The Bear Review

The first season announces itself with pure momentum, overlapping dialogue, whip pans and a sound design of tickets printing and pans scraping that makes a sandwich shop feel like a disaster in progress. Review, the seventeen minute single take, is the best directed episode of television in its year and the show never needed to prove that particular point again. The second season is the better one because it slows down, and Forks and Fishes are two of the finest hours anyone has made about competence and about family respectively.

Jeremy Allen White plays grief as a work ethic, Ayo Edebiri gives Sydney a caution the writing keeps testing, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach turns the most obnoxious character into the most moving one. The third season is a genuine problem, a set of beautifully shot episodes that decline to advance anything, and the audience noticed immediately. The fourth recovers some ground. Superbly made at the level of the shot and the scene, and unreliable at the level of the season.