The Bear Season 5 Review: A Decent, Overly Tidy Finale to a Well-Loved Series

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The Bear wrapped its story with a final season that’s decent, but suffers from having no story left to tell, or at least from forcing one to a close.

The Bear closed out this year as one of the more well-loved series of the last few years. The first episode starts slow, especially if you’ve forgotten how last season ended, but once the premise settles, the action slowly picks up and you get hooked again. The pace keeps increasing episode to episode. It’s pretty smart that the season revolves around solving the same problem the last one ended on: season 4 builds around one big problem, and the whole of season 5 solves that one last problem.

As is standard for final episodes, the last one dragged and was full of exposition. A bit unnecessary. They just tied up all the loose ends, and it could have ended with the penultimate episode instead. To be honest, I walked out on the last two minutes. It was pretty pointless by then.

It was a pretty good series, with a lot of breakout stars, but the final season was just okay.

I was actually surprised at how little buzz there was around this last season. It was just available, and we didn’t even notice until two months later. Nothing on social media, none of our usual sources or reviewers. Watching it now, it was just pleasant, so yes, it suffers from that “tying everything up with a pretty little bow” problem. It’s decent, but it’s not great.

While watching this final season, I kept pointing out to my wife how far all the actors have moved on from the show. Most notable is Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who’s now in the MCU. And while we’re at it, let’s do the MCU connections: Jon Bernthal was already The Punisher before this started. Will Poulter was in Guardians of the Galaxy. Most recently, Liza Colón-Zayas played the police officer friend of Peter Parker in the latest Spider-Man movie. Jeremy Allen White was in Springsteen and The Iron Claw, and he’s in Mandalorian and Grogu now too, which we haven’t seen yet, so that’s bad news for him. But we’re definitely going to watch The Social Reckoning.

I’m most worried about Ayo Edebiri. She won an Emmy, which is good and well-deserved, but her character this season was a bit flat, and I honestly don’t know what she’s doing next. I don’t want her to lose her momentum.

For me, the most successful at riding that momentum is Molly Gordon. She wasn’t even in this last season, oddly, but she’s moved on so well. She wrote and produced Oh, Hi (2025), and was great in The Sheep Detectives (2026). She also wrote and directed Theater Camp (2023), though that one was only in the zeitgeist for a bit. Looking forward to what she does next.

3 out of 5 stars, for both of us.

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