The Bear for you – but without spoilers

I’m a little late to the table, but I’ve recently started season 4 of The Bear on Disney+ with the hope that the slow simmering of season 3 is replaced with one that reaches the boiling points of the earlier ones.

It’s early days for me to fully chew into what season 4 has on the menu, but the steaks have been raised and it looks appetizing to add to my TV series diet. Yet there’s one ingredient in The Bear that’s made in through all four seasons, and has started to turn sour.

This could ruin The Bear for you, regardless of which season you’re on, as once you see it, there’s potentially no going back…

Heady flavors

That thing is the nodding. So. Much. Nodding.

Very noticeable in the first two seasons, to my eyes, every time key characters have a deep and meaningful interaction, they tend to nod a lot at each other. Speech pauses, the camera fixes on their individual faces and cuts between them, nodding to each other.

Fixing on faces and having slower moments is a fine tool to emphasise the emotion or impact of a scene, especially when the story is centered on chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto’s coping with trauma, death, and a dysfunctional restaurant. And Carmy’s nodding is almost a signature emote brought to the character by actor Jeremy Allan White.

This is all fine until you start to notice other actors and characters also nodding away in close-up scenes, often with eyes full of sadness or damp emotion. Used a few times, it’s a neat touch and seasons a scene or interaction.

Can we appreciate Carmy’s signature head nod for a moment??? from r/TheBear

As such, now that we’ve got to season 4, I find myself struggling to watch The Bear without fixating on spotting the incessant nodding, be it big and bold or just a subtle dusting of y-axis head movement. Though with a little sprinkle of irony, I don’t think this season is quite as full of nodding as the others, with the exception of Carmy’s bobbing head.

But there’s still a heck of a lot of slow scenes with characters staring into the void or at each other, which I fear is blunting the pace of The Bear and leaving episodes to feel a bit spongy in terms of proper narrative progression.

The Bear is less about food and more about the characters as they process challenges and changes, jeopardy and joy, all in the pressure cooker of a busy restaurant kitchen. But after the frenetic pace of the first two seasons and some standout episodes, The Bear’s focus on the characters is starting to taste a little samey without much in the way of big changes to push the narrative forward at a speed that’s in sync with the 30-minute runtime of each episode.

It feels like more development could be coming after my appetiser of two episodes. My hope is that season 4 rounds out with a perfectly baked story, and characters that don’t feel like they’ve been left in the emotional oven for too long or underdone like Edwin Lee Gibson’s Ebraheim, who I felt didn’t get much time to sizzle on screen.

And I do hope the nodding is kept in check, as otherwise I’m going to be driven slowly mad by The Bear, which would be a shame given a fifth season has been greenlit.

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