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.
