In its third season, The Bear gets avant-garde

Warning: Mild spoilers follow for season three of The Bear. A tip creative writing teachers dole out, frequently enough that the advice has become its own cliché, is to avoid ending a story with “and then I woke up”. Not just because it’s clumsy and invalidates much of what came before, but also because the logic of dreams is so loopy and private that it’s (usually) only interesting to the dreamer.

It’s also, of course, exactly the kind of rule ambitious creators love to break. The Bear , Christopher Storer’s breakout hit about food - and grief and vocation, perfectionism and mentorship, service and trauma and ego and guilt and repair - went one further: it opened with a dream. Back in 2022, the pilot began with a surrealist sequence in which a tormented young chef named Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) approached and freed a caged bear on the State Street Bridge.



I thought back then that it was bold (and maybe a little hokey) to establish a collective unconscious for your show before introducing any actual characters. Or plot. But these writers weren’t coy.

They plunged you right into the show’s messy, broken subtext. The third season, which follows the gang as they try to make the fancy new restaurant a going concern, doubles down on that impulse to throw the viewer into the deep end. Tomorrow , the first episode, picks up in the immediate aftermath of friends and family night at the Bear (the restaurant, not the show).

And it’s a formally inventive, .