The Bear is officially coming back to Hulu this summer — but is this the show’s final season?
FX confirmed on Tuesday, May 13, that season 4 will premiere on June 25 at 8 p.m. ET. All episodes will drop at once but no word on whether the fourth season is the show’s final after speculation.
The Bear has released a new season every year since it premiered in 2022. The series explores the food industry through the lens of a talented chef named Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), who returned to Chicago shortly after his older brother Mikey’s (Jon Bernthal) death to take over their family sandwich shop, The Beef. After closing the local spot, Carmy and the employees reinvented the restaurant into The Bear, which has found success and failure.
Before season 3 even aired, reports surfaced about FX filming seasons 3 and 4 at the same time due to the busy schedules of cast members such as White, 34, Ayo Edebiri and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
Moss-Bachrach, 48, who plays Richie, hinted that the news was true one month later when he discussed how the cast filmed an extended amount of episodes.
“When we went in to start season 3, we weren’t going in to make season 3 and 4,” he recalled during a July 2024 episode of the “Talk Easy With Sam Fragoso” podcast. “But it swelled and our episodes got quite big — over an hour.”
The extra footage allowed for the cast to start season 4 production immediately, with Moss-Bachrach adding, “Some of these episodes we’re splitting [and we] are not making it into two seasons and now we are going to be making 15 or 16 episodes instead of 10. But we’re gonna do it all at the same time.”
However, filming out of order wasn’t always easy for the cast.
“I would come in at the beginning of the day and shoot a scene from late in season 4 and then shoot a scene from early season 4 and then shoot a scene late in season 3,” Moss-Bachrach explained. “Jeremy, Ayo and I are in a constant state of rereading through the seasons and trying to remember where your person is at.”
He concluded: “We shot about 18 episodes, but everything shifts. In the past, what was one episode on the page has been split into two. I just lose myself in the messiness and chaos of it. I like getting taken by a wave that’s bigger than you thought it was, [getting] tumbled around and spit out the other end.”
While fans wait for news on whether The Bear will wrap up after season 4, the chairman of FX Content and FX Productions John Landgraf previously called it “accurate” when Deadline asked him in September 2024 if he still didn’t know whether there would be more seasons of the hit Hulu series.
The Bear returns on Wednesday, June 25, with all 10 episodes and past seasons are currently streaming on Hulu.
