Jamie Lee Curtis confirmed The Bear will end with its fifth season

It was Jamie Lee Curtis who let the cat out of the bag: The Bear is coming to an end.

She had recently posted a photo of herself in character on the Chicago-set comedy-drama with castmate Abby Elliott, who plays her onscreen daughter. “FINISHED STRONG!” she wrote, in part, adding that creator Chris Storer had completed the story of the Berzatto family.

When asked this week by Entertainment Tonight if her post meant The Bear was done, she replied, “It is the end of the show”.

It’s never easy to break the bad news to fans, but The Bear has prepped them for this moment. If anything, the fifth season was already a reprieve. Star Jeremy Allen White has previously said the original plan was for four chapters.

When the fifth season ends later this year, that will be its final service for a series that completely captured the zeitgeist from the moment it hit the TV scene.

But what’s curious about The Bear is that while it was inescapable those first two years, for a show that was so high on the excitement metre, its time in the sun was relatively short.

It’s not an Icarus thing, it’s not as though it took bigger and bigger swings that failed, it’s just that audiences simply moved on. They mostly still watched it, but people weren’t talking about it with anywhere near the same feverish idolatry.

That first season was an absolute barnstormer. When The Bear premiered in June 2022 in the US (Australia didn’t get it until September 2022), it was something completely fresh, even though it played with familiar elements.

Centred on Carmy Berzatto (White), it told the story of a young chef who had returned home from his high-flying career in some of the most famous restaurants in the world. He had to take over his family’s hot beef sandwiches establishment after the unexpected death of his brother.

Carmy was a mess on the personal level, which made him compelling, but he displayed a quality that we clearly all craved only months out from the chaos of the pandemic, which was competency.

Competency is sexy because it was, at the time, seemingly rare. He might be temperamental and really bad at communicating, but his skills with a knife, his palette for flavour combinations was undeniable.

The show was fast-paced and short, and it garnered a lot of attention for episodes that had a distinct identity. In that first season, it was the 17-minute oner that was pure anxiety as everything went tits-up in that kitchen and Carmy lost it.

In the second season, it was “Fishes”, the family Christmas flashback where we met the extended Berzatto clan including Curtis as Carmy’s manic mother. At over an hour long, it was one of the most stressful moments of TV in 2023.

While episodes like those showcased some of The Bear’s finest filmmaking, it was also what eventually put a lot of people off. It was too stressful, people would say, they couldn’t cope with it.

But it was the third season where it really shifted. People fell out of love, and once that discourse caught on online, it was like putting toothpaste back in the bottle.

Thinkpieces flowed dissecting what changed, including those that even posited that when the show shifted to more high-end dining, it no longer looked too delicious to ignore. Or that it had gotten too dark.

Despite the fact the third season still had a Rotten Tomatoes score of 89 per cent, it wasn’t the 100 per cent and 99 per cent of its predecessors. There was a crack, and The Bear became a victim of its own success. No one likes an overachiever.

Everyone loves to be a contrarian, and now you could poo-poo the cool kids and be praised for it. The show never got back that cachet and soon, only two years after it was being feted by all, The Bear became a pop culture villain.

You could see it in the awards races too, where after that first year, the conversation overwhelmingly became, “Is The Bear even a comedy?”, which were the categories it was submitted in.

The first year it was eligible for the Emmy Awards, it swept the field, winning everything it was nominated for during the primetime ceremony – best comedy series, lead actor for White, supporting actress for Ayo Edebiri, supporting actor for Ebon Moss-Bachrach and directing and writing for a comedy series for Storer.

By the Screen Actors Guild Awards this week, it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Oh, how quickly they turn on you.

Maybe this final season will be a valedictory lap pumped with goodwill. Because the show was always great, even if it was no longer cool.