Prestige TV is always thinking bigger. Especially if it gets popular enough to command a hefty budget, an ambitious show will expand its playing field and reach for real-world resonance. In their ultimate act of bratty myopia, Succession’s billionaire failchildren put a fascist in the White House. Breaking Bad never stopped broadening the implications of Walter White’s villainy. Industry began as a cerebral soap about entry-level investment bankers. Now, as its final season approaches, the characters are driving not just international finance, but also a toxic political landscape and tech industry. One of them has essentially become Ghislaine Maxwell.

Although it’s a half-hour dramedy set in a restaurant, FX’s The Bear occupies a similar place to these high dramas in the TV landscape. Released in full on Hulu in June of 2022, its first season became a word-of-mouth sensation, coining catchphrases (“Yes, chef!”), launching A-list actors, and inspiring parasocial relationships between thirsty fans and the fictional staff of an establishment originally known as the Original Beef of Chicagoland. Then came the awards. Creator Christopher Storer raised the stakes by following the Beef’s reinvention as fine-dining destination the Bear; we delved into characters’ pasts and saw them evolve into skilled culinary artisans in the present. At the end of last year’s fourth season, with financial pressure escalating as the team pursued a Michelin star, brooding chef-owner Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) told his deputies, chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and front-of-house manager Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), he was leaving the restaurant. Then, a special flashback episode culminated in the harrowing cliffhanger of a car smashing into Richie’s vehicle.

With that in mind, you might expect The Bear’s fifth and final season, now streaming, to be its grandest. Instead, it’s the narrowest of all. The seven episodes provided for review (all but the finale) pick up the story just hours after Carmy’s bombshell and all take place on the same day. More than painting the restaurant as a triumph or tragedy, Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo seem focused on completing each character’s emotional arc. By this measure and others, the season is uneven, better than its most recent predecessors but rarely as sublime as the second half of Season 1 and Season 2. But it’s at its best when training its observant gaze on Sydney, a talented, stable, responsible chef whose only barrier to becoming the leader the Bear requires—one superior to Carmy in almost every way—is the confidence to trust her instincts.

She’ll need to develop it ASAP. Carmy hasn’t abandoned his colleagues yet, but he has fully, perhaps a bit performatively, ceded leadership of the kitchen to Syd. The Bear has always been great at registering the subtle shifts in characters’ relationships to one another; some of this season’s most fascinating scenes find these two chefs working side by side, as she struggles to direct the man who was, just yesterday, her boss and he forces himself to stay out of her way. It would be a tough night even if executing her first menu were all Syd had to worry about.

It isn’t, by a long shot. For all the speculation around Richie’s fate, he turns out to be fine, the car accident just one more delay in a day of setbacks. (A show in tighter control of its storytelling probably would have avoided such cheap suspense, but plot has never been The Bear’s strength.) His real problem is that the reservation app is down, making the service ahead a black box of anxiety. Meanwhile, torrential rains have Chicago at a standstill, and the Bear’s plumbing is not exactly solid on its best days; repeated closeups of a pile of cigarette butts bulging and swirling in a sewer grate capture the loss of control. The restaurant’s gloriously foulmouthed backer, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), has even more urgent money problems than he let on last season. Carmy’s sister and co-owner, Sugar (Abby Elliott), having nervously left her baby in the care of the mom (Jamie Lee Curtis) who so disastrously disserved her and her brothers, keeps ordering cuts to portions. But such measures seem kind of futile for a business that is already, by any rational measure, beyond saving. Servers are quitting. The season opens with a sleepless Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) panic-cooking Brussels sprouts at home, as her husband (David Zayas) assures her that even if she loses her dream job, they’ll survive.

For a show as grounded as The Bear, the choice to spend a full season (or 88% of it, at least) on a single day, but to seed that day with more disasters than any workplace would conceivably face in a month, creates an odd relationship to realism. From scene to scene, the tension is more than just believable; it’s immersive. One reason viewers so quickly became invested in the series is, I think, because it put us so close to the characters, visually and emotionally, that we felt like we were sweating on the line beside them. Now, after a few seasons that emphasized their development outside the kitchen and the experiences that led them there, it feels right to keep them in that pressurized space together. It’s just strange to keep stacking catastrophes on what would already be an extraordinarily tough night, until the season becomes a haute cuisine Book of Job. This level of artifice simply wasn’t needed. It distracts from the show’s exquisite detail work and demands suspension of disbelief where none was previously required.

A more persistent problem, throughout the show’s run, is a lack of narrative balance. With its storytelling so weighted in favor of moments, tableaus, conversations, and the interiority of some characters more than others, the whole suffers. This season, I wanted more time with sandwich-window striver Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) and less with Jimmy’s crew, which mostly squanders the addition of Elsie Fisher as a precocious associate named Cheese. I’ve been frustrated for a while that Richie’s evolution from screw-up to hospitality virtuoso happened so fast and so early in the series’ run that all he has left to do is briefly succumb to self-doubt before snapping himself back into his hypercompetent present. In its reluctance to drop the pretense that it is a comedy, The Bear keeps making the buffoonish Fak brothers (played by Matty Matheson and Ricky Staffieri) sillier and more dissonant with the rest of the show. 

In the past, I’ve also complained about the primacy of Carmy, a character whose gloomy self-involvement has never felt as rich to me as it evidently did to Storer and Calo. I had hoped that, with his departure from the restaurant imminent, we would see less of him in this final season. As it turns out, he’s always present but no longer the center of the story. It makes a big difference. Suddenly, the Bear and The Bear don’t revolve around his decisions or feelings or damage. Instead of being the protagonist, in his own mind as much as for the writers, he lets himself fade disinterestedly into the background. Richie’s wise counsel: “Not thinking about yourself all the time, that’s a good thing. But not thinking about anything is f-ckin’ depressing.” What Carmy needs is to learn how to relate to other people—or, as Richie puts it, “be a f-ckin’ human being.” All around him are colleagues who are happier than him because they’ve been collaborating and caring for each other while he’s been too wrapped up in his ego to be part of the collective.

It’s a lovely evolution, one that almost—almost—justifies the four seasons of wallowing. But the real payoff comes as Syd rises to a challenge everyone but Syd knows she can handle. “Everyone who works here has a personality disorder,” one character laments, only slightly exaggerating. Syd is the exception, an utterly sane and clear-eyed person, which does initially put her at a disadvantage; you have to be a tad delusional to believe you can succeed in the precarious food service industry, let alone against the obstacles she’s facing on this night. She can’t conceal her indecision, at first, enough to motivate a rattled staff. The chief pleasure of this season is in watching her slowly (in TV time but instantaneously in restaurant time) apply the skills and vision and trust she’s built over years in the kitchen to making the impossible happen. 

Pop culture’s default image of a master chef is a lone, tortured genius like Carmy. What The Bear suggests, through Syd’s ascendance, is that greatness is more realistically achieved through cooperation and mutual respect. We see her reward the hard work of her team and remind people to treat each other civilly and defuse the kinds of conflicts that in previous seasons derailed entire nights. It creates an atmosphere safe for improvisation, an art unto itself that can be practiced just as stunningly by the front of the house as it is in the kitchen. If the service doesn’t unfold the way anyone could’ve predicted, maybe that’s what makes it magical.