“When June rolls: ding! Yes, chef! The Bear is once again ready to dish up a sizzling slice of drama TV and so it is with a bit of sadness that this time around marks the last,” writes streaming columnist NICK OVERALL. 

For a show of such quality, it is remarkable how quickly The Bear has consistently served up its episodes.

Since 2022 this hit culinary drama series has released five seasons on Disney Plus.

To put that in perspective, almost 50 episodes were written, shot and produced in the same time frame between just season four and five of Netflix’s Stranger Things.

When June rolls around each year: ding! Yes, chef! The Bear is once again ready to dish up a sizzling slice of drama TV and so it is with a bit of sadness that this time around marks the last. All eight episodes of the final season are now streaming.

It’s a TV show that on paper seems like it wouldn’t work.

Set inside a small Chicago sandwich shop, the story follows an exhausted but extremely talented young chef named Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) who is forced to take over the business after his brother tragically takes his own life.

Drowning not just in grief but in mounting bills, Carmy has only one option: cook his way out of this mess by turning the struggling shop into a first-class dining experience. 

What follows is quite literally blood, sweat, tears as he pulls together a team to put the restaurant on the culinary map. 

Despite the setup sounding rather dark, it’s actually recognised more as a comedy and under that classification has won a remarkable 21 Emmy awards throughout its run.

There are laughs here amongst the heavy drama, which keeps the show buoyant but it shines most when putting the real-life chaos of a high-stakes kitchen to screen.

Steam fogs up the camera as these cooks rush between a ludicrous amount of pots and pans. A kaleidoscope of every obscure ingredient is thrown across the screen. A dizzying amount of cuts and close ups mix together, capturing each bead of sweat as the sound of an endless stream of receipts demanding orders inundates the kitchen, spooling across the floor. 

It all comes together in an overwhelming but entertaining dance that many chefs have remarked is so realistic, it can be hard to watch after they come home from their own job. 

The Bear has stayed fresh by turning up this heat each season as Carmy’s culinary dreams get bigger and bolder.

Let’s hope that with its final season, The Bear can put the cherry on top. 

THERE’s an intriguing addition to HBO Max this month, with the entire set of hit series Mad Men now available to stream.

I say intriguing because this prestige drama series originally aired in 2007 as an attempt to directly compete with HBO.

Back then shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and The Wire had already cemented HBO as the king of traditional network television.

Back then Mad Men, a drama series about New York’s cutthroat world of advertising in the 1960s, was actually pitched to the network but rejected. 

Instead it was AMC, a rival American channel, that picked up the show and cast a little known actor named Jon Hamm to play the mysterious, but charismatic main character Don Draper. 

Over the years that followed Mad Men became one of the most lauded series of the era and Draper became one of the most recognisable characters of 2000s television.

Throughout seven seasons, Man Men weaved together a fascinating roster of character arcs to form a profound look at an American Dream manufactured by marketing. An absolute ace for AMC in its battle against HBO.

But in the age of streaming, all that is different.

Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO Max, realises Mad Men is the sort of prestige television subscribers expect and has opened up its wallet to get that level of quality on to its platform.

What a turnaround: a show that was once rejected by HBO has now, almost 20 years later, been claimed to fall under its own brand.

Perhaps on this one those upstairs at HBO took a bit of iconic advice from Don Draper himself: “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”

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