The UnBEARable Lightness Of Being (Transparent)

June 25, 2026

One of the buzzier series ever set in the work of restauranteuring reaches its expiration date tonight as FX’s THE BEAR drops its fifth and final season. Those who like and subscribe–and choose to watch–on Hulu will be able to binge-watch the final eight episodes in one marathon setting should Red Bull and/or Ryze allow one to; those remaining Luddites who remain on its increasingly inconsequential linear channel will have to settle for the network’s tried-and-true two-episode premiere/weekly episodic release strategy. Good luck with trying to steer clear of spoiler alerts, since a critical darling like this already has its share of fanboi mourners who began sitting shiva months ago. Witness what SCREEN RANT’s Matthew Rudoy guffawed back in March:

The Bear is closing its kitchen doors after season 5. Cast member Jamie Lee Curtis previously seemed to confirm that The Bear was ending when she shared an image with Abby Elliott on Instagram with a caption that read “FINISHED STRONG! Surrounded by an extraordinary crew and group of writers and producers and scene partners on the show that Chris Storer created, completing the story of this extraordinary family that we have all fallen in love with. Got to finish it out with my baby Berzatto bear”.

Since it first debuted in 2022, The Bear’s reviews have been exceptional, leading to an overall critics’ score of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. It has dominated during awards season as well, having won 21 Emmys and five Golden Globes. This includes wins for Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (White), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (Ayo Edebiri), Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series (Jon Bernthal), Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (Curtis), and Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series (Storer).

UNSCRIPTED’s Jeremy Rabe dropped his own emotional attachment onto the funeral pyre yesterday morning:

Season 5 picks up right after the intense Season 4 cliffhanger where Carmy(Jeremy Allen White) announces his exit from the restaurant business, leaving Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Natalie “Sugar” (Abby Elliott) in charge of the struggling fine-dining spot. They face the monumental task of keeping the business afloat while managing an increasingly stressed crew and escalating external crises. Sounds funny right. It is a great cast and yes, I watch because I want to see how it all ends, and I have a feeling the cast will all move on to do other amazing shows.

Rabe might have overlooked that very point which Rudoy addressed in detail lo those many months before:

Largely due to the show’s immense success, The Bear’s cast has become increasingly busy with other projects, making it more difficult to bring the actors back together for each new season. White played Bruce Springsteen in the biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere and is voicing Rotta the Hutt in The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is the first Star Wars movie since 2019. Moss-Bachrach made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut as Ben Grimm/The Thing in The Fantastic Four: First Steps and is reprising the role for Avengers: Doomsday. Edebiri voiced Envy in Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which grossed $1.7 billion worldwide, and she starred in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt alongside Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield.

Were Rabe an actual media journalist, he might have asked the question at some point that’s at least been on my mind–what “immense success”are you citing?

It couldn’t possibly be actual audience estimates–what we used to reference simplistically as “ratings”. The last time FX was on record itself waswith the third season premiere in 2024 when it issued a release humble humble-bragging about what they at the time posited as newsworthy:

In its first four days, the debut episode (Episode 301) was streamed by 5.4 million viewers across Hulu and Hulu+Disney+ in the U.S., plus Disney+ in select international markets… This figure — calculated by Hulu as total watch time divided by the show’s runtime — marks:

The largest premiere of a scripted series in Hulu history
The biggest FX season premiere ever on Hulu
The third-largest season premiere of any kind on Hulu

The closest we got to followup last summer was this confounded observation from VARIETY’s Selome Hailu:

“The Bear” was the seventh most-streamed title in the U.S. during the week of its Season 4 premiere, per Nielsen, hitting 917 million minutes watched from June 23 to June 29. That’s a drop off of approximately 24% from the 1.2 billion minutes the series reached during Season 3’s premiere week last June. Last year’s 1.2 billion minutes marked a record for “The Bear,” outranking the 853 million minutes the series achieved during the week of the Season 2 premiere, as well as the 349 million minutes it reached during its sole appearance on the chart in 2022, the week after Season 1 premiered. That puts the Season 4 premiere week in second place overall.

