The Bear Season 2: Release date, trailer, cast, plot & more

With the premiere of The Bear Season 2 on the horizon, here’s everything you need to know including its release date, trailer, cast, plot, and more.

The Bear dropped out of nowhere last year and immediately became one of the best TV shows of 2022.

The series, created by Christopher Storer, follows a young chef who inherits a Chicago sandwich shop from his late brother and has to contend with its stuck-in-their-ways staff. Naturally, tensions reach boiling point on more than one occasion.

News of its renewal was met with relief and excitement by fans, so here’s what we know about The Bear Season 2.

The Bear Season 2 release date

The Bear Season 2 will premiere on June 22, 2023.

All episodes will be available to stream on Hulu and Disney+ on the date of release.

Announcing the show’s return, FX Entertainment president Eric Schrier said (as per Variety): “The Bear has exceeded our wildest creative, critical, and commercial expectations. We can’t wait to get to work on Season 2.”

Christopher Storer and executive producer Joanna Calo also said: “We are so grateful to FX, our insanely talented cast, our crew who worked hard, fast, and in the dead of winter, not to mention everyone who watched. And we can’t wait to bring you all back to The Bear in 2023.”

The Bear Season 2 trailer

The first full trailer for The Bear Season 2 was released on May 16, 2023 – check it out below:

The trailer doesn’t feature any footage from the upcoming season, instead acting as a reintroduction to the show’s cast and teasing what to expect. “It’s not a reopening, it’s a rebirth,” it’s captioned.

The Bear Season 2 cast: Who’s in it?

We can expect everyone in The Bear cast to return for Season 2, including:

• Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto
• Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Richard “Richie” Jerimovich
• Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu
• Lionel Boyce as Marcus
• Liza Colón-Zayas as Tina
• Abby Elliott as Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto
• Edwin Lee Gibson as Ebraheim
• Neil Fak as Matty Matheson
• Oliver Platt as Jimmy Cicer

It’s unclear whether we’ll see any more flashbacks of Jon Bernthal as Carmy’s brother Michael. When he first took over The Original Beef, he believed it to be a final “f*ck you” from Michael, but the discovery of the money and that last look in the finale saw him reconcile his grief, love, and gratitude.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, White admitted feeling a bit anxious about the next season. “This is all really exciting, but I am a little bit nervous about going back to shoot the second season because so many understandings of this work we did are now being pushed on us,” he said.

“If you read too many reviews, this thing that was once ours has had so many ideas put on it. I’m hopeful we can shut the world out a little bit.”

Bob Odenkirk, of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Nobody fame, has also joined the second season in an undisclosed guest role. And Will Poulter, still flying high off his stellar performance in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, joined the sophomore cast an artistic Dutch pastry chef, per The Daily Beast.

The Bear Season 2 plot: What’s it about?

While no official plot details have been revealed, The Bear Season 2 will be about “the opportunity to start fresh and what that means.”

“What does Carmen and Sydney’s dream restaurant look like? But also at the same time, what is a dream restaurant in 2023 look like? I think that’s the thing they’re sort of battling with,” Storer told Variety.

Season 1 ended with Carmy closing The Beef and taking his first steps to launch The Bear, a new restaurant he’ll run with Sydney by his side – but don’t expect him to be a mentor.

“I hope that’s something that’s explored a little bit in the second season – if he can kind of get out of his own way a little bit, how can he help everybody else in the kitchen and also how can they help him?” he said.

“I think, in this first season, he had a lot of selfish thinking going on. I think he wanted to be there for Sydney, but I don’t think he was capable.”

That said, there are questions needing answered: how will Uncle Jimmy feel about a new restaurant when there’s still a debt to be paid; will Carmy and Sydney move past the events of the first season; and what about the IRS sniffing around?

Storer told IndieWire: “This is the question we wanted to end with and hopefully get to explore in a second season. Carmy gets some closure with his brother, but then how does he handle this going forward? How can he build something new and start from a more positive place?

“There’s something beautiful in the idea that Carmy could have found this right off the bat if he would have made the spaghetti in the pilot, but then maybe he would have burnt out similarly to the way Michael did.

“I think by not discovering this immediately, he really learned the difficult lesson that not only was he sort of trying to ‘fix’ this restaurant for all the wrong reasons, but that he also couldn’t do it himself.”

In a recent Actors on Actors Variety interview with Jennifer Coolidge, White was asked why Carmy didn’t have a love interest in Season 1 and if that’ll change in the next chapter. “When we made the first season, we didn’t want any of the characters to have attachment to anything outside of the kitchen,” he said.

“Carmen is such a poor communicator and socially inept in so many ways… in the second season, Carmen tries to pursue some joy outside of work, and it doesn’t work out that great. But he tries to find some happiness outside of being successful at his skill.”

And it seems like taking a deeper look into The Bear’s cast of characters really paid off as Season 2 currently has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Bear Season 2 is now streaming on Hulu. You can check out our other movie and TV hubs below:

Physical 100 Season 2 | Invincible Season 2 | The Boys Season 4 | Stranger Things Season 5 | Severance Season 2 | The Witcher Season 3 | Harry Potter TV show | House of the Dragon Season 2 | Fast X | Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse | The Flash | Indiana Jones 5 | Oppenheimer | Barbie | Blue Beetle | Extraction 2 | The Night Agent Season 2