Review: The Bear, "Gary" | Season 4.5
E-BUG The (Love) Letter (to Mikey and Richie)
Hey free subscribers. I don't know what to do with this interregnum episode of The Bear exactly, so I split things down the middle: you get my preamble about the episode's release, and paid subscribers get the analysis of the episode itself. If you think you'll want to continue reading our coverage of the final season next month, might as well join us now!
We’re a little under two months away from the end of The Bear—yesterday, FX announced the show’s final eight episodes will debut on June 25. While critics are currently buried under a deluge of Emmy contenders, anyone looking ahead to summer has no doubt put some thought into how to reflect on the FX series’ legacy. It may have only debuted in 2022, but its yearly releases and immediate awards success have made it an embedded part of television culture over this period. It even forced me to abandon Episodic Medium’s resistance to binge releases, because for better or worse the show’s pleasures and pretensions make it something people want to talk about.
Myles McNutt
The question is whether or not people are talking about it enough to overcome two overlapping challenges. The first is common across all streaming series: even without long gaps between seasons, momentum is hard to maintain when your audience is spending a week with your characters once a year and forgetting about them otherwise. The second is a direct result of those pleasures and pretensions, the balance of which has created heated generic debate and an ongoing concern that The Bear is more likely to eat itself than reach a satisfying conclusion—an Ourobearos, if you will.
I say “overcoming challenges,” but it’s not like The Bear’s final season won’t be widely watched. The problem is that the show’s cultural footprint has become linked to its award wins, and this is where it has lost all momentum. After winning 23 Emmys across its first two seasons, the show was shut out amidst The Studio’s sweep of last year’s awards. It still picked up three Golden Globe nominations in January, but that was down from five the year before, and all of the show’s actors got shut out of the non-ensemble categories at the first annual Actor Awards. There’s a chance that the show returns to some of its technical category domination for season four with The Studio absent, but before this week I doubt anyone would have predicted The Bear to win in any major category, even if inertia nominations are guaranteed for the show, its leads, supporting actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and guest star Jamie Lee Curtis (plus a likely nomination for the late Rob Reiner for his guest starring role).
That may not have changed, but I find it hard not to read “Gary” as an effort by FX to change the narrative. Timed to the day before the announcement of season five’s premiere date, and to the release of the Tony nominations where three members of the cast (including the two stars of the episode, currently co-starring in Dog Day Afternoon) were eligible, it’s hard not to see this as a promotional tool first and foremost. Sure, all three of them went unrecognized by the Broadway League if that was ever the intention, but the release still puts the show and its stars back in an Emmys conversation they’ve largely been forgotten from. If the goal was for people to be talking about The Bear six weeks earlier, they succeeded, and probably guaranteed Jon Bernthal another nomination for Guest Actor in the process.
But let’s strip away the promotional dynamics for a moment. Let’s ignore that they randomly dropped this with no notice (to critics, even) via the actors’ instagram accounts. Let’s bypass the fact they uploaded it as “Gary,” with no specific ties to The Bear. Despite all of this, this is just a flashback episode of The Bear focused on Richie and Mikey’s relationship, one that—given its ending—very well might have at one point been one of nine episodes of the fifth season. And so if we’re going to evaluate it, it really comes down to a simple question: was there a story reason for releasing the episode like this, or was this a case of strategy outweighing narrative intention?
