NOTE: Don’t read this if you haven’t finished season 3 of The Bear yet (and you want to). Or if you haven’t finished season 3 of Ted Lasso yet (and you want to).
Ted Lasso’s first season was peak pandemic TV. In the fall of 2020, when we still weren’t seeing our friends regularly and the power of word of mouth was greatly diminished, it was fascinating to see more and more people slowly discover the show until it felt like everyone was scrambling for a way to get the same three month free trial of Apple TV+. I can’t think of the last time a show grew steadily to such heights the way that it did.
By season 3, which aired in 2023, it became pretty clear that it was time for Ted Lasso to end. The show limped to the finish line, turning into a glut of supporting characters and episodes that felt painfully long. The best narrative decision it made, however, was that much like the show itself, Ted the character knew when it was time to leave. After transforming the football club and imparting life lessons about forgiveness and personal growth on each of the show characters, he leaves the club and goes back to Kansas.
In watching season 3 of FX’s The Bear, which came out last week, I couldn’t help but feel that the show I so dearly love has turned into a sort of bizarro Ted Lasso. (I won’t pretend that I’m the first person to make this comparison - a quick Twitter search of “the bear ted lasso” shows otherwise.) On paper, the shows seem incredibly different: The Bear exchanges Ted Lasso’s sunny aphorisms and incessant romcom references for f-bombs and layers of intergenerational family trauma. It almost feels like comparing Uncut Gems to any other movie Adam Sandler has done.
But at its core, The Bear is about an outsider (Chef Carmy Berzatto) who comes to a new environment (his recently deceased brother’s restaurant) and tries to implement his own methods and to get his coworkers to believe in his vision. Slowly but surely, he does — he gets Tina and Marcus to aspire to become fantastic chefs, he gets Sydney to fully believe in her ability as a CDC and culinary partner, and (more improbably) gets Richie to buy into the idea of exceptional service and hospitality. That description alone feels almost to a tee what Ted is to FC Richmond, at least through the show’s first two seasons. (I also think it’s interesting to note that the torch has been passed from one show to the other in terms of who sweeps the comedy Emmys each year. If nothing else, both seem to pass the smell test as far as a “palatable” TV comedy with a massive audience that’s still high brow enough).
There are some areas where The Bear clearly outshines Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso’s disappointing third season was full of critical moments that were never actually shown on camera, but just implied — Nate and Ted reuniting, Nate coming back to the team, Ted telling the team that he’s leaving, etc. For as long as those episodes were, it seemed like its writers shied away from actually putting those moments on camera, a puzzling decision for a show that nailed so many of those moments in the earlier seasons.
In the first episode of The Bear’s third season, the show boldly claims that it won’t make the same mistake. The standout episode “Tomorrow” weaves past and present together as Carmy, in the wake of being trapped in the walk-in at the end of season 2, devises the motivations for the new era of the restaurant. We get a deluge of high stakes moments from the past that have influenced Carmy in both positive and negative ways — gorgeous scenes of him staging in Napa, Chicago, New York, and Copenhagen alongside the moments leading to his brother’s suicide and the subsequent funeral that he couldn’t bring himself to attend. The episode functions as a foil to Ted Lasso in that it doesn’t shy away from delivering key moments that were still fuzzy in the heads of its viewers, and it cleverly re-contextualizes some of them throughout the season. It’s a fantastic episode — the TV equivalent of an album opener that absolutely locks you in to the rest of the album.
Sadly, after the first episode, the season largely falls flat. The Bear continues its trend of delivering fantastic episodes focused on single characters, following up episodes about Marcus and Richie in season 2 with equally brilliant episodes about Tina and Sugar in season 3. But unfortunately, outside of these great standout episodes, the uneven season feels stuck, largely in part due to how it handles its main character, Carmy.
We often talk about TV shows or movies where “you can’t root for anyone.” It doesn’t hold a lot of weight for me as a reason not to like a show (you know who’s hard to root for? everyone in Succession!) But casting aside the merit of that as an actual point of criticism, part of what makes The Bear interesting (and also a reason why it seems somewhat backed into a corner this season) is that it’s the opposite: in spite of all its stressors and profanities, you can root for practically everyone. Through its previously mentioned gorgeous single-character episodes (“Forks,” you will always have my heart) and rich flashback sequences, the show does a fantastic job in creating reasons to want to see all of its characters succeed. This is maybe most clearly seen in the fire suppression test sequence in season 2’s “Bolognese” — as each character goes down the line while watching the tense make-or-break moment for the restaurant, we get rapid flashes of the personal stakes that each carries at that particular moment.
What, then, do you do in this situation to manufacture a villain or some semblance of conflict? Ted Lasso solved this problem in a couple different ways, first with the constant presence of the cartoonishly villainous Rupert, Rebecca’s ex-husband, and then by taking the lovable character of Nate and turning him into a spited foe that contrasts with Ted at every step.
The Bear’s solution to this problem, however, is to make Carmy frustratingly unable to get out of his own way or the way of anyone else and become the de facto villain in the process. Throughout the new season, Carmy makes decision after decision that highlight his inability to learn from his mistakes. It starts with his outlandish list of non-negotiables, most notably the stipulation that the menu must change every day. This leads to an inevitable breakdown in communication and heightened tensions between the kitchen and dining room that the restaurant seems unable to recover from. But even as the season goes on, Carmy continues to frustrate at every step. He’s insistent on plating elaborate courses slowly on his own, holding up the entire kitchen in doing so. In one hard to watch sequence, he contradicts Sydney at every turn when deciding the menu for the day. Throughout it all, I found my willingness to root for him tested more and more with each episode.
A core tenet in both The Bear and Ted Lasso is the idea that people are capable of change. But in The Bear, while everyone appears to be able to unlearn the bad things about themselves and grow, from Richie to even Mama Berzatto, Carmy spends the entire season unwilling to do so. It comes to a head in the finale, “Forever,” when he confronts the executive chef that verbally abused him, left to mull on the chef’s response that that abuse is perhaps what made him such a good chef. In the aftermath of this scene, we see virtually all of the other major characters in the show enjoying themselves as Carmy is absent — much like season 2, when the restaurant functioned better without Carmy, season 3 ends with an implication that things are much better off when Carmy isn’t there (like season 2 Carmy being stuck in the walk-in, season 3 Carmy appears stuck in all of his bad tendencies).
I can appreciate nuance — I don’t need every character of every TV show to be perfect in every sense. But part of what irks me is it feels like the Carmy that we’re left with at the end of season 3 is largely the same Carmy that we’re left with at the end of season 2. Part of me wonders if The Bear’s implied 4th (and maybe final?) season will make the same narrative decision as Ted Lasso and have Carmy decide that he needs to step away from the restaurant. I doubt it actually will, but throughout the season I found myself frustrated by the constant destructive habits from the main character in a show whose central thesis seems to be that people can change, to the point that I became far more interested in any storyline that didn’t involve his character. Perhaps it’s all meant to tee up a redemptive arc for him in season 4. Even if that does happen, it felt like we as the audience had to sit through much more of a stagnant season 3 than we perhaps needed. And although I understand why The Bear maybe needed Carmy to fill the role he did, I can’t help but feel that it detracted from an otherwise good season of TV.