The Bear season 5 review: Hilarious, indulgent and perhaps the finest workplace drama there has ever been

The Bear is closing. At the end of season four of Christopher Storer’s scrappy, passionate restaurant drama, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) quit The Bear, the elite Chicago eaterie he created by taking over his late brother Mikey’s neighbourhood sandwich joint. It seemed the show might be over, or that it would go on without White. Either would have been bitter.

Instead there is one more season, about one more day in the life of The Bear. Carmy has handed head-chef responsibilities to Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), the protégé with more than enough talent but maybe not quite enough self-belief, but he’s still in the kitchen. The money has run out but the cold stores still have food and the staff are still faithful. A rainstorm has flooded half of Chicago, so the tables tonight might be full or empty, but The Bear is not quite done yet. There’s one more show.

To finish, Storer boils his creation down to its core flavours. This is distilled Bear, concentrated Bear, a Bear jus. At least for the first seven of the eight episodes, which are what critics were sent in advance, we barely leave the restaurant. The unpredictable matriarch Donna Berzatto (Jamie Lee Curtis) is rarely seen – although when she does get involved she impacts on the story in a way we’ve not seen before. Similarly sporadic is Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), the money man whose efforts to save the business from financial oblivion are a reminder that today is all or nothing.

If The Bear is the sort of show that sparks the same emotion and devotion as a rock band, the timeline has gone like this: scintillating debut album (season one), followed by a stratospheric second and a wilfully awkward, divisive third. After a return to form in the cathartic fourth season, the Storer band’s fifth LP seems for a while as if it’s going to be something like an experimental drone record.

The Bear has started slowly before but never as off-handedly as the first two or three instalments here, where conversations are quiet murmurs and, with the restaurant doors not yet open, the only action is a plumbing issue that keeps causing pipes to burst at the funniest possible moment.

As always, though, Storer has a plan and the payoff in the back half of the season is like a sports film where the underdog team brings its misfits together for a big final against impossible odds. By The Bear’s standards the air-punch moments veer into indulgence, but we’ve been through so much together that we’ve earned episode seven, the most tearful, joyful, human hour of television you’ll see anywhere this year. It also contains three or four of The Bear’s best ever gags and by far its most hilarious ever one-off character. If American awards ceremonies classify this show as a comedy again next year they’ll still be wrong, but not by as much.

The Bear has always been about grief and recovery, ambition and self-doubt, the families we choose and those we are given. All these are present this season, especially in the way the Berzattos have the loss of Mikey hovering over their every interaction like a black mist, the remaining pieces of the family damaged but still fitting together to make a whole.

But primarily Storer’s series is a workplace drama, perhaps the finest there has ever been: a band of imperfectly matched people complete a difficult task together, pouring themselves into it to achieve something that most likely means little to anyone outside the team. Watching them do a skilled job well is an easy pleasure; watching each person recognise their own talent and find the guts to use it is a deeper thrill.

An example of a difficult task taken on collectively would be turning a TV drama with the aesthetic of a low-budget indie movie into an all-time classic. Storer and co have done it, and to those of us who have lived every scene, it means everything.

The Bear season 5 can be streamed in its entirety on 26 June.

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