Barry's Final Act Begins.

 

 

The more I think about it perhaps the real reason I rejected Barry’s initially was because I never understood the appeal of Stefan. Bill Hader was always an interesting SNL cast member, but his trademark Weekend Update character never gelled for me. I never understood how people could love a character who spoke in such breathless tones intercut with being on the verge of dissolving into laughter.

It did not help matters the initial set-up for Barry ­– a contract killer who decides to stop his day job to take an acting class – sounded far too much like the set up of a network television series rather than anything HBO would do. Not even the presence of such towering legends as Henry Winkler and Stephen Root convinced me it would work. Then after Hader and Winkler took Emmys for Season 1, I reluctantly got on board. And have since been on the wildest ride in the history of television.

Historically I never been fond of dramedies. Much of this has been due to my experience with Showtime, which had a habit of creating series that had a brilliant set up and cast, started like gangbusters and then became so dark over their runs they forgot to be entertaining. Nurse Jackie, House of Lies, The Big C, all of them started out strong and eventually deteriorated to the point that no matter how they ended, I could barely care. I had already gone down a similar path with Veep and I think the only ones many on Netflix didn’t deteriorate was because the writers made sure to end them before they could. But Barry is the exception that proves the rule. Not because it hasn’t gotten darker with each successive season – it really has -but because the more Hader and his wonderful go further in Barry’s race towards the inevitable,  they have made the comedy less important to the series as we see just how fully damaged Barry Berkman is. This could easily have fallen apart – Barry is, in his own way, just as much a White Male Antihero as we have seen at Ozark and the Roy family – but as the series has gone on, it has become increasingly clear that Barry is so badly damaged that he doesn’t have an understanding of reality the way so many of them do. So many times we see him talk to Gene and Sally in what appear to be child-like terms as if he can’t comprehend reality the way a functioning adult does. He may speak of terms of needing a purpose or forgiveness, but he has no more comprehension of that then a five-year old does quantum physics.

Perhaps we should not be stunned that the opening of the final season, Barry uses his one phone call to reach Gene. He has just been arrested for the murder of Janice, the detective he killed to protect his identity and attempted to kill her father. One of the last scenes showed Gene there. Barry’s call to Gene is that of a child: “Mr. Cousineau, are you mad at me?” he begins in a sad, pleading voice as someone who can’t understand why the man who he tried to kill, locked in a trunk and then threatened to kill his family would be upset with him. Gene listened to him plead and then says simply: “Barry, I got you” and hangs up. You would pity Barry if you didn’t know him.

The repercussions are already being felt, most painfully when it comes to Sally. The incredible Sarah Goldberg is remarkable in the season premiere as she returns to her home town, trying to flee the murder of her abusive ex-husband that she ended up committing when he attacked her in the season finale. We meet her parents and we get a very clear picture of how Sally ended up the way she did. Her mother seems more interesting in her fast food order than her daughter’s realization she’s dating a hit man. Her father can’t seem to comprehend why his daughter’s man or what her show is like. And in a scene that would be the all-time leader in horrible family situations, her mother can’t even work up the barest minimum of sympathy or interest in her daughter and is perfectly willing to blame her for her lot in life. We totally get why she flees her home town the next day.

The thing about Sally is that in a way she has been fooling herself her whole life. During the second season of Barry, she spent much of her time working on a scene about a struggle she’d had with her husband that cause her to walk out on him. Eventually we learned it was a lie and she did the real scene which more people like. But in the Season 2 finale, faced both with a distracted Barry and an impressed agent, she chose to do the lie.

In Season 3 she seemed to realize her dream. She finally got her own drama series that was on a streamer. She continued to ignore the warning signs with Barry that her assistant clearly saw. On the night of her greatest triumph, she dumped Barry more because he wasn’t there for her than because she saw the danger. Then in a scene that was right out of Hollywood, her show was cancelled because the algorithm told them so. She had a mental break down in an elevator when one of her friends betrayed her and was among to do mind games on the studio boss when her husband came in determined to kill her. When Sally comes to see Gene and demands to know why he didn’t tell her how dangerous Barry was, the very self-absorbed Gene (I’ll get back to him in a minute) asks her simply how she lived with him for a year and had no clue. Sally closes her mouth because her first act upon returning to LA was to go to lockup and see Barry – to protect herself to be sure, but her last words to him were: “I feel safe with you.”  Sally has spent her life drawn to abusive and violent men. She is a victim, as she says, but in her own way, she’s as good a liar as Barry is – to the world and to herself.

Considering everything Gene went through during Season 3 – and considering how much of what we saw of him genuinely seemed redemptive – you’d think he’d have learned by now. But no. He spends all of the first two episodes of Season 4 convincing a writer from Vanity Fair to learn about him for the sole purpose of being able to toot his own horn in a one-man show. Now to be fair, nothing he tells this reporter is entirely a lie – everything that he says happened – but Gene has apparently decided to use this trauma to promote himself. The fact that Barry killed Janice is now in his rearview mirror, all he cares about is becoming the star he thinks he is. There really isn’t anything Henry Winkler does that can surprise me anymore.

