This article contains details about season 3 of The bear.
The doors to Carmy and Sydney’s new restaurant have finally opened, and the stakes are higher than ever for Hulu’s hit series The bear. On the surface, the third season of Chef Carmy’s is a tale of the constant effort and relentless perseverance it takes to open a successful, fine dining restaurant. But as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and the rest of his team (including Ayo Edebiri as Sydney) search for financial solvency and a Michelin star, it becomes clear that what sets this season apart is its honest portrayal of grief.
“I just wanted to let you know that some of us here, we probably know how you feel,” Carmy tells Marcus (Lionel Boyce) when he returns to the kitchen after his mother’s death. Carmy means that he and the rest of the staff understand the overwhelming grief over the unexpected suicide of his brother, Michael, who owned the Italian beef restaurant Carmy takes over in Season 1. But as the season progresses, it becomes clear that the losses suffered by Carmy and the other characters extend much further.
“Grief is difficult and it’s pervasive, and it’s not just when people die. It’s when you move, when you lose your job, when you go through an identity change. Any kind of transition can involve loss,” says Sonya Lorelle, a clinical associate professor at the Family Institute at Northwestern University who collaborated with fellow professor Katherine Atkins to reconceptualize grief and create a new model of grief. Their Transcending Model of Grief and Loss recognizes how both death and nondeath losses impact a person’s life and identity development.
This is illustrated in the final season of The bear, says Rebecca Feinglos, a grief support specialist and the founder of Grieve Leave, a grief support platform and global community. Whether it’s the death of Marcus’ mother, Carmy’s messy breakup with Claire (Molly Gordon), his cousin Richie’s divorce, his sister Sugar’s estrangement from her mother and simultaneous transition into motherhood, Tina losing her job before she’d found her place in the kitchen, or the closure of Chef Terry’s three-star restaurant, this season is all about grief.
“[Season 3] gives us example after example of non-death related grief, and I think that’s so important for the media and the shows that entertain us to normalize, so that we can see that all of these forms of loss come with pain,” Feinglos says. Also, as someone who has experienced grief related to divorce herself, Feinglos could personally identify with Richie’s (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) storyline this season when he finally took off his wedding ring and remarried his ex.
Fan Rosalinda Romero posted about The bear on TikTok for years, and explains why it’s so relatable, especially as someone who spent years working in the hospitality industry in Chicago. This season, she found herself identifying with Sydney because, as someone who also experienced the loss of a parent at a young age, she understands the impulse to not share that information with everyone she meets because it can be such a heavy topic. Romero also appreciated Sugar’s (Abby Elliott) storyline. “Even though Sugar gains something this season — having a child — there’s a loss of her former self, because when you get older, you’re a new person, [it’s] a new [type of] to live.”
As a fiction writer, fan Eric Schlich was drawn to the final “funeral service” at chef Terry’s (Olivia Colman) restaurant Ever before it closed. During dinner, one of the chefs jokes with Sydney about how he’s recycled his trauma over shelling peas into developing pea pancetta. The 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 experimented with white pansy desserts because pansies were his mother’s favorite flower.
One of the biggest reasons these characters’ storylines are so relatable is that they show what grief is really like. Lorelle and Atkins argue that the problem with most media representations of grief is that it often reduces loss to stages, but that’s not how people experience loss. Their research and new model describe how people’s initial responses to grief often leave them feeling lost and adrift, oscillating between moments of compartmentalization (focusing on completing the daily tasks that need to be done, like going to work or making your kids’ lunches) and coping (making meaning for a new way of life).
This season’s characters exemplify this dichotomy. They compartmentalize in the kitchen to The bear restaurant successfully and also deal with their individual losses. While there has been some criticism that this flashback and clip-filled season of The bear is disjointed and has too many separate episodes, but Feinglos finds it appropriate for the subject matter.
“Grief is a disjointed thing. The stories we tell about grief can be disjointed, and so I see this season as a very clear reflection of what our grief feels like in real life,” she says. “It’s not neat. It’s not linear. There are no stages, and it’s all grief and it’s messy. This season is a messy season, and that’s okay.”
The bear Season 3 is now streaming on Hulu.
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