Next Week I Will Mourn The Departure of Barry More Than Succession

 

Next week, the saga of the Roy family will reach its inevitable conclusion in the series finale of Succession.  I have little doubt, regardless of how it ends, people will be analyzing it and the series for a very long time – no doubt longer than it deserves to be. My opinion on Succession has changed slightly since the final season began about its quality. My opinion about the series that has aired immediately after it on HBO for the last seven weeks and that will end on the same night as Succession does has not. If anything, I’m even more convinced of its power than I was when the fourth season began.

If you had told me six years ago that some day I would rank Bill Hader among the greatest creative minds in the history of television, the equal of Vince Gilligan and Matthew Weiner, I would have called you a lunatic. And yet, anyone who has watched Barry for the last four seasons can not deny the incredible gifts and power of Hader as not only an actor, but a director and writer. He has been the creative force behind Barry since it began, creating a group of indelible characters that have had some of the greatest performances in the echelon of Peak TV.  And having watched it all the way through, if you asked me to consider which series was is the superior piece of art – Barry or Succession – it is not a difficult or close question. Barry is better than Succession on every conceivable level you could measure – writing, directing, filming, acting and creativity. It’s a much funnier series that Succession has ever been. It’s a much better drama than Succession has ever been. And every single character on the series is more layered, tragic, developed and human than any of the characters in Succession.

And I say this with the full awareness that the title character is a contract killer who has a much higher body count than Dexter Morgan managed in twice as many seasons and who, in the case of Barry Bloch, you’d can’t pretend that all or even most of his victims deserved to die.  Yet I would still rather spend five minutes in the company of Barry than with any of the people who inhabit the world of Waystar Royco.  Even with his body count and lack of self-awareness, it wouldn’t take Barry two minutes to realize just how truly monstrous the Roy family were.

In his last conversation with his children Logan told them that “they were not serious people.” The implied indication was that they could not survive in the ‘real world’; i.e. the one that he had been the master of for half a century. That is true because the Roys have been so isolated by their wealth and privilege that they do not understand even the bare minimum of humanity or the consequences of their actions. None of them – not even Logan – would survive for a moment in the world of any of the other great series that have been headed by antiheroes over the past decade, because none of them know how to even fake human interaction. The Frank Underwoods of the world would have no problem manipulating them as they would everybody else; Gus Fring would be capable of attending their fundraisers with them none the wiser to who he was, and even the Marty Byrdes would have no problem being able to manipulate them because of how well they understand money. Only the Ray Donovans of the world would be able to work along side them, and that is because they know that when it comes down to it,  they are necessary for them to maintain their power.

(That said, I could see Mike Ehrmantraut serving as a fixer for Logan Roy, if only because he has a no bullshit approach that Logan might appreciate and he is more than capable of keeping his mouth shut, withholding the contempt he would feel for the Roy family, and when things got tough, he would be able to vanish without a trace before they figured it might be necessary to get rid of him.)

By contrast, every major character in the world of Barry (in the criminal world) would be accepted and capable of surviving in the world of the antiheroes. Hader actually apologized to Vince Gilligan for spending so much time before the final season shadowing the writers and cast of Better Call Saul.  He has no need too, because for anyone who has spent any time in the Breaking Bad- verse knows perfectly well that almost all of the characters in Barry could survive – and perhaps even thrive – in Gilligan’s Albuquerque.  You could see Monroe Fuches being the guy that Saul knew to handle a problem for Walter White or Gus Fring. You could see Gus managing negotiate with the Noho Hanks of the world even if it meant dealing with people as reckless as the feuds between the Chechnyan and the Colombians in the second and third season.  And one could certainly see Barry being called into handle such problematic people as the Salamanca clan.

(It has to be added that this level of fandom also applies to how fans view the key female characters. Sally, the abused wife who becomes Barry’s girlfriend and is clearly a victim of both his abuse and that of Hollywood, has come to be the focus as just as much vituperative criticism online as Skyler White was throughout Breaking Bad.  The fact that Sally clearly goes from one abusive relationship to another and has clearly been part of a horrible childhood has done little to change the opinions of many fans of Barry who clearly still believe that an evil monster should just be allowed to do horrible things on television without a whiny wife or girlfriend trying to protect herself.)

