"The Bear" S3: Eps. 6-10.

Apparently every second doesn't count. The second half of the season gets better, but barely, and institutional decisions remain problematic. Some failure analysis.

Of all the things to be annoyed at, both as a fan of FX’s “The Bear” and a critic trying to suss out where this series spun out, it seems very minor to be annoyed at creator Christopher Storer for using the song “Save It For Later” as a wink.

But it did annoy me. Obviously still does. Because he knew — and, of course, FX knew. They knew this S3 wasn’t really going anywhere, plot-wise. They knew they were saving it for later.

I mean, it wasn’t super hard to glean that S3 was going to be a continuous holding pattern — I predicted it. I’ll save you all the extraneous parts or my S3 preview and just lay this at your feet:

So, I go into S3 — a new season and essentially a new show, as I said above — and I hope that series creator and writer Christopher Storer has the creative vision to take life at a high-end restaurant — its stresses and victories — and can make it more dimensional than it seems on paper. Right?

If there really is a fourth season already approved then, historically, that makes this upcoming one more difficult to pull off. Why? Because it’s not the end. There’s another act. And the next act can’t be this act, so whatever happens this season must in some way be burnt to the ground or turned on its head, and that tends to create drama for drama’s sake.

It also almost guarantees the lack of a satisfactory ending to S3, no matter how it’s conceived.

To be coy with the English Beat song, “Save It For Later,” both covered and in original form, is to basically say, yeah, this story is in neutral — we’ll finish it up later. It’s like a joke that doesn’t land.

Because S3 is just one long disappointment.

The previews for S3 were part of the tell — it was all dramatic angst about the newly minted high-end Bear restaurant getting a Michelin star and how that was going to tear Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and probably everyone else apart, but the previews gave the ominous impression that’s all there was — because, indeed, that’s really all there was; there was no other content to hint the story went further.

But beyond that tell was the fact that S4 was essentially tacked on to make S3 a cliffhanger that leads to S4; and if blaming the strike seems easy (because it is), that doesn’t forgive the fact that S3 could have actually been about something, been less static, less reliant on flashback, less needful of leaning into very-late character development, feeling less painfully stretched thin.

That’s the reason to be aggrieved. It didn’t have to be this way.