Barry finale review – farewell to the true best show on television

Well, that’s it. 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 your stomach in knots for days. And now it’s over. Four seasons and done. Succession? What? No. I’m talking about Barry.

Barry has concluded with “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.

But first, 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.

Except that wasn’t the ending. 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.

But Barry was its own thing; high-minded and experimental and relentlessly singular. This might be why it didn’t jibe with the general public as well as Succession. Succession is all 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. 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 accessible. 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.

What this season opened up, though, was space to underline exactly how repellent these characters are. In the first episode back, Barry goads a sympathetic prison warden by reminding him (and us) of all the police officers he has killed. Henry Winkler’s Gene Cousineau shot his own son. No-Ho Hank watched impassively as the love of his life was murdered. Sally Reed, played by the miraculous Sarah Goldberg, was eventually given the closest thing to a happy ending, but she still endured a stretch of being a horribly negligent mother. The history of television is littered with villains and antiheroes who audiences have incorrectly fallen in love with. Think Tony Soprano, or Walter White or Kendall Roy. Barry’s fourth season often felt like an opportunity for the writers to prevent this from happening. Time and again, the show went to great pains to underline just how awful these people were.

When you think of this last season, you’ll probably remember how oppressively dark it was. In one episode we heard the terrified gasps of a man drowning in sand. In another 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. I’m honestly struggling to recall a season of television that has been so inescapably bleak. Comfort food this wasn’t.

But taken as a whole, this turn makes perfect sense. Barry quickly shook off its slightly hack premise – hey, everyone, a hitman wants to become an actor! – by becoming a meditation on the nature of forgiveness. At what point does a person become utterly irredeemable? When can someone escape the shadows they’ve thrust upon the world? Can love help you? Justice? God? This has always been a show about consequences, so it was only right that we should be forced to watch all of Barry’s consequences play out in horrible detail.

But I don’t think this is how we’ll remember Barry. Yes, these last few weeks have been hard to watch, but they have also contained moments of vaulting invention, something which has been in keeping with the whole series. Last year’s 710N contained a motorcycle chase that will be spoken about for decades. Season two’s ronny/lily was violent and surreal in equal measure. On top of that, it was also a peerless Hollywood satire. A scene where a network executive discusses an actor with an agent with a series of yelps and grunts was hilariously on the money, and the scene where a streaming executive cancels a show on the say-so of its all-powerful algorithm] recently went viral as striking writers picked it up as a demonstration of all their frustrations.

This is why Barry deserves to go down as one of the best of all time. Once all the Succession dust has cleared, I’m certain this will come into sharper focus. And while it does, Bill Hader has just guaranteed himself an audience willing to follow him wherever he chooses to go next.