‘The Bear’ Season 4 Goes Big and Goes Small in Two Very Special Episodes. Both Work

This post contains spoilers for Season Four of The Bear, which is now streaming on Hulu.

Late in “Bears,” the seventh episode of the new season of The Bear, 16 different people are seated under the same table at a wedding reception. When we first see this table — part of the furnishings in the home of Frank (Josh Hartnett), newly-married to Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs), who used to be married to Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — it does not seem large enough to accommodate that many people. It looks like… a table, just big enough for Tiffany and Richie’s daughter Eva (Annabelle Toomey) to hide under because she’s nervous about doing a stepfather-stepdaughter dance with Frank. When Richie, Frank, and their friend Claire (Molly Gordon) join her to make sure she’s OK, the area is so cramped that Richie’s legs stick out from beneath the tablecloth. Yet one by one, this group is joined by Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Carmy’s sister Natalie (Abby Elliott), Natalie’s husband Pete (Chris Witaske), Natalie’s frenemy Francie Fak (Brie Larson), Neil Fak (Matty Matheson), Ted Fak (Ricky Staffieri), Ted’s girlfriend Kelly (Mitra Jouhari), Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), cousin-in-law Stevie (John Mulaney), Marcus (Lionel Boyce), Marcus’ friend Chester (Carmen Christopher), and finally Tiffany, and there is room for them all to not only sit, fully upright, but to move around without risk of injury. 

Is this a table built for giants? Did Frank — who, admittedly, is quite wealthy as the CEO of a popular keyless entry app — have it imported from a castle in Gstaad? Is it like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, much bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside? A magical object capable of expanding to accommodate however many people are providing emotional support for one another underneath it? No one in the scene questions the table’s size, though they’re eventually excited to all be under it together; Ted even takes a selfie of the group, whose encouragement and empathy finally convince Eva to rejoin the party. So we can only speculate as to its special properties. 

But the series’ ability to incorporate so many people into such an allegedly small space, and to make an episode featuring all of them, plus nearly everyone else in the show’s main cast, plus guest stars like Jamie Lee Curtis, Bob Odenkirk, and Sarah Paulson, and to never make it feel too crowded, or like anyone is being lost in the shuffle, is part of its own magic. 

Yet The Bear can cast just as potent a spell when it keeps things small and simple, like the season’s fourth episode, “Worms,” where Sydney is the only regular character to appear, there are only three other substantial speaking parts, and Sydney interacts with each of those people one-on-one. 

Co-written by Edebiri and Boyce, and directed by Janicza Bravo, “Worms” (named for the gummy candy Sydney enjoys at one point) finds Syd trying to address two problems on the same day: She needs to get her hair braided, and she needs to decide already whether she wants to leave The Bear to help Carmy’s old colleague Adam Shapiro (played by the actor of the same name) launch a new restaurant, where she will be the head chef. The converted warehouse space Shapiro shows her is a raw lump of clay, which the two of them could theoretically mold into anything, but which could also turn out to be a mess. She knows about The Bear’s problems — most notably Carmy being an erratic, undependable, at times maddening boss, mentor, and alleged creative partner — but she also loves the people there, and knows what the place can be like when everyone is on their game and working in harmony. Shapiro’s spot could become anything, or nothing. 

From there, Syd goes to the home of her cousin Chantel (Danielle Deadwyler), a professional hairstylist happy to do a favor for family away from the salon. Chantel is a single mom, raising her daughter TJ (Arion King) with occasional help from TJ’s father — and Chantel’s off and on boyfriend, it seems — Christian. Where Sydney is a bundle of nerves most of the time, Chantel is at ease with herself and her place in the world, happily gossiping about friends, family, and clients with her cousin. (Deadwyler, one of the most chameleonic actors we have, disappears into this relaxed, confident, funny role.) But she runs out of supplies while Syd’s hair is only halfway done, so she ducks out to the store, leaving Syd in charge of TJ. 

The structure is not dissimilar from a classic episode of another FX comedy-drama hybrid, Atlanta, where Paper Boi’s attempt to get a haircut from his favorite barber led him on an odyssey of crime and misfortune. Things don’t go nearly as badly for Syd, but Chantel is gone a long time — it later turns out that she ran into Christian in her travels — and Syd winds up bonding with TJ. We already know that Syd’s mother died when she was little, and that this loss helped define the person she is, for good and for ill. So the script doesn’t have to lay it on thick that she is spending an afternoon playing surrogate mother, nor that she has complicated feelings simply watching Chantel and TJ interact. It’s just understood by all. It doesn’t take over the story — in which Syd’s attempt to help TJ deal with a friend group crisis in turn helps her reckon with the Shapiro vs. Carmy question — but it adds another layer of complexity and emotional shading to it. 

