The Bear season 4 makes a crucial TV error we've seen before – and shows how to put it right

The first season arrived like a bolt from the blue, taking everyone by surprise. The tight eight-episode run was filled with comedy and pathos and frenetic energy quite unlike anything else on TV at the time.

Season 2 arrived a year later and saw the series at the peak of its powers. Where the show had initially been a scrappy underdog, now it was a serious awards contender, with viewers having flocked to the first season since its debut.

Episodes were chock full of A-list cameos, displaying the industry's reverence for the series, and beloved episodes like Fishes and Forks went beyond anything it had done before.

When the release date for season 3 was announced - pretty much exactly one year after season 2 - the show was hailed as a brilliant, consistent and reliable throwback of a series, at a time when most shows took two to three years between seasons.

Then, season 3 arrived.

It wasn't that season 3 was bad. In fact, it was still leagues above a lot of its competition on TV, with an incredible cast giving never-better performances, some truly moving sequences, and some genuinely laugh-out-loud comedy, no matter how much people argue its genre has been miscategorised.

However, there's no doubt it did feel somewhat different, a bit aimless, even a bit (whisper it)... pretentious.

A lot of the criticism the season came in for regarded its pacing, with many suggesting it simply didn't have enough of a propulsive plot.

It's true that season 2, as arguably the most successful run, was the most plot-heavy. There was a clear A to B that year - Carmy and his team wanted to turn their old sandwich shop into a fine-dining establishment, had a certain window in which they could do it, and in the end, they succeeded, with the finale centring around their first friends and family sitting.

Was season 3 missing some of that energy, that sense of direction? Sure. But I always had a sense that wasn't the primary issue holding the season back.

Now, season 4 has arrived, and in truth, it's a similar story to its predecessor, particularly in the first half of the run. In fact, even more so the first few episodes of season 4 feel turgid and humourless. This really isn't a show which is looking to avoid criticisms that it's a drama masquerading as a comedy for awards clout.

Elements of season 4 were shot alongside season 3, and while we'll likely never know exactly how much or which episodes, it would make sense for it to be the earlier part of the season.

This is because they suffer from the exact same problem, and in actual fact illuminate the issue. It's an error that The Bear is not alone in making, but which is provides a prime example of.

That is that the episodes fail to live up to their title - they are not nearly episodic enough.

Now, this is likely to be a contentious claim. In the past, many shows have provided riveting one-off instalments, which fail to advance the plot but which develop the characters, have a unique aesthetic or thematic exploration, and stand alone, and so often, these have been labelled with a derogatory term - filler.

I could spend days arguing the misuse and in most cases redundancy of the word filler, but it speaks to an obsession so many have with plot-driven narratives and serialisation.

Some shows have narratives like these, and for them, this approach and argument makes sense. For instance, in a detective drama where one case is investigated across a season, you wouldn't expect it to change things up each episode, and you wouldn't feel the need to distinguish too clearly between the instalments.

However, in spite of what season 2 may have made fans feel, The Bear has always been more of a character-driven show with no real trajectory. That's fine, but therefore its episodic structure is key.

No one wants to watch characters wander around aimlessly with little notable development, unless you are unpacking something different each time, or there's some new location, theme or one-off story to hook on to.

Atlanta is a perfect example of how this can be hugely effective. Every episode of that show, another FX release, could have been defined as filler, in the traditional sense that none of them advanced some long-term plot.

However, they all put the characters through their paces in different ways, and each time you tuned in you didn't know what you were going to get. You were kept on your toes, and every single episode was distinct.

The issue with The Bear is not necessarily that its episodes don't have enough plot, and certainly not that they don't have enough of an overarching plot, but more that they bleed into one another and are oftentimes indistinguishable.

In season 2, there were so many episodes that you could point to and summarise succinctly, even if it didn't quite encapsulate the whole of the instalment's goings-on.

Beef was the one where the team met with Cicero and got the ball rolling on their new restaurant. Honeydew was the one were Marcus went to Copenhagen. Pop was the one where Carmy and Claire went to a party. Fishes was the one with the Christmas dinner and the car in the wall. Forks was the one with Richie's training and that phenomenal Taylor Swift needle drop. I could go on.

Now look to seasons 3 and 4. In the former, what happened in Doors, Violet, Children, Legacy or Apologies? In the latter, how about Soubise, Scallop or Replicants?

So many of these episodes follow multiple different storylines which are continuing from previous instalments, all in familiar locations, with not much going on from either a plot or a character standpoint.

There isn't a distinctive feel, location, sequence or story, they all just feel like much of a muchness, a rehash of the same routine The Bear has fallen into over the past two years.

This is all the more obvious when the show is delivered as part of the binge model, with all episodes being released at once.

Structuring the season like this might help to keep viewers watching, ending many of them on a cliffhanger of sorts and picking up immediately after so you barely even notice the episode has changed, but it also makes each one feel less special, and the season as a whole feel samey.

The good news is that The Bear season 4 has already shown us how it can overcome this trend, and therefore how other shows can too.

The back half of season 4 features some real stand-outs, with Bears being an obvious one. There's also Tonnato, which includes that stellar, stand-out scene between Carmy and Donna, and the finale, Goodbye.

Now, the finale isn't perfect - I would argue it would have been far better if showrunners Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo had made a clear decision ahead of time whether this would be the show's last season or not, and leant into their decision here.

Goodbye could have worked great as a series finale, were it more conclusively set up as one, with some more definitive notes of finality.

However, what it did have was a simple yet defined set-up of the three central characters hashing it out, and a distinct location which helped demarcate it from so many of the others.

If The Bear does return, then hopefully it can do so back on form, having learned its lessons from this mixed bag of a fourth season.

Then, it would just need to remember to liven things up with some of the comedy which made it so successful in season 1. It may not quite be a straight comedy series, as has been argued for the awards bodies, although there's an argument to be had that maybe it should be.

But that's a debate for another day.

The Bear season 4 is available to stream in the UK on Disney+.

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