FX confirms "The Bear" is coming back for a fifth season

Why might we have envisioned the fifth season as the last? A couple reasons, one related to "The Bear" itself and the other a larger cultural circumstance. While FX bigwig John Landgraf touted the fourth season's "incredibly high viewership," "The Bear" has fallen from the zeitgeist. It has already been heading in the wrong direction in terms of the Emmys, critical assessments of the third and fourth seasons were lower than the first couple of seasons. This is not atypical, to be fair. Landgraf, the man who popularized the phrase "peak TV," knows as well as anybody how many shows are jockeying for attention. It's hard to stay at the center of the conversation year in and year out, especially if your quality dips at all or your storytelling stalls in the slightest.

As such, we could have imagined "The Bear" crew saying, "Alright, let's do one more season, let's really get some narrative heft behind it, and let's go out on a high note."

In terms of larger entertainment forces at work, the success of "The Bear" has bred soaring careers for the show's stars. Jeremy Allen White is a household name who stars in the upcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic . Ayo Edebiri has become famous enough to host "Saturday Night Live" and has two movies coming out in 2025. Oh, and Eban Moss-Bachrach is The Thing in " Fantastic Four: The First Steps."

So yeah, the cast of "The Bear" is busy and heading toward the whole movie star thing. "The Bear" birthed their success, but also now complicates scheduling out a movie career, or other television projects. Are they really going to want to do not just a fifth, but a sixth (or seventh) season? 

While we do know a fifth season of "The Bear" is coming, we still could see it turning out to be, with intent, the last season of the show before they shutter the whole thing.

(h/t Variety)