Because we’re watching a show called The Bear, where Carmy and Syd are the two main characters, while Shapiro is a minor recurring character who hasn’t been granted the level of depth of, say, the members of the extended Berzatto family who appear at the wedding, we’re inclined to root for Sydney to stay at the series’ titular workplace. But the choice is as difficult as Sydney makes it sound when she tries to frame it to TJ like she’s picking between two different houses to visit for a sleepover. We know what a catastrophe The Bear, and particularly Carmy, can be. We know it’s a family establishment that, while it treats Sydney, Marcus, Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), and others like they’re family, may never entirely feel to Syd like it’s hers. (Chantel dismisses The Bear as a place from the predominantly white north side of Chicago, where they don’t make beef the way she’s used to.) But she knows Shapiro more by reputation than as a person, and the unknown of the new endeavor in some ways is even scarier than sticking around and waiting for Carmy’s latest meltdown.

The day spent with TJ doesn’t exactly help Syd make the decision, but it at least gives her the courage to continue talking with Shapiro about terms. And being around her own extended family — when it seems that most of her life is either about work, or seeing her widower father (Robert Townsend, wonderful in other parts of the season) — reminds her of just how important it is to stay connected with people who aren’t your co-workers. Hearing that Chantel and Christian are back on good terms, she suggests going out with them the next time she has a night off. Even if that’s not for another three Saturdays, it’s still a big leap for her. 

In all, “Worms” is a lovely spotlight on the series’ co-lead, that feels at once like a little interlude from the main action and like an important stepping stone in the season’s larger arc about what will happen to The Bear, and whether Syd wants to keep working with Carmy. Like the cheffed-up Hamburger Helper meal Syd teaches TJ to cook — or, for that matter, like the pared-down menu The Bear has to deploy this season after the grocery budget starts getting too low — it turns its lack of ingredients into a strength. The simplicity of it allows the most important part — in this case, Edebiri’s screen presence, charm, and palpable vulnerability in this role — to stand out, rather than getting lost in a busy sauce. 

That said, when the sauce is as rich and thick and spicy as it is in “Bears,” that works splendidly, too. 

The two episodes are linked in terms of Sydney’s conflict, as we still don’t know which way she’s leaning by the end of “Bears.” (Nor, at that point, do we know what Carmy is trying to tell her about alterations to the partnership agreement she still hasn’t signed.) Beyond that, they couldn’t be more different. “Worms” is barely over a half hour, all of it about one character, with Shapiro, Chantel, and TJ all allowing Syd to confront different facets of the story. “Bears” is 69 minutes long — within spitting distance of feature film length. It has 20 significant characters in it, all of whom get at least one brief spotlight moment, if not a full arc within the episode. It is loud where “Worms” is quiet, chaotic where “Worms” is chill, and deeply sentimental where “Worms” is more than a little skeptical of the idea that Syd should stay with these people merely out of affection and familiarity. 

Despite its runtime, “Bears” never seems padded because so much is happening, and because Joanna Calo’s script and Bear creator Christopher Storer’s direction makes every moment for every character — whether someone we know well like Richie, or someone relatively minor like Frank or Stevie — feel real and honest. Even the more exaggerated comedic material, like Francie and Natalie(*) cursing each other out for most of the evening over some incident that’s never entirely explained(**), has a core of emotional truth to it, in the way that only the people we love the most can drive us that crazy.  

(*) Credit obviously to Brie Larson for absolutely going for it with this performance, when her comedic chops have been called upon less and less the bigger her career has become, and for also trying to fit into the show in a way that John Cena — as another Fak — didn’t bother to last season. But the subplot’s also a potent reminder that Abby Elliott was once an SNL castmember and a gifted comic actress, when The Bear mainly uses her (as it uses everyone else) for serious, heartfelt material. That said, the funniest bit of that subplot doesn’t involve either of them, but rather the cut from Tiffany offering to help get a sad Neil a hot chocolate at the end of one scene, to a happy Neil sipping his hot chocolate and watching Francie and Natalie yell at each other at the start of the next scene.   

(**) Pete does at least figure out that Francie and Natalie once hooked up, though that doesn’t seem to be the thing the two women are fighting about here.   

The length, and the army of big-name guest stars, evokes “Fishes,” the famous, and famously stressful, Season Two episode where a Berzatto family Christmas at the home of Carmy and Natalie’s mother Donna (Curtis) descended into chaos and rage, culminating in her crashing her car into the living room. Most of that episode’s guest stars are back, even if some, like Odenkirk and Paulson, are only really in one scene apiece(*). Carmy and Odenkirk’s Uncle Lee talk about the events of “Fishes,” and at another point Carmy flashes back on that terrible day while struggling to remain emotionally present and not too overwhelmed at the wedding. 

