This article contains details about season 3 of The bear.
The doors to Carmy and Sydney’s new restaurants are finally open, and the stakes are higher than ever on the hit Hulu show The bear. On the surface, season three of Chef Carmy’s story is about the constant effort and relentless perseverance it takes to open a successful fine-dining restaurant. However, as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and the rest of his team (including Ayo Edebiri as Sydney) seek financial solvency and a Michelin star, it becomes clear that what makes this season resonate is its honest depiction of grief.
“I just wanted you to know that some of us here probably know how you’re feeling,” Carmy tells Marcus (Lionel Boyce) when he returns to the kitchen after his mother’s death. Carmy wants to say that he and the rest of the team understand the overwhelming pain over the unexpected suicide of his brother Michael, owner of the Italian steak restaurant that Carmy takes over in Season 1. But as the season progresses, it becomes clear that Carmy and the other characters’ losses are even more far-reaching.
“Grief is difficult and widespread, and it doesn’t just happen when people die. It’s when you move, when you lose your job, when you have some kind of identity change. Any type of transition can bring harm,” he says. Sonya Lorelleclinical associate professor at the Family Institute of Northwestern University who worked with fellow professor Katherine Atkins to reconceptualize grief and create a new model of grief. From them Transcending the grief and loss model recognizes how loss through death and non-death affects a person’s life and identity development.
This is exemplified in the last season of The bear, it says Rebecca Feinglosgrief support specialist and founder of Bereavement leave, a grief support platform and worldwide community. Whether it’s the death of Marcus’ mother, Carmy’s messy breakup with Claire (Molly Gordon), her cousin Richie’s divorce, her sister Sugar’s estrangement from her mother and simultaneous transition into motherhood, Tina’s loss of her job before she finds her place in the kitchen, or the closure of Chef Terry’s three-star restaurant, this season is defined by pain.
“[Season 3] gives us example after example of non-death-related grief, and I think that’s really important for the media and the shows that entertain us to normalize, so that we can see that all of these forms of loss have pain associated with them,” says Feinglos . Additionally, as someone who has also experienced divorce-related pain, Fienglos personally related to Richie’s (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) story this season, as he finally took off his wedding ring and navigated his way to his ex getting married again.
Fan Rosalinda Romero have posted about The bear about TikTok for years, explaining why it’s so relatable, especially for someone who worked for years in the food service industry in Chicago. This season, she resonated with Sydney because, as someone who also experienced the loss of a parent when she was young, she understands the impulse to not share this information with everyone she knows because it can be such a heavy subject. Romero also liked Sugar’s (Abby Elliott) storyline. “Even though Sugar this season is gaining something – having a child – there is a loss of her old self, because when you become a father, you are a new person, [it’s] a new [type of] life.”
As a fiction writer, fan Eric Schlich, was drawn for the final “funeral” at Chef Terry’s (Olivia Colman) restaurant, before it closed. At dinner, one of the chefs is joking with Sydney about how he redirected his trauma from shelling peas to develop pea pancetta. This exchange resonated with Schlich because of the way grief can be repurposed to create art, and it reminded him of an earlier moment in the season when Marcus tried white violet desserts because violets were his mother’s favorite flowers.
One of the biggest reasons these characters’ stories are so relatable is that they reveal what grief is really like. Lorelle and Atkins find that the problem with most representations of grief in the media is that loss is often reduced to stages, but that’s not how people experience loss. Their research and new model describe how people’s initial reactions to grief often leave them feeling lost and adrift, and they oscillate between moments of compartmentalization (focusing on completing daily tasks that must be done, like going to the work or preparing lunch for the children). and processing (making sense of a new way of life).
This season’s characters exemplify this dichotomy. They compartmentalize in the kitchen to do The bear restaurant was successful and is also processing its individual losses. Although there has been some criticism that this season full of flashbacks and The bear is disjointed and has many unique episodes, Feinglos thinks is appropriate for the subject matter.
“Grief is disjointed. The stories we tell about grief can also be disjointed, and so I see this season as a clear reflection of what our grief is like in real life,” she says. It’s not linear. There are no phases, and everything is sadness and confusion. This season is complicated and that’s okay.”
The bear The third season is now streaming on Hulu.
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