Paradoxically, I think the fact that Barry is infinitely more violent than Succession is actually makes it more humane and the characters more relatable.  The Roy family – and in fact, everyone at Waystar Royco – are incapable of the basic human emotions or even caring about human life. By contrast Barry is a killer, but at some level he is aware of how big a monster he is and is still hoping that there is a way to earn forgiveness or even redemption. All of the characters on Succession are so selfish and broken that even the idea of redemption or forgiveness is something that is foreign to them except, of course, if someone is bestowing it to them. It’s pretty clear that Shiv would be as horrible a mother as Sally is currently being to her child,  but at least Sally has a somewhat better reason for it than Shiv does.

There is also the fact that while Succession spent almost its entire run having nothing happen to any of its characters and only the appearance of change with no consequences, Barry was willing to involving huge change at least once a season, if not more., and for every character.  And while the characters on Succession could literally destroy the country and not seem to care about the consequences, there were always repercussions for every action a character on Barry took, and then there was unforeseen fallout and endless backlash, as we kept seeing over and over between the most honest – and heartbreaking arc on the series – the affair between Noho Hank and Cristobal. We spent so much of the series watching increasingly horrific  actions follow every single move the two men made to protect themselves. We had front row seats to one of the most incredible scenes of 2022; when a terrified Hank managed to free himself from being chained to a radiator and make his way down the hall to see his lover being tortured by his wife and finally shoot her. And then after seeing them get out alive, we really wanted to believe they could have a happy ending – and we were utterly destroyed at the end of the fourth episode of the season when it ended the worst possible way.

And Barry has always been willing to transcend the limitations of its material far more Succession or indeed many of the best dramas of the era.  Who can forget the incredible ‘ronny/lilly’ episode which was little more than a half-hour kung fu movie between Barry and two karate masters – one of whom seem to be a flying ten year old? Or the hallucinatory moments of ‘candy asses’ when a poisoned Barry walked through an illusionary world, eventually ending up on a beach with every person who’d ever died at his hands? (Hader never said a word in the entire episode.) Or of course, Hader’s most daring move to flash forward eight years between Barry and Sally’s disappearance to reveal them living in a trailer park with an eight year old, fundamentally isolated from the world. Barry has spent the last eight years trying to reinvent himself in the eyes of his son. But its been clear that all of it was something he was willing to throw away to protect himself.

Bill Hader has said that he has an idea for a horror movie for a future project and having seen him work as a director and a writer, it’s very clear that he could be just as gifted at it as Jordan Peele has proven to be. He has the same gift for commanding visuals, the ability to fool us with cut away, and the constant sense of dread that he can pull the rug right out from under the viewer at any time. In last week’s episode, Sally passed out drunk and seemed to arise to hear voices in the background. She then walked through the halls of her house closing doors and windows, while an unseen presence lurked. When the door slammed shut, there were moments of barely audible dialogue and horrible sounds before a wall in their house appeared.  Eventually she regained consciousness and the walls were whole – but when she walked into the next room, the furniture had been completely wrecked.  When they inevitably reboot Halloween again, Hader gets my vote to head the franchise right now.

I don’t know if it will matter as much how Barry finally wraps up next week. (For the record, that’s the series finale I’ll be analyzing next Monday as well as an assessment of the work as a whole.) I don’t think one way or another it will affect my assessment of the series as a whole. Barry is going to be in my top ten of 2023, almost certainly in the top 5 and it deserves to rank, along with the recently departed Atlanta, as one of the two comedy series that have done the most reshape the boundaries of that genre in the era of Peak TV.

One last note. I mentioned that I don’t think Succession will have much rewatch value when its done. I’m not sure I’ll even have the energy to watch the whole thing. And while there have been many dramas I have enjoyed rewatching over the years, I rarely feel the same way about comedies in the era of Peak TV.  (Not network ones; I’ll rewatch an episode of Parks And Rec or Scrubs anytime.) But even Barry’s end is disappointing, I will gladly watch the whole thing in the same approach I have watched so many other great dramas of the era.  And I suspect, like with so many great series, I’ll wish that I could watch it as if I were seeing for the first time and I will be sorry when I’m done with it.