To understate the case a bit, the new third season of FX's “The Bear,” which returns Wednesday on Hulu, is as magnificent as television has ever been. I'm not here to tell you what happens in it, but in any case it is not a particularly plot-driven season, although there are challenges that the characters face and the question, which hangs over the entire series, of who and what will be in charge. . keep us together, and who and what will separate.
Created by Christopher Storer, who writes and directs many of the episodes, it is a fundamentally musical show, and not just in terms of using recordings to underline or create counterpoint to the action, which is standard screen practice, but constructed tonally. and rhythmically. . Words matter, of course, although fewer than 100 are probably spoken in the opening episode, a non-linear montage of past and present moments over a floating ambient score, but the series' impact is less literary than musical; illuminates the limbic system.
With Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) at his side, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) turns his staff at the Bear into fine dining professionals.
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As a season, it's an album, changing from track to track, the same way Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) wants to remake his menu day by day. It is organized in short and long movements, in major or minor keys, at tempos marked as long, moderate or prestissimo, with passages played in fortissimo or pianissimo. Dissonance dissolves into consonance, consonance drowns in dissonance. There are motifs (many watches) and quotes. (Persons from the past reappear; REM's “Strange Currencies,” the de facto “Love Theme from 'The Bear',” sneaks in.) Ensemble sections alternate with duets, trios, solos, well-arranged or seemingly improvised. Each performer is her own instrument, an individual timbre; the series is not so much edited as orchestrated. Sometimes it is an opera, other times a ballet.
There's a comforting unreality at the heart of “The Bear,” which began as “The Bad News Bears,” with steak sandwiches; Now the team has advanced to the major leagues. Aside from Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Carmy's journey into fine dining depends entirely on the staff she inherited from her late brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal), whom, overcoming their resistance, she inspired, trained and, as they say in cooking competitions, kitchen, elevated. It's not about changing them for experienced professionals because all that matters in the world of “The Bear” is family, the people who know you, the people you know, who put up with you and whom you put up with, those who love, or at least the less they will sit still to listen to your stories and those whose stories you want to hear. This intimacy allows scenes to be played in fragments, without too much explanation. But we understand how the characters understand (or don't) each other and themselves.
Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), unlike Carmy, moves toward self-improvement.
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“The Bear” is, from its very premise, a story about food, the preparation of which is lovingly rendered; but ultimately it’s more about service than cooking, more about the community that creates a restaurant than any genius who creates the dishes. (“I like people,” Mikey says, in a flashback to his first meeting with Liza Colón-Zayas’s Tina.) Working at the interface between the back and front of the house makes Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), running the front of the house, an unlikely hero of continued self-improvement, in contrast to his cousin Carmy, who is lonely, broken and stuck. (Literally trapped, in a refrigerator, at the end of last season.) Cinematographer Andrew Wehde brings his camera even closer, hanging at length on an actor’s face, letting us linger on freckles and lines and scars, blood vessels in a tired eye. It is this attitude of tenderness that makes “The Bear” not only great, but also beautiful.
The season looks back and forward, with episodes titled “Legacy,” “Children,” and “Forever.” There is birth and death. For much of the way it feels like a summary, but we end on a suspended chord, with the resolution hanging in the air.
