REVIEW: The Bear – Season Five [2026]

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 8 | Runtime: 40 minutes
Release Date: June 25th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: FX Network / Hulu
Creator(s): Christopher Storer

We will be here tomorrow.

In its attempt to recapture the frenetic tone of the first season, Christopher Storer and company end up transforming “The Bear” into some else entirely with its final run. Gone are the blaring needle-dropped end credits. Gone are the bottle episodes looking to mine deep into each character’s individual psyches. Gone is the yelling that just couldn’t help but spew forth with Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) at the wheel. Gone are the ghosts of the past.

Season five unfolds as three acts dissected into eight episodes with Act One spanning the first six as the crew comes together during a torrential downpour on the day after Computer’s (Brian Koppelman) clock reached zero. It proves a worse day than when Syd (Ayo Edebiri) left the preorders on because the reservation app is down, Marcus’ (Lionel Boyce) “Best New Chef” notice sparks interest, and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is too soft to cancel any tables.

Add Ted (Ricky Staffieri) falling through the roof and Neil (Matty Matheson) locking himself in the bathroom upon hearing Carmy had quit and it’s chaos from start to finish. Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) is pushing through. Sweeps (Corey Hendrix) is having an existential crisis. And Sugar (Abby Elliott) has an earbud in to listen as her mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) babysits the baby off-site. Oh, and the Michelin Star man has been clocked as coming in for dinner.

The show attempts to work its magic by giving everyone their moment to shine (even Jose M. Cervantes’ Angel and Richard Esteras’ Manny get a couple minutes before they aren’t seen again), but it doesn’t quite work when it’s all one day and the drama is all in one place. There’s a whole exterior subplot with Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and Computer delaying the inevitable (listening to Edwin Lee Gibson’s Ebra’s franchise pitch) that proves more distraction than necessity.

I get it, though. This is kind of the price of doing business at a time when the line between film and television has blurred to nothing. No one on this show was really a “name” when it burst onto the scene and now it must be a nightmare to try and get their schedules aligned. So, one locale (besides Jimmy’s journey and some cutaways) surely eased production costs and time. The writers must then do their best to make it work within those constraints.

While that means some characters are left by the wayside for simple victories (Tina and her sprouts) or familiar frustrations (Lionel Boyce’s Marcus letting the anxiety from inviting his estranged father for dinner spill into his BFF-triangle with Will Poulter and Carmen Christopher), it also allows for the spotlight to shine on the lead trio. This is important because Act Two and Three truly prove a changing of the guard from Carmy to Syd.

The hour-long seventh episode portrays the service from its empty beginnings (that rain causes delays) to its insane middle (triple bookings leading to the kind of ingenious improvisation The Bear crew is known for) to its … peaceful end? How could this second act not be a changing of the guard then? When every prior season ended in ambitious impossibility or utter implosion, this one teases hope. Maybe they all did learn something along the way.

Syd embracing her talent by not only measuring up to her idol in Carmy, but also hearing his admiration while accepting his fallibilities in the process. Richie finding purpose to weaponize his best strengths as a storyteller into a bona fide vocation thanks to Carmy taking him seriously enough to transform under the armor of professionalism. And, of course, Carmy finally acknowledging that running into restaurants was actually him running away from life.

That’s when Act Three arrives via the hour-long series finale and its immediate aftermath of that unforgettable night moving into a series of vignettes revealing everyone a few days removed. Is it overly sentimental? When has this show not been? Is it inspiring enough to overshadow how sped-up these evolutions prove? Sure, because the idea behind it all is that the support of family—chosen family even if blood is involved—truly has the power to save the world.

So, while this season probably feels the least like “The Bear” yet (seasons three and four have outlier moments and flourishes but mostly feel aligned with their predecessors if treated as a single unit), it still gets the show’s intentions. And, as such, provides a fitting conclusion to the Berzatto clan’s saga with its already maxed out (and traumatized) umbrella opening a bit further to let more strangers in. It’s always been a show about its characters and they’ve never shone brighter.

Those first two seasons are all-timers that probably couldn’t have been sustained even if the cast and crew devoted themselves solely to the show without expanding their careers further than its shadow. Despite that reality, however, I do admire the effort to keep going and deliver a satisfying conclusion. The writing is never as tight due to working towards that end rather than the present, but it’s still a great season of television. It’s still a helluva show.