Barry

The struggle for Barry’s soul that unfolds in Season 4 will be remembered as some of the best TV of 2023: nerve-shredding, hilarious and emotionally devastating to the very end.

More remarkable is how Hader hones his nascent directorial flair. Season four’s most striking moments are quiet and still, the air filled with tension and regret as terminal winter descends on this whole sorry scene. ... When the season does get loud, it does so in arresting fashion—comic and terrible at once, sideways and weird but, most crucially, controlled. ... The plot is constructed as a mesmerizing Rube Goldberg machine, a bloody sequence of cause and effect that makes nihilism engaging.

Hader masterfully captures the many elements of the series. In one episode a character says, “Barry is a very complicated guy, but a sympathetic soul.” That’s true of the character and also the show. It sounds like a contradiction, and it is. It’s also what makes “Barry” one of the best shows on TV.

Equal parts despairing and absurd, Hader’s serio-comic HBO gem, which returns April 16, remains a one-of-a-kind amalgam of introspective character study, deadpan L.A. crime odyssey, and caustic showbiz satire.

It’s a show able to look beyond what happens and enjoy how it happens — whether that’s how it’s plotted, how it’s shot, or how it’s performed. “Barry” is hurtling toward an ever-narrowing conclusion, but it’s already so much deeper than a good guy/bad guy story. It’s more than a Hollywood satire, an antihero’s journey, or a morality play crossed with a comedy of errors. It’s “Barry,” and no matter how dark things get, I’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Impeccable dark comedy. ... [Hader] has a master’s command of blocking and pacing, each episode an exercise in prismatic stillness, often giving way to explosive violence. ... It’s hardly the original premise, but it’s hard to think of a show that explores it with as deft and devilish a hand as “Barry.”

The knowledge that the end is nigh emboldens them to make huge swings from week to week, something which is a huge factor in making this season of the Bill Hader and Alex Berg-created series easily some of the best TV of the year.

The hopeless hitman takes his atonement efforts to the extreme in the fourth and final season, a pensive and beautifully peculiar deconstruction of our need for redemption and the (im)possibility of true change.

The final half of the final season of “Barry” takes a turn that could end up more divisive than the recent one on that other lauded HBO show. Give it time. Actually, give this whole season time. It deserves it. And it works at a slightly different pace.

This is a show that has never been afraid to make you laugh and then, in the next moment, make you feel deeply uncomfortable. Season 4 is happy to continue this tradition and then some.

Laughter sticks in the throat in a savage satire that never plays it safe. [24 Apr - 7 May 2023, p.6]

That refusal to pander frees Hader and his co-stars Sarah Goldberg, Anthony Carrigan, Henry Winkler, and Stephen Root to slough off their skins between each new season, culminating in these final episodes where everyone is raw, ragged and bloody.

We no longer feel much pathos for Barry, but the show is acutely aware of his collateral damage. ... As “Barry” starts to cement its legacy, though, “funny” is only one adjective to describe its overall effect; “eerie,” “melancholy,” and “gutting” would be equally as accurate. The show continues to take risks through the eleventh hour, shifting gears halfway through the season in an audacious twist. But it also has a firm handle on what the story seems to call for in terms of its tone.

In its fourth and final season, the HBO dramedy lays out some of its most thrilling and most ambitious moves yet, pushing its characters into territory we scarcely could have imagined at the start of their journeys. But it never loses sight of its darkest, funniest and most fundamental truth: Wherever these people go, there they are.

If Season Three proved there was more life in the concept than it appeared at first, Barry is still not a series built to run forever. Credit to Hader and Berg for recognizing this, and for making a final run of episodes(*) that feels true to the spirit and ideas that have typified Barry at its best.

I couldn't help thinking about Barry's dogged survival as sort of meta commentary of the series, which has thankfully been allowed to end on its own terms after a remarkable four-season run where it stayed true to itself the entire time — an increasing rarity.

Fast, furious, funny, with a twist.

There is certainly a relentless darkness about Barry that gets even darker in its final season. But Hader and Berg still throw in enough absurd moments and character-based humor to keep things from careening into full-on drama. But we’re definitely expecting the final season to be heavily dramatic, and we’re on board for it.

The uniform consistency of these performances doesn’t quite match the season’s writing; there is a convolutedness to how Barry arranges these characters for a shared season-long arc, and a certain twist is somehow both bold and anticlimactic at the same time. But the penultimate episode, “a nice meal,” is so clever in how it strips Barry, Gene, Sally, and Fuches to their core pernicious impulses that it makes the early meandering worthwhile.

An even darker season that accentuates the show’s ensemble aspect while leaning a little too heavily on blurring lines with flights of fancy.

If this is Barry’s end, it’s the beginning for director Bill Hader. His creative stamp is as pervasive as Barry’s cruel influence, and even if you’re put off by Season 4’s stark, pulsating vibe, it’s one Hader wields complete control over.