The man who spent season 3 trying to destroy Barry naturally ended up in the same prison in him. The nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is Monroe Fuches tries to cut a deal with the Feds to try and save his ass. His utterly half-assed attempt fails the minute Barry admits that he truly made a mistake and that all of this was his fault. The season premiere ends with him tearing off his wire and embraces Barry. He instantly tries to get the two of them out of prison in the second episode, and the two seem to be bonding over his acting workshop. But of course Fuches rambles to much and tells Barry what he tried to do and Barry immediately turns the tables on him.

Fuches’ teary-eyed phone call to Noho Hank at the end of the second episode would be moving – had we not been getting flashes of Barry’s past in the second episode. Perhaps we should not be shocked that Fuches has known Barry since his childhood, has almost certainly been manipulating him his whole life. It looks like Barry was a lonely child and Fuches may have been that father figure he was looking for. (I expect more revelations in future episodes).

But the thing about Barry is that he is genuinely clueless. One of those flashbacks ends with an aged him and Sally dancing at a wedding. When he makes that same deal with the Feds, he makes it very clear that he wants to take someone with him. The idea that Sally, whose life he has essentially helped destroy, would not go with him never enters his childlike, traumatized mind.

And he’s going to be dealing with another problem. Noho Hank and Cristobal have escaped from the clutches of the Brazilian mansion they were both held prisoners in. Hank, who has managed to seem detached from everything involving crime, is now reeling with PTSD of his own. (At one point he awakes from a dream with him handcuffed to a radiator and Barry is across from him, similarly chained.)

Hank and Cristobal could clearly be fine if they stayed off the grid. But of course, a business opportunity comes along (it is literally built on sand) and in one of the few genuinely hysterical moments in the two episodes they have a meeting of gangs that is basically a motivational speakers session at ‘the Dave’s and the Buster’s.” Hank is initially determined to break Barry out of prison, despite the dangers. At one point, he tells Cristobal: “I think I understand him now.” Before he elaborates, Fuches calls and tells him that Barry is talking to the feds. With a self-determination we’ve never seen to him, he walks back to Cristobal and says: “We have to kill Barry.”

Hader’s decision to end Barry after four seasons is absolutely the right call. So many of the best dramedies – I’m thinking of Nurse Jackie and Weeds in particular – collapsed because they were kept on the air well past their expiration date to increasingly diminishing returns. Hader may have made that decision in the midst of the pandemic, but I have to give him credit for following through. I couldn’t see how the show could have gone on much longer than a fourth season even before Season 3 ended. It now looks like he’s set everything up perfectly.

Along with Atlanta, Barry is one of those comedy series that have completely transcended the genre. You don’t question reality as constantly as you did in Season 3 and 4 but Hader (who has written and directed the majority of the entire series) takes you into just a surreal world. Atlanta was governed by the African-American experience; Barry is grounded in trauma, and both can be as genuinely horrifying and hysterical to watch in the world’s they inhabit.

I expect the series finale to be more concrete than it was with Atlanta. I don’t expect the end for Barry to be a happy one. I saw a comparison to this show to Breaking Bad online, and its not without merit. Like Walter White, Barry Berkman passed the point of redemption long ago (like with Walter, it was with the death of someone he considered a threat who someone vital to him loved) and he’s capable of far more violence than Walter White was. He may not be nearly as clever as Heisenberg, but he’s left nearly as high a body count (and in the penultimate episode of Season 3, we actually saw just how massive it was.) I don’t think Barry deserves a happy ending any more than Walter White did. The only question is how many more people will die before it does end.

Many people will mourn Succession when it comes to an end in a few weeks. It is likely that same week the series finale of Barry will air. While I have more respect for the latter series than I did a week ago, I will still mourn the loss of Barry far more. Bill Hader has created one of the most extraordinary series in the 21^st century – one that reaches the gold standards that even the best shows of HBO have provided us over the period. I have been told that halfway through the final season there will be a major twist that upends the remainder. A trial? Witness protection? A reality show? A made-for-TV movie? A flashforward showing a Dateline version of this very story a decade after the fact? All of these seem very valid possibilities in the world that Hader and Alec Berg have created for us. And honestly, I don’t think I will care or be disappointed no matter how Hader chooses to end his masterpiece -  hell, if he were to do it with a cut to black or showing Barry in an ad for Coke, I think I’d be fine with that too.

The cast and crew of Barry have justifiably earned a lot of awards over the last three seasons – Hader has two Emmys for acting, Winkler for Supporting acting and they have dominated many of the Critics awards over the year. It is a certainty they will dominate the Emmy nominations for their final season (hopefully Goldberg, Anthony Carrigan and Stephen Root will be rewarded as they walk out the door) though admittedly the odds of any of them triumphing again are slim with such powerhouses as Abbott Elementary and Ted Lasso, series that are equally brilliant but the polar opposite of Barry in tone both the characters and situations. Hader himself will not care and neither will I. He has created one of the great masterpieces of television that has defied all genre. He will no doubt go on to create other series, much like I expect Donald Glover will now. Or perhaps he won’t – Hader’s always had his own views of how much success he can handle. Either way, he will have left us with Barry and if that is his sole entry in the world of Peak TV, I’m completely fine with that.

My score: 5 stars.