Hold Up, Is The Bear Season 4 Going To Premiere This Year?
It's time for seconds already!
After treating fans to a spicy entrée in Season 3, it sounds like The Bear is bringing out a second course much sooner than expected. In the past, the culinary drama has had a pretty consistent release schedule in which new seasons would drop almost exactly a year apart. But the wait for Season 4 will probably be a whole lot shorter. That’s because it was already largely filmed before Season 3 even aired, one star recently confirmed.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays the Taylor Swift-loving server Richie, confirmed that although it wasn’t the initial plan to film Seasons 3 and 4 back to back, that’s what ended up happening in early 2024.
“When we went in to start Season 3, we weren’t going in to make Season 3 and 4,” Moss-Bachrach said on the July 7 episode of the Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso podcast. “But it swelled and our episodes got quite big — over an hour.”
The actor said they filmed so much content, it became a necessity to work on two seasons at once. “Some of these episodes were 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,” he said. “But we’re gonna do it all at the same time.”
He explained how working a whole two-season arc for his character in such a short time became confusing. “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,” he recalled. “Jeremy [Allen White], Ayo [Edebiri], and I are in a constant state of rereading through the seasons and trying to remember where your person is at.”
Deadline first reported that Seasons 3 and 4 were being filmed back to back when FX renewed the series for Season 4 in March. Filming for both seasons began in late February and wrapped in May, just a month before Season 3 aired.
In another interview, Moss-Bachrach estimated that they shot about 18 episodes in that time, which would mean the cast and crew just have two more episodes to shoot for a 10-episodes fourth season. “We shot about 18 episodes, but everything shifts. In the past, what was one episode on the page has been split into two,” he told Mr. Porter‘s The Journal on July 8.
Because it sounds like the bulk of Season 4 has already been filmed, it stands to reason fans could expect it to air much sooner than previous seasons, possibly even before the end of 2024.
