The TV interregnum

This is not a passive-aggressive establishment

Note: In general, this is a spoiler-friendly space, but since season 4 of The Bear has been out for less than a week, I’ve tried to discuss it in more general terms.

I begin this newsletter a couple of days before the new seasons of Squid Game and The Bear drop, and I genuinely don’t know how much I will have watched by Sunday, my self-appointed deadline. And rather than deprive you all of the joy of my hot takes, I thought I’d take a look at some other upcoming shows that I may talk about here. Unless the reviews are absolutely dire, in which case I’ll simply pretend this never happened.

  • Smoke, season 1 (possibly a limited series), beginning Friday 27 June, but I’ll probably get to it later — this is ostensibly a crime drama (no, I know) about a cop teaming up with an arson specialist, but the reviews are promising some sort of twist. But you all know by now that I’m a basic bitch. They had me at “arson”.

  • Foundation, season 3, from 11 July — I would never go so far as to call this a perfect series, but I really enjoyed the first two seasons and I’m always here for Lee Pace being unhinged.

  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3, from 17 July — this is actually my second least favourite of the streaming era Star Treks, but I’ll be discussing it weekly on my podcast, and it may sneak in here as well. Preview: my co-host has already seen the season premiere, and reports that it meets but does not exceed our expectations. And our expectations were really low.
    (Further update: we just received screeners, which actually increases the odds I’ll be talking about SNW at least a little bit here — screeners mean we watch and discuss episodes out of sync with fandom, which means I find new things to say after they drop for everyone else.)

  • Chief of War, limited series (?), from 1 August — historical drama about the colonisation of Hawai’i, from the perspective of the Hawai’ans.

  • Alien: Earth, season 1, from 12 August — I love the Alien movies, and I’m not completely convinced they’ll work in a series format, but I’m also very eager to explore the world in more depth. And I really like showrunner Noah Hawley’s work on Fargo. The trailer assaulted my unsuspecting ears with a broad Australian accent, so we’ll have at least one Not Very Stealthy Australian of the Week coming up.

  • The Morning Show, season 4, from 17 September — The Morning Show is a terrible series which thinks it’s a prestige drama, and the result has a compelling trainwreck quality. Season 3 saw Jennifer Aniston’s character having an affair with a guy best described as Sexy Jeff Bezos, played by Jon Hamm, while Reese Witherspoon and Juliana Margulies filmed intimate scenes in separate sessions with their eyelines not quite matching up. Yes, just like Margulies and Archie Panjabi in The Good Wife — suffice to say she’s not coming back for season 4. I cannot wait for this year’s shenanigans.

  • Slow Horses, season … 5? from 24 September. Cannot wait to be reunited with my failspies.

  • The Diplomat, season 3, sometime in late 2025 — I need my chaos Americans. I need them. Season 2 ended with Hal accidentally causing the President of the United States to have a fatal heart attack, and I’ve been desperate to see what comes next.

  • Stranger Things, season the last one, 26 November and then another episode drop on 25 December, followed by a third drop on 31 December — this won’t be good, but I’m committed, and optimistic for some fresh remixes of ‘80s classics.

As it turns out, I wound up holding the newsletter back for a day so I could finish The Bear. So here we go!

The Bear, season 4

Unlike a lot of people, I did not actively dislike season 3, but I ended the season thinking it was a mistake to spend ten whole episodes on montages and self-sabotage. I could sense that it was setting everything up for season 4, but while I appreciate the trust it showed in the audience, I wasn’t sure my time would be rewarded.

But season 4 pays off. The first few episodes feel like The Bear at its best again, returning to the combination of professional competence and personal dysfunction which made seasons 1 and 2 effective. Carmy has achieved some small measure of self-awareness — just enough to let him step back and let his crew do their jobs.

Okay, he hasn’t achieved that much self-awareness, yet…

Overall, I feel like season 4 does not meet the heights of season 1 and 2, but it also asks: does it need to? Is it not enough to make a good television series? Is it necessary to create profound tension and stress in the viewer?

Which is not to say season 4 is a chill cruise. If season 3 was full of montages, season 4 is dense with dialogue. A lot of difficult and necessary conversations take place, culminating in the final episode, which is just three people talking to each other and trying to explain themselves. Trying to apologise.

The Bear S4 is definitely validating my feeling that for the last three seasons it's become more and more a self-flatteringly agonized show about being a show runner--a genius beset by people who want something from him, his brilliance and his faults tragically entangled, so good but so flawed, etc.

Mark Harris (@markharris.bsky.social)2025-06-28T16:36:19.029Z

With respect to Mr Harris, I strongly disagree with this reductive hot take. It is the exact opposite of season 4’s message, which is that Carmy needs to get out of the way and let all his collaborators excel without him. (It also requires you to pretend that Ayo Edebiri is not the co-protagonist and a strong presence in the writers room.)