(*) Goodness, though, does the episode get great mileage out of each of those scenes! The one where Tiffany and Paulson’s Michelle lie in bed together, and Michelle helps Tiffany work through her conflicted feelings about her own difficult mother not coming to the wedding, should not work. Michelle is barely a character on the show — no matter how many times someone tries to explain the Berzatto family tree, I can’t keep track of whether she’s a blood relative or another fake cousin like Richie — and Tiffany to this point has been defined almost entirely through Richie’s sense of guilt about blowing things with her. But Jacobs and Paulson are so present and warm and open with each other that our lack of knowledge of either of them doesn’t matter. And Odenkirk and Jeremy Allen White stage a spectacular little duet as Lee opens up to Carmy about all he’s been through since they last saw each other. It’s hard to choose which is the more powerful moment: the slight break in Lee’s voice when he tells Carmy, “Sometimes, to break patterns, you gotta… break patterns, man,” or the look of astonished hope on Carmy’s face when he realizes Lee is telling the truth about Mikey being proud of his little brother.  

Ultimately, though, the episode proves to be its predecessor’s spiritual opposite. “Fishes” was a story where everyone’s theoretical holiday excitement was ruined by the stress of actually gathering that many Berzattos in the same place at the same time. “Bears” is a story about a day that everyone is worried about going in — Sydney is there not because she knows Tiffany or Frank, but because Richie needs a friend to lean on for what he assumes will be a dark, painful affair — that instead turns out to be wonderful for nearly all involved. 

Again, nearly. Donna wanders through the reception like a figure out of one of the many horror movies Jamie Lee Curtis has starred in — the alcoholic, mentally ill mother who destroys all joy in her path, and who seemingly can’t be destroyed herself. Carmy is so shaken by her presence that Richie and Sydney have to swoop in to rescue him, which means Syd is the one who gets stuck with the full D.D. experience. By the end of their conversation, Syd is shaking, as much for understanding what Carmy has been through as for her own complicated maternal feelings. (It’s not Edebiri’s rawest moment of the season, but only because she goes to such a dark and pained place in the episode where Sydney is at the hospital after her father’s heart attack.) And on a lighter note, Frank is not at all pleased to learn that his mom invited Chester, whom Frank fired from his business. (And Marcus in turn is annoyed that Chester invited him as his plus-one without explaining his history with the groom.) 

But Carmy’s conversation with Lee, and then his time under the table with the big group — and especially with ex-girlfriend Claire — does wonders for his disposition, and for his usual difficulty being in crowds. He’s able to open up to Claire, and to tell the truth about the scar on his hand that he lied about when they were together. 

And almost everyone else gets what they want. Natalie and Francie reconcile. Ted tells Kelly that he loves her, and she says it back to him. (Kelly has never appeared before, and barely says or does anything, yet that scene works, too. That’s how on rails the episode is.) Eva agrees to dance with Frank, and Richie helps Frank feel less self-conscious about his role as stepdad. Tiffany — in another knockout scene from Gillian Jacobs — tells Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) that she worried she would lose the Berzattos when she and Richie divorced, since they feel more like her family than her actual family, and he assures her that she’s stuck with all these Bears for life. Neil gets his hot chocolate. And Richie — for whom this day should have been the most difficult, since it makes the end of his marriage even more official than the divorce — comes out of it feeling oddly reassured by it all. He knows that Frank improbably feels inferior to him. And he tells Jimmy that where he once thought of himself as an isolated rock in the Zen garden of the Berzattos’ lives, he’s come to think that maybe he’s the sand holding the whole group together. When you consider that all of these people are at this wedding, and in Tiffany’s life, because of Richie, he’s not exactly wrong, is he? 

While Syd is acting as Carmy’s human shield, she and Donna talk about the differences between work-family and family-family. But the wedding is an example of how the definition of family can be amorphous. None of the Berzattos are related by blood or marriage to Tiffany, but they matter more to her than her biological kin. Mikey is gone, but Carmy still has a brother in Richie. And while Sydney understandably feels like she can never truly be part of the clan, she’s under that table like everyone else, and we see at the end of the season that Carmy trusts and cares for her like he does his own sister. Like Tiffany, she’s a Bear forever if she wants to be. 

One episode is tiny. One is huge. One is mostly about Syd’s family-family, the other about her work-family. But The Bear can be at its best at any size, no matter how many or how few people it needs to fit under the table.