For all the time The Bear spends gazing at its protagonist, Jeremy Allen White’s seraphic, tormented chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, I’m hard-pressed to say what its third season has imparted about him that we didn’t already know. Where the show once offered an array of small details that brought Carmy to life—he stuttered as a child; he collects vintage denim; he can make his own Sprite from scratch—of late, it’s felt less like a character study than a series of psychological diagnoses, a portrait of pain rather than a person. The Bear is still extraordinarily artful; it experiments with form and style in Season 3 in ways that seem strikingly modernist for scripted television. But the show also appears less interested in telling a story than in offering an immersive trip for viewers into the recesses and faulty wiring of Carmy’s brain. We’re subsumed, for better and worse, in The Bear’s trauma plot.
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