The Bear is cooking up some mixed reviews this season, even within The A.V. Club. Saloni Gajjar lauded its groundbreaking episode one music choice, while Jenna Scherer wrote in her review that “the episode feels both too slow and too fast. And ultimately, it doesn’t tell us a whole lot that we didn’t already know.” Everyone still seems to think Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) are destined for romance, despite the cast’s frequent insistence to the contrary. Oh, and Claire’s still there.
But these debates seem to have only whet audiences’ appetite for the FX drama even more. According to Variety, season three has already pulled in 5.4 million viewers in its first four days of streaming. That makes The Bear the most-watched season premiere of any scripted series on Hulu (not to mention the streamer’s most successful FX premiere ever). Including unscripted series like The Kardashians, season three is now Hulu’s third biggest premiere of any kind.
Variety notes that a view is calculated by “dividing the total time a title was watched by its runtime.” Those 5.4 million accounts were combined from standard Hulu as well as the relatively newer Hulu on Disney+, which Disney said gave the season a “significant boost.” To be exact, season three brought in 24% more viewers than season two in the same amount of time. With the viral success of the show, season two also represented a massive 70% increase in viewers in the first four days over season one.
Unfortunately, this is probably bad news for anyone hoping Hulu would get it right the next time around and actually release The Bear weekly instead of dropping the entire season at once. While we’d love to savor each morsel the series gives us, the stuff-it-in-your-face model is clearly working, at least from an economic standpoint. It also seems to be the philosophy behind the show’s production: season four was filmed back-t0-back with season three, and will be coming for Emmy discourse—and probably even more records—sometime soon.