For five years now, Barry has not only been one of the very best things on television, but one of the most criminally overlooked. To some extent, this makes perfect sense. It has a bland, terrible, functionally useless title that gives nothing of itself to prospective viewers. What’s more, it has a premise – a comedy about a hitman who decides to become an actor – that sounds like the stuff of the hackiest sitcom imaginable. If these two things were all you knew of Barry, you’d probably give it a swerve as well.
But please don’t. The fourth and final season of Barry is about to start, and it is worth every second of your time. There might be bigger shows than Barry on television. There might be better publicised shows. I’m already glumly resigned to the fact that the climax of (the brilliant) Succession will knock all the wind out of Barry’s sails and reduce its finale to an afterthought. But we can’t let this happen. Barry is so singular, so restless, so terrified of complacency, that it deserves to go down as one of the very best.
One of the joys of Barry has been to watch the evolution of its co-creator and star, Bill Hader, in real time. When the show started, he was still best known for his silly Saturday Night Live sketches, and the public found it hard to believe that he was capable of more than that. Indeed, Hader himself has hinted that Barry (a show about a man who is very good at something he doesn’t love and yearns for more) is basically an allegory for his time at SNL. Over the years, however, Hader’s confidence in both himself and the show has grown exponentially.
Although Barry has never taken its eye off the ball narratively, it has also become a vehicle with which Hader can flex any muscle he likes. When he wants the show to be funny, it’s as funny as anything else on television. When he wants it to be tense, as he often does, the results are as unbearable as season four of Breaking Bad. He has turned Barry into horror. He has turned it into Lynchian arthouse. There was a sequence last season where Hader’s character becomes embroiled in a shootout on a motorway, and the resulting sequence arguably qualified as the best action movie of the year. There seems to be no upper limit to what he is able to create. There are no clues as to what Hader will do after Barry ends, but on this basis he should be allowed to do anything he likes.
That said, Barry is far from a one-man show. Hader has surrounded himself with an unbelievable cast of varying experience and given them the material of their lives. Henry Winkler won an Emmy for his role as the selfish, conceited acting coach Gene Cousineau, not least because it plays at cross purposes to his reputation as the nicest man in Hollywood. Stephen Root has played dark before, for Jordan Peele and the Coen Brothers and Kevin Smith, but none of those roles have been quite as multifaceted as Monroe Fuches, Barry’s father-figure nemesis. Anthony Carrigan typically plays gangster NoHo Hank for laughs, but has excelled whenever the role has plunged him into lovelorn despair. And Sarah Goldberg, as Barry’s on-off girlfriend Sally, is a phenomenal talent who might just qualify as the best actor working in television today.
I’ve seen most of season four already. I don’t know how it ends, but there are extended moments in the first seven episodes where the entire notion of comedy is jettisoned. Again, this makes sense. The overriding theme of the show has been living with the consequences of your actions, and Barry’s have been darker than most. As the season three finale demonstrated, the law has finally caught up with Barry, and he is being punished for his countless crimes. There are scenes in this run that feel completely opposed to the notion of television as entertainment. They’re bleak. They’re disturbing. One managed to bring me to the brink of a panic attack. And yet it never quite feels gratuitous, because this is the bed that Barry has made for himself over the years. It’s all coming home to roost.
If you haven’t seen any of Barry yet, this is the perfect opportunity to dig in and watch all the way from episode one. If you’re caught up, and you’re as eager to see how this thing ends as I am, then strap in. It’ll be sad to say goodbye but, trust me, we’ll have to go through hell before that happens.
Barry season four is on HBO Max in the US and starts tonight on Sky Comedy and Sky Now in the UK.
