The Bear Season 4 Trailer Introduces The Hulu Series' Most Stressful Idea Yet
If you thought previous seasons of "The Bear" were high-stress, just wait until you see what the show has cooked up for season 4.
The latest trailer just dropped for the hit Hulu series centered around fine dining, which brings Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bacharach, Abby Elliott, and the rest of the Chicago-based gang back for another round. So, what's that super-stressful element? Well, as Jimmy "Cicero" Kalinowski (Oliver Platt) tells Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto (White) at the beginning of the trailer, "That clock is telling you how much money we have left. When that shows zero, this restaurant needs to cease operations." Jeez. (As we all know, "Uncle" Jimmy is the money behind this whole thing, so his approach does, unfortunately, make some sense.)
The fictional restaurant, which shares its name with the series itself, finally opened in season 3 after Carmy, his "cousin" Richie (Moss-Bacharach), and the rest of their motley crew transformed it from a humble sandwich shop into a fine-dining destination. Unfortunately, as various characters note, reviews aren't great, saying things like "the offerings were substantially different on each visit" and "consistency seems to be the weak link here." Can Carmy, Richie, Sydney (Edebiri), Marcus Brooks (Lionel Boyce), Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas), and everyone else turn this car around before it careens off a cliff? Well, that remains to be seen.
Should we be worried about season 4 of The Bear?
On some level, yeah, it's exciting that "The Bear" is returning for its fourth season so soon; showrunner Christopher Storer has created something pretty special with the series, and every single actor involved is always firing on all cylinders. (There's a reason that White, Edebiri, and Moss-Bacharach have each received armloads of awards for their roles.) Still, I have some concerns, and all of them center on the show's third season, which dropped on Hulu last year.
Season 3 of "The Bear" was, to put it politely, a mess. After a genuinely phenomenal sophomore season, which included one of my all-time favorite television installments, the Richie-centered "Forks," and happened to feature one of the greatest and best-deployed Taylor Swift needle drops in TV history, the show returned in June of 2024 and seemed a little high on its own supply. The celebrity cameos, which were a pleasant surprise in season 2, spiraled out of control; I'll argue with anyone that bringing both Olivia Colman and Jamie Lee Curtis back was a mistake, and adding someone like John Cena into the mix wasn't fun but totally distracting. The pace of the series, which has always been relentless, also seemed to slow as the in-universe restaurant struggled to get off the ground, and Carmy's obsessive nature and unwillingness to listen to a single well-meaning person in his orbit just started to feel stagnant and frustrating.
With that said, some of season 4 was filmed concurrently with season 3, which explains why season 3 also sort of ... felt incomplete, so it is genuinely possible that Storer and his team can right this ship. We'll find out when season 4 of "The Bear" drops in its entirety on June 25, 2025.