Barry (2018-2023) series review

In the wake of Warner Bros and subsequently HBO/HBO Max/MAX being under disastrous new management, it seems that Bill Hader may have seen the writing on the wall early on and crammed 2 seasons worth of story into the final season of Barry, the first half in prison and the second half the time jump, but it’s a testament to how strong of a vision he and Alec Berg have for Barry that the final season is still absolutely fantastic. The crunch in time has trimmed every last bit of fat from the season.

If you haven’t seen Barry yet, you should. I don’t know why you’d read this if you haven’t. Stop reading now because I’m going to spoil it.

Something that Berg, Hader and the rest of the creative team behind Barry has excelled at all throughout the series is making the show feel very grounded and real. The way it’s shot feels very naturalistic, which has always been the case but in season 4 it has really come to a head. A great example of this is the way that the show portrayed violence, shown from a very objective point of view that makes it feel scary and blunt, feeling like security camera footage of a violent crime in comparison to the movie within the show “The Mask Collector” that depicts the events of the show in a very cynical, traditionally Hollywood way. The same can be said about non-action scenes as well. The way they are shot, edited and paced out immerses you into the moment, each second of every scene feeling deliberate but never feeling calculated or inhuman.

But the thing that really makes Barry feel *real* and poignant is the way it handles its characters and its drama. It’s a very tense and fast paced show, but it avoids melodrama at all costs, emphasizing a resistance to change, not only in its evil characters, but in the ones that are just regular civilians. It’s pretty fresh in my head and I’ve only had a week to digest the finale, but I think that the core takeaway from Barry is how difficult it is to change even if you really try.

None of the core characters; Barry, Fuches, Sally, Gene, or Noho Hank, have grandiose journeys of self discovery or change as people, but remain stuck in their habits and mindsets in a way that people in the real word often do. Real change takes years and years of effort, like Sally’s “arc” from season 1 all the way up to the very final episode that she begins to *consider* changing. Before his death, the last thing that Barry considers is "hey, maybe I should have listened to people and taken accountability for my actions instead of continuing to let people get hurt for my own wellbeing... huh," then immediately is shot and killed by Gene. Perfect.

Barry Berkman is a unique take on the TV anti-hero archetype because at the beginning of season 1, he is already at a place where a lot of TV anti-heroes are at the ending of the show. He’s a very experienced and procedural hit man, and he’s so used to it that he treats it like any other boring day job. When he begins acting, it fills that void as an emotional outlet that used to be relieved by killing: both acting and killing people in war and for hire got him positive affirmation from a father figure in Gene Cousineau and Fuches, as well as an emotional outlet for feelings that he didn’t know how to process. The acting class wasn’t a cure for him, it was merely a distraction. When the class gets shut down in season 3, that quick fix for him is gone, and he is left at a worse place than he was at the beginning of the series, leading him to become sloppier and sloppier with his assassinations until he eventually gets arrested.

His arc in season 1 is where he tries to get to the point “starting now,” he will no longer kill people and solely focus on acting. But he fails, because self preservation is more important to him than actually changing, so he kills Janice Moss to cover his tracks. In season 2, Barry is committed to his new “no killing” rule. He refuses to kill people for Noho Hank, instead opting to train his men instead of assassinate people directly, even when blackmailed to kill, he doesn’t do it, opting to tru to reason with Ronny and Lily instead of just shoot them. However, since the foundation of his no “killing rule” was built on unstable ground due to it being maintained by the murder of Janice Moss, it is able to eventually crumble when Fuches threatens the security of Barry’s acting class, resulting in Barry snapping and killing a bazillion of Noho Hank and Cristobal’s men, sending Barry on a spiral in season 3. He is willing to stop killing, but he is unable to fix the issues inside of him that result in violent outbursts. Try as Barry might to change, his attempts in seasons 1 and 2 are like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole.

