Bill Hader’s intense, deserves far better than to play second banana to Succession it is a stomach-turning series is an extraordinary achievement.
The best series on television has ended. Since 2018 it has towered above its rivals, thanks to its highwire ability to mix incredible comedy with the sort of intense drama that leaves anxious for days. And now it’s over. Four seasons and done. Succession? What? No. I’m talking about Barry.
Barry has been a story about the stories Barry wants to tell himself, about himself. Never mind that he’s a contract killer whose body count has only ballooned over four seasons — Barry’s always clung to the delusion that one more “starting … now” might reframe him as a savior, as a protector, as a good guy whose bloody past has been wiped clean. It’s why he’s spent the season stewing over Cousineau (Henry Winkler) telling his story, why he gives his son an ultra-sanitized account of his time in Afghanistan, why he was so drawn to Hollywood in the first place. What better place for a man trying to rewrite his entire life than an industry built around selling lovely little fictions?
Barry has ended  with  the expression  “wow”, an episode of television that pulled off the remarkable job of creating a definitive ending and leaping forward a decade (for the second time in a month), while still managing to be the bitter Hollywood satire it always was. It was an extraordinary achievement, and you can’t help but feel that it deserved far more than to play second banana to Succession.
Actually , about that finale. Really, there was only one way that “wow” could have ended, and that was with Barry dead. This was a man who has committed more atrocities – both legal and moral – than almost any other character on television, and for a show as preoccupied with redemption as this, he would always have to die. Personal improvement didn’t work. Prison didn’t work. However you would choose to characterise his relationship with Sally didn’t work. In the end, there was a hint of Barry having its cake and eating it – he was about to turn himself in when he was murdered – but the ending was a just one.
The real ending happened during another 10-year flash-forward, with Barry and Sally’s now-teenage son John watching the movie made about Barry’s life. Not only did it present a false Hollywood narrative – it framed Barry as a hapless stooge, set up by criminal mastermind Gene Cousineau then buried with full honours at Arlington – but it also presented itself as the trashy, blood-soaked, gratuitously oversimplified nonsense that many people secretly wished Barry was.
Barry has  its own thing; high-minded and experimental and relentlessly singular. Succession is all about  big money and far-flung locations while, for all its ambition, Barry always felt like it was shot on the cheap. Its influences, too, were more left-field.  you csn Read any interview with Bill Hader from the last five years and you’ll be overwhelmed with references to Soderbergh and Luis Buñuel and FW Murnau and Preston Sturges. There is also the sense that Succession was taken more seriously because its episodes were an hour long, while some snobbery still exists about the merits of the half-hour dramatic form.
All that, plus this final season has arguably been Barry’s least reachable. This is partly because season three ended on the satisfying note of Barry finally being brought to justice. Hader has previously illustrated this with a story about Larry David; Hader said he was working on a fourth season of Barry, David replied that he must be crazy, because the story had so obviously already finished.
But even as the type of critically acclaimed dramedy that its characters might once have (mostly metaphorically) killed to get cast in, Barry has been more interested in puncturing those fictions than upholding them. Throughout the show’s run, we’ve watched Barry go from simply trying to outrun his past to seeking forgiveness for it — not by owning up to what he’s done but by, for instance, showering Gene with money and professional opportunities.
When you think of this last season, you’ll probably remember how restrictively dark it was. In one episode we heard the terrified gasps of a man drowning in sand. another scene we witnessed the once-seen-never-forgotten nightmare fuel of a silhouette stalking a character through their own home. Last week’s penultimate episode began with the sound of a man hyperventilating as his torturer explained that he had amputated his arms and legs. It has been richly satisfying stuff, if you had the stomach for it, but that’s a big if. Goodbye Barry - the best show on televisionI’m honestly struggling to recall a season of television that has been so inescapably bleak. Comfort food this wasn’t.
We find the Barry  at the end  hasn’t gotten much better at atonement. The morning after his non-death, he decides to turn himself in for Janice’s murder. Tellingly, he wasn’t interested in doing so when Sally had urged him to do so hours earlier, informing him that Cousineau might otherwise fall for Barry’s crimes. It’s only when Barry’s backed against the wall, with Sally and John having left without a trace and Tom (Fred Melamed) pleading that only Barry can save Cousineau, that he finally relents.
But Barry snatches away his final opportunity to play the hero, having Cousineau kill him before he can confess. Going out in a blaze of Chechen gunfire or a swarm of police would have  suited the white knight Barry needs so hopelssly  to believe he is. Instead, Barry‘s moral accounting spits out an unceremonious end to fit the unworthy man he truly was. “Oh, wow,” he remarks after Cousineau’s first shot to his shoulder. He doesn’t have time to add anything else before Cousineau’s second and final shot to the head.
At the end, Sally and John are captured by Barry’s associate-turned-enemy NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) while trying to reunite with Barry in LA. A standoff between Hank and Fuches leads to Hank’s death, after which Fuches returns Sally and John to Barry, unharmed, before slinking off into the night. Barry then arrives at the home of his acting teacher, Mr. Cousineau (Henry Winkler), who, due to a misinterpretation of the evidence surrounding his late girlfriend Janice’s death, has recently been charged with her murder. For a moment, the show’s central animating tension is laid bare: As Barry resolves to turn himself in for killing Janice in order to clear Mr. Cousineau, we’re left to wonder whether he will snap back into the depths of delusion, or if the purgatorial cycle has finally been broken. The question ultimately remains unanswered, as this moment of seemingly pivotal change is Barry’s last: Mr. Cousineau stumbles into the room, takes one look at Barry, and shoots him in the head.
Goodbye Barry - the best show on television
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