The Bear

FX

I have lost almost all of my Apple TV shows at this point, the long line of quality programming that has taken up my last few months. I hear season 2 of The Last Airbender on Netflix is bad, so what to watch?

Well, it’s time. FX/Hulu’s The Bear is back for its fifth and final season, all eight episodes dumped out at once, which is not often the case for non-Netflix series anymore. After two less-than-perfect seasons, The Bear has returned as one of the best shows on TV with a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it was 100% for a little while. That puts it right there along with the best seasons of the show:

• The Bear season 1 – 100% critic score
• The Bear season 2 - 99% critic score
• The Bear season 5 – 97% critic score
• The Bear season 3 – 89% critic score
• The Bear season 4 – 84% critic score

So, things have turned around, and it should be noted that audience scores were quite low for season 3 (54%) and season 4 (68%). We will see what they do here.

The Bear has been an extremely rare show, able to deliver 8-10-episode seasons every year, debuting within a few days of this week’s release date, June 25. Season 5 has eight episodes, but it also had a special, Gary, that aired before it, more or less another two episodes right there.

The Bear has often been considered a “they should have quit while they were ahead” series, but it seems that they may have stuck the landing in season 5, at least for critics. The Bear has won 21 Primetime Emmy Awards over its lifespan, including 11 in one year, a record for the comedy category. And it has been the subject of frequent debate over the years regarding why it’s in the comedy category at all.

The breakout star of The Bear has certainly been its lead, Jeremy Allen White, previously of Shameless. Since The Bear began, he’s starred in the highly praised The Iron Claw and Deliver Me From Nowhere, a Bruce Springsteen biopic where he recreated the artist’s singing almost perfectly. He even had a role in the last Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu.

It probably is a good time for The Bear to end, as it’s simply not a series that could continue on forever. What happens with the crew? You have eight episodes and around four or so hours to find out.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.