The Bear's Downfall Can Be Tracked Back To One Moment

For a while, "The Bear" was the hottest thing since sliced bread. Christopher Storer's kitchen dramedy, which airs on FX and Hulu, stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto, a talented and highly-trained haute cuisine chef who gives up his career working in Michelin-starred establishments to return to Chicago in the wake of his brother Mikey's (Jon Bernthal) death. After hiring new blood like chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and getting Mikey's best friend Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bacharach) on board to help him reinvigorate the sandwich shop known as "The Beef," Carmy sets out to turn it into the titular Bear, a fine-dining destination.

It's objectively correct to say that, during its first two seasons, "The Bear" was a genuine phenomenon. After Season 3 left fans feeling colder than a serving of gazpacho soup, people sort of stopped paying attention to the series; Season 4 sort of came and went when it aired in the summer of 2025. Now, the fifth and final season of "The Bear" is set to air in June 2026, and nobody is talking about it at all.

Why is that? I think I know, and I think it can be traced back to the Season 2 episode "Fishes." Obviously, that ensemble episode — set during a hectic Christmas celebration at the Berzatto house — was a huge hit when it first aired, thanks to major guest stars like Jamie Lee Curtis, Bob Odenkirk, Gillian Jacobs, John Mulaney, and Sarah Paulson. Unfortunately, this episode has been the central source of all the problems "The Bear" has experienced since it aired. Since "Fishes," "The Bear" has relied far too heavily on stunt casting for guest roles, and it never truly recovered from this post-"Fishes" fumble.

Right on the heels of "Fishes," "The Bear" did air what is, in my opinion, its finest half hour — "Forks," the Richie-centric ode to five-star dining experiences — but even "Forks" fell into this new trap the show created for itself. In its final moments, Richie, after completing a stage (or learning phase) at the fictional Chicago culinary institution Ever, encounters the legendary Chef Terry ... who's played by Oscar winner Olivia Colman. While this leads to a genuinely gorgeous scene between Richie and Terry, it creates an underlying problem: this sort of celebrity cameo becomes the norm in Season 3 of "The Bear."

Colman returns; Joel McHale takes on the role of one of Carmy's former culinary mentors (who verbally abused the young chef for years); and Josh Hartnett plays Frank, the new paramour of Richie's ex-girlfriend, Tiff (Gillian Jacobs). Beyond that, actual chefs Daniel Boulud, René Redzepi, and Thomas Keller all cameo as themselves during the Season 3 finale, which takes place as Ever prepares to close its doors. (Just some added nastiness here: Redzepi, who ran the Copenhagen restaurant Noma, was credibly accused of rampant physical abuse in his kitchen in March of 2026.) This is not even a full list, by the way!

The worst of these cameos, though, is easily John Cena as Sammy Fak, a member of the wide-ranging Fak family who's mostly represented by Matty Matheson's Neil Fak. Cena showing up in the fifth episode of Season 3, "Children," is easily one of the most distracting TV cameos I can remember, and it completely took me out of the story to be like, "Hey, that's John Cena." So did "The Bear" figure out that this impulse was a problem? Not really!

Apparently, nobody at "The Bear" noticed that the constant celebrity cameos were really dragging down the show's whole vibe, because they just kept doing it! Season 4 of "The Bear" was chock-a-block full of cameos, with some new and returning players; Brie Larson shows up as Francine Fak, for example. Jamie Lee Curtis also features pretty prominently as Berzatto matriarch Donna, and basically everybody who's ever been on "The Bear" in any capacity shows up for Tiff and Frank's wedding, leading to a scene where Tiff and Richie's daughter Eva (Annabelle Toomey) hides under a table, and everyone ends up joining her. It's cute, but it feels devoid of any real narrative heft and reads more like the show's unfortunate impulse to show off that Christopher Storer and the stars have a lot of famous friends.

I'm not saying "The Bear" is a bad show, per se. Even a mediocre episode of "The Bear" is, honestly, superior to a lot of slop that airs on network TV. Still, a good show that could have been consistently great across five seasons ended up undercutting itself with cheap celebrity cameos because Oscar winners and former pro wrestlers took an interest in the series after its first season was such a huge hit. I'll still tune in for the fifth and final season of "The Bear" when it drops in its entirety on Hulu on June 25, 2026 ... but I'll still hope, probably in vain, that they've cooled it on celebrity cameos to let this show speak for itself.