Did HBO's 'Barry' go wrong in series finale?
Some endings just leave you feeling mixed.
Before we really get into it, let’s just point out that TV shows are very hard to pull off. It’s especially difficult to end them. Bill Hader’s career took off with Saturday Night Live, but it broke through with HBO’s Barry. A dark comedy about a war veteran with P.T.S.D. who stumbles into an acting class in Los Angeles, finding family and mayhem in weird varieties. This is Hader’s show, from being the star to co-writing all episodes and directing several of them.
For most of its run, the show was great. Few shows can pivot from raw comedy to very real violence (seriously some of the best filmed-for-television action sequences), before going back to comedy. Barry pulled that off all the time, highlighting tightly wound 30-minute episodes with superb ensemble acting from the likes of Henry Winkler, Sarah Goldberg, Stephen Root, and Anthony Carrigan.
No one could have guessed what was coming next time on Barry. Remember the second season episode where Hader’s conflicted assassin runs into a martial artist and his mutant daughter? Throughout the episode, Root’s Fuches is terribly stitching up Barry’s wounds as he tries to clear his name. It’s just a wild comedy. However, keeping that balance between comedy and drama can be hard to maintain. This brings us to the series finale of Barry, which took place Sunday night.
*SPOILER ZONE WARNING*
Without having to dig deep into the entire contents of the story and the third/fourth season plot threads, let’s just say things took a hard turn in the fourth and final season. Time jumps, tone switches, and storylines that seem to ramble on more than enter a concise zone of finality. Moments of sheer brilliance with some not-as-sharp filler.
We’ve seen Winkler’s Gene Cousineau run the gauntlet of emotions, going from renegading victim to supposed killer. Root’s Fuches enters prison as someone who still hid behind what he meant to Barry, before exiting a kingpin. Carrigan’s NoHo Hank finding love and drug business don’t really mix well. Goldberg’s Sally finds herself pulled between the man she isn’t sure she ever loved and a career that she can’t get away from. Oh, and there’s the son that Barry and Sally have together.
All of it circled each other for the final eight episodes, culminating in a wild series finale that left me cold to the touch but probably finished where it needed to. While I can respect the decision to have Gene kill Barry, I can’t get over Winkler’s acting coach spending the rest of his life in prison for Barry’s crimes. Revenge is real and cold, but something didn’t feel right.
Directing wise, Hader knocked it out of the park. The final demise for two characters includes a killer camera shot. Aesthetically, the show didn’t run far from its mark. Ultimately, the way it felt and landed bothered me. Again, the Gene in prison while Barry is honored as a war hero sings like darkly comic brilliance to some, but it looked like a slow spiral to me.
From what the show was to that… I am not sure. Maybe it’ll marinate well, or maybe Barry will be a show that I revisit in episodic spurts more than a full second trip through. It’s not easy making a great show; ending it is even harder.
Barry showed us that Bill Hader is a multi-faceted star who makes fresh things and can do a lot. It also showed us that directing a movie should be in his future. The finale was good enough, but easier to admire than love.