Season 4 is about learning to step back, to accept imperfection, to take accountability for your failings and try to forgive others for theirs, to live with grief and find the joy in small things, like a perfect dessert or a hair-braiding appointment that turns into a bonding session with your tweenage cousin. It ties into the subplot about Ebraheim trying to build the sandwich side of the business, which raises the possibility of expansion: sometimes, in order to grow, you have to release control.

With season 3 behind us, my biggest beef, no pun intended, with The Bear is the same as in seasons 1 and 2 — dropping a whole season at once is an act of total self-sabotage worthy almost of Carmy himself. This is a series which cries out for a weekly release, and I’m genuinely shocked that Hulu/Disney isn’t going down that path now they’ve built momentum and reputation.

I’m super susceptible to suggestion, and more than anything The Bear makes me wish I could simply pop over to Chicago, get myself an Italian beef sandwich and listen to some cool music while the L rumbles overhead. Shout out to Tuckers Sandwiches, doing the closest impression of an Italian beef you can get in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, but it’s not the same. (So far from being the same that, since the last time I went there, they’ve swapped the beef for lamb. I mean, that sounds delicious, I will absolutely eat it, but come on, guys, it’s The Bear season.)

Murderbot, season 1, episode 8

Okay, now we’re cooking. The series is back to nicely balancing the external plot with the interior character stuff. GrayCris is in play, complete with a human representative whose evil is signalled by the fact that they have a facial scar. (eyeroll)

There is nothing remotely subtle about the mirroring of Murderbot and Gurathin, which makes it extremely funny that neither are aware of how similar they are. I do not enjoy Gurathin’s infatuation with Mensah, but I also feel like, well, who can blame him? I too love and adore Dr Mensah and would die for her.

I also do not enjoy the whole Ratthi/Pin-Lee/Arada triangle. This is partially my beef about the changes to Pin-Lee’s personality, but also … I just don’t know these characters well enough to care about their drama, and I think that, at eight episodes in, I am ready to say I do not care for TV!Ratthi either. I cheered when Mensah called him out for treating Murderbot as his pet, and I’m ready for more of that energy.

It’s quite ironic that, for all my deep reservations about the casting of Murderbot itself, I think the biggest problem in the series is the writing of the human characters. I’ve seen people suggest that they’re meant to be annoying because Murderbot finds them so, but I … do not want to spend half an hour a week with people who irritate me and make me uncomfortable? And I think that’s a reasonable position. With the exception of Mensah and Gurathin, the PresAux team are either two-dimensional, irritating or both, and I’m disappointed.

Poker Face, season 2, episode 10

I could have gone a lot longer without learning that drinking human breast milk is a real thing in the bodybuilding/fitness is all about the gains community. Like, a whole lifetime. But since I know, now you have to know.

This week, as she settles into her new life as a city dweller, Charlie makes a friend (Alex, a nice lady who never lies) and joins a gym. Briefly. Unfortunately the owner murders Jason Ritter (my beloved), who was about to blow the lid off his “selling stolen human breast milk” side hustle. Charlie is adamant that she’s not going to get involved in another murder, on account of all the near death experiences she’s had, but then she goes to confront Brick alone. Girl, you have a friend now. You don’t have to live like this.

Also, this is why we don’t do gyms. (This week I decided to begin my fitness journey by doing a 30-second plank every day, as my core strength is non-existent. So far I have managed a 15-second plank. It’s a step, right?)

We’re back to a point with Poker Face where a good episode no longer feels NEW and EXCITING. It’s a welcome return to consistency ahead of the finale, which I assume will involve Charlie learning that her good buddy Good Buddy (so far just voice cameos from Steve Buscemi) is not on the up and up.

And now I have a fun question for you all…

Are The Bear and Poker Face the same show?

Okay, obviously they are very different. The Bear is self-serious to the point of being pretentious; Poker Face is quirky to the point of being … okay, pretentious.

But the recurring theme of Poker Face in its second season and The Bear from the beginning is community. Carmy wants to create a space where people feel safe and welcome. Richie has a series of pre-service mantras about how diners at the Bear belong. Meanwhile, Charlie laments that the end of the gym means “another community broken”.

Very early in the pandemic, in the first days of Melbourne’s first lockdown, I went to get a takeaway coffee, but my card didn’t work. The lady behind me in the queue jumped forward and paid for it, saying, “We need to be kind to each other now.” In some ways, these very different shows are striving to capture that mood, to create fictional communities at a time when the real world feels fractured and very dangerous.

Coming up next week: Squid Game, which is presumably not going to be about finding and building communities. Season 3 is only six eps long, so hopefully I’ll be back to my Sunday release schedule … and looking for something else to watch.