The affects of Barry Berkman’s actions never go away, which is an attribute that I never noticed in some of my other favorite shows but now that I’ve noticed it in Barry, I kind of wish some other shows had taken this approach. For example, in Breaking Bad, Walt kills Emilio and Crazy-8 in season 1, and he causes a fucking plane crash in season 2 that kills hundreds of people, but eventually those events and other moments like that kinda fade away and are never important again. I love Breaking Bad, it’s probably my favorite show ever, but after Barry, many of Walt’s victims being waved to the side feels like a blind spot for the show.

In Barry, all of Barry’s victims matter, and the pain and hurt that he caused to innocent people never goes away. The victims in season one: the guy in the hotel in the very first shot of the show, Ryan Madison, and Janice Moss are all crucial elements in the final seasons. even the victims who at first seemed like random NPCs to be used as unimportant plot devices. Barry doesn’t forget that the innocent people matter. We see the suffering that he causes first hand, which is part of why I think I prefer seasons 3 and 4 to the first two seasons. The first two seasons are much funnier, no question there, but the second two gives me more to think about. In season 3, his actions crush him internally, but also externally as the families of his victims individually deal with the grief he has caused. Hader and Berg take it a step further, with some attempting to get back at him in the same way that he hurt them, which only leads to more suffering and pain. Each attempt on Barry’s life gets killed in process, arrested, or in a worse place than they started. The one to succeed in taking down Barry is Jim Moss, the only victim who doesn’t try to take out violent revenge on Barry.

Another contrast with Breaking Bad is that unlike Vince Gilligan, who despite how unredeemable his characters are still seems to have some level of affection for them, Hader seems to hate the character he created to a point where his main goal with Barry’s final season is destroying any possible inkling that the viewer might have that any of his characters, Barry Berkman in particular, could be redeemed. There’s a great moment in the first episode of the season where Barry is in prison and a guard comes up to him and tells him that he must not be such a bad guy because he was a veteran, and Barry goes on a maniacal rant about how he would kill the guard and his entire family in a heartbeat if he had the opportunity, pairing nicely with the final moments of the finale, putting a wonderful cap on the entire show.

Over the course of the show, the facade of a dark comedy show about hitman taking acting lessons crumbled away and turned into a surreal psychological darkly comedic tragedy. Season 4 has some genuinely disturbing and haunting moments; Barry being beaten by the prison guard, the quicksand scene, Sally’s nightmare about the man she killed in season 3. Bill Hader directed every episode this season, and fuck me, the horrible, nasty disgusting things I’d do for a Bill Hader directed horror movie. Even the funniest moments in the season come with a dose of surrealism, the funniest being Fred Armisen’s cameo as an assassin trying to kill Barry in prison and accidentally gets his hand blown to pieces, a scene that was shot and edited so strangely it felt like jump scare.

Every character gets a fitting conclusion: Gene and Jim Moss’s vendetta only serves to ruin lives around them and give Barry more power than he otherwise could ever dream of. Hank’s cowardice results in the love of his life dying spending the rest of his life in denial about it. Gene’s narcissism gets him pinned for all of Barry’s crimes and he spends the rest of his life in prison. Fuches goes on a journey of self reflection in prison that leads him to believe he is completely heartless. Sally spends the rest of her life raising a son that she can barely even say that she loves, still dreaming of being a famous actress. The happiest ending, ironically, goes to Barry, who gets shot in the face by Gene and inadvertently turns him into an American Sniper-style martyr to be idolized instead of a monster to be feared. I am yet to rewatch the show from the beginning, but ending with John watching “The Mask Collector” and reading the ending title card about Barry being laid to rest in a memorial cemetery with a smile on his face was an incredibly bleak but hilarious way to end the show.

I’m really sad to see this show go. I hate adding the word “prestige” to things to make me look smarter for watching a fucking tv show, but I feel like the this is the end of the era of really great prestige TV. Better Call Saul ended last year, I don’t really care much for Succession but that’s one that connects with a lot of people and that just ended the same night Barry did. All we got left are shitty Sam Levinson shows and 8 hour episodes of Stranger Things. “Oh wow.”