Review: The Bear, "Ribs" & "Raspberries" | Season 5, Episodes 4 & 5

How much attention do people pay to an episode’s running time when they hit play?

I don’t want to make the fifth season of The Bear entirely about each episode’s running time (although read the replies on my Bluesky post for some answers), because this is a character-driven show and there’s character things to talk about. But I also have to acknowledge that the brevity of the opening episode was the first concrete thought I had about the season; it’s now competing with the real-time narrative, but that can’t help but be shaped by the same observation. After the first three episodes, there were two pieces of clarity about the season: that the entire season would cover what might be the last day of The Bear, and that spreading that over eight episodes means that those episodes are going to cover fairly brief periods of time, likely with short runtimes.

And because I’m thinking about this, and because FX’s screening platform—like most streaming apps—makes the length of a given episode fairly obvious, I knew going into “Ribs” that it would be diverging from the pattern. At 38 minutes, it’s the longest episode of the season thus far, even if it doesn’t come close to the supersized length of episodes like “Fishes” and “Bears.” Immediately, my mind started to explore what this could mean. Are the writers going to hit a fast-forward button to get us closer to the end of the day? Are we going to abandon the real-time focus for flashbacks or a departure episode? Are we going to double-down on the real-time focus and have an entire episode from Ted’s perspective stuck in the ceiling, only able to hear what’s happening below?

I’m a little mad they didn’t go with that last idea, to be honest, but what became clear as “Ribs” started was that its length was simply a byproduct of needing to do more with character within the limitations set by the season’s structure. The liminality of this moment for these characters is the point of the season, and nothing in either of these episodes lifts that: Jimmy, the Computer, and Cheese spend the episode at the county clerk’s office trying to find out who owns the air rights, and if you expected the answer to resolve the uncertainty about the restaurant’s future before the series finale I have some air rights for you to buy. But what “Ribs” shows us is that the trials facing the restaurant earlier in the day have done what they will do: the basement is flooded, the roof has caved in, and the rain continues to come down, and all they can do now is try to run a restaurant in spite of it.