The third season of restaurant drama The Bear has left some critics cold – what ingredients can it beef up, tone down or discard in the next?

Major spoilers ahead

The third season of the Bear concludes on somewhat of a cliffhanger, albeit an underwhelming one: Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), fresh off a funeral dinner for his mentor’s restaurant, gets a Google alert for the Chicago Tribune restaurant review that will make or break The Bear. (If only critics had that power!) We still don’t know whether Syd (Ayo Edebiri) will jump ship for a different, less emotionally intensive job, whether Carmy will ever make amends with Claire (Molly Gordon) or Cousin Richie (Eben Moss-Bachrach) after season two’s freezer meltdown, whether the Bear will crawl out of its debt. What we do know, through Carmy’s anxiety-spiral, fragmented intake, is that the Tribune critic uses such words as confusing, excellent, innovative, sloppy, delicious, inconsistent – in short, a seemingly mixed review. And ironically, a decent-enough take on the season itself, which went down lukewarm with most TV critics.

I’ve been a fan of The Bear, created and largely written and directed by Christopher Storer, since it premiered in summer 2022. The first season was a tour de force out of the gate – confident, frenetic, immediately lived-in, the rare show to capture both the soul and addictive, cortisol-laced chaos of a kitchen. The 10-episode follow-up, released last summer, offered a delicious, if sometimes too indulgent, second helping of character development, cacophony and growth, as The Beef morphed from local Chicago sandwich joint into fine dining upstart The Bear. This season is its third in as many summers – an impressive pace for television, though as my colleague Stuart Heritage has noted, the haste shows. I won’t go as far to say that The Bear is now a bad show, as Slate has argued. But its third outing definitely feels deflated from its previous highs – unfocused, self-indulgent, hollow, admirably ambitious yet frustratingly aimless.

Anne Hathaway and Nicole Kidman are romancing younger stars in glossy new romcoms, adding texture to the dreaded cliche of the ‘cougar’

A Family Affair, a new romcom from Netflix, knows the precisely calibrated fantasy it’s offering: a romance between a celebrity and a normal person, a titillating but not scandalous age gap, some movie-star chemistry threatened by a mild and ultimately surmountable amount of disapproval. The twist? The woman in this pairing, a 50-year-old writer played by 57-year-old Nicole Kidman, is the elder of the pair. A widow with a few books under her belt and an enviable closet of cast-off designer gowns, Brooke summarily charms (and mounts) actor Chris (34-year-old Zac Efron), who in the film is 16 years her junior – and also her 24-year-old daughter Zara’s (Joey King) exacting, aloof boss.

The film, written by Carrie Solomon and directed by Richard LaGravenese, shares with its Netflix romcom brethren a certain aesthetic, for better and often for worse: the made-for-streaming sheen, just-past-current needle drops, cavernous yet lifeless showroom mansions. Unusually for many a romcom these days, it does contain an actual sex scene, albeit one without nudity. But the hijinks-filled romance between two consenting adults is more interesting than it otherwise would be for depicting a notably older woman in a functional pairing, or even still just showing a woman over 40 with any sexual desire at all.