Note that number came from Nielsen itself, which merely releases weekly top ten lists for streaming series. With the exception of Netflix platforms feel no obligation whatsoever to share individual series performances with the public, lest the curtain be pulled back on their Wizard of Oz-like representation that there really isn’t all that massive an audience out there after all–and heaven forbid shareholders have the ammo to hold these companies accountable for their indulgences. The actual data exists, and as streamers continue to become more reliant on advertising for incremental revenue it’s all the more relevant as to why shows get renewed or not. But since no one seems to be asking those kinds of questions any more, FX and Hulu in particular felt no obligation–even to its fans–to concede that something they at lease once passionately believed in may have run its course.

This still didn’t dissaude passionistas and tastemakers like COLLIDER’s Shrishty Mishra from picking up on the kind of breadcrumbs that her fellow “journalists” offered up last month in the wake of a surprise bonus episode being released in advance of this swan song season:

(F)ans are tuning in to check out this prequel, Gary, has risen to #3 on Disney+’s top 10 list, as per FlixPatrol. In just four days, the standalone has dethroned features like Zootopia 2, Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: Episode I, and more, standing only behind Sam Raimi’s Send Help and The Devil Wears Prada.

But as I continue to remind my detail-denying roommate when he sees these sorts of “ratings” on his home page that’s all relative to one point in time on the platform itself. We have zero idea how many viewers–or even minutes–contributed to that ranking, or how yuge a gap there was between those catalogue titles on either end. Certainly no context to offer if after last season’s seminal ending a new wave of more forgiving curiosity sampling or anticipation had set in.

Even if one defaults to critical ratings there’s scant little evidence of correlation. Season 4 notched a distinctly lower Popcornmeter score on Rotten Tomatoes (68%) that reflects the vox populi verdict as opposed to the 84% number that critics supplied to the Tomatometer number. But that was significantly above the 54% Popcornmeter score for that “record-breaking” Season 3.

What’s especially disappointing is that FX honcho John Landgraf was once far more willing to man-splain these realities when he was actually pressed to do so. Recall how he addressed the network demise of another critical darling which TV SERIES FINALE’s Trevor Kimball reported on 16 summers ago. I spent my last months at the network regularly being forced to confront these realities not only for John but I also got dragged into debates our team had with everyone from DAMAGES’ co-stars Glenn Close, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen to their disbelieving fans, which happened to include Barack and Michelle Obama. A good deal of what John confessed that day was teed up by hard but necessary conversations I had with him even before I was shown the door.

But at least Sony was willing to try and keep something going. I couldn’t help but notice that earlier this week the ever-secretive Entertainment Strategy Guy was pointing out that Hulu was being driven--such as it is–by acquired content, to an even greater degree than its competitors. If indeed there was such a core audience for THE BEAR wouldn’t the need to build upon the so-so number of 47 episodes produced to date be some sort of driver for Hulu to perhaps shoulder some of the burden that FX alone could no longer justify? Are they that hell-bent on defaulting to older content to prop them up? Do they want to be the MyNetwork TV–or even Tubi–of streaming platforms?

Maybe Landgraf’s colleagues were reading the report that Luminate dropped for free yesterday that referenced the cyclical nature of retro revivals that reported that ol’ ESG may have overlooked that Hulu was anything but an outlier when it comes to such overreliance on catalogue content. In which case, what a shame that Landgraf seems to have matured into the sort of obfuscation that he once derided his streaming competitors for fostering in the case of even addressing THE BEAR at all. Their loyal fans–and for that matter his network’s core–deserve better.

So be prepared to say ta-ta to THE BEAR. But hey, if Luminate is indeed onto something, maybe it’s time you–and the Disney media properties– discovered–or rediscovered– DAMAGES? There is a long hot summer ahead.

Until next time…

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