Barry Finally Gave Up Its Delusions

This story contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Barry.

After everything he’d somehow survived—the stash-house shoot-outs, the brushes with law enforcement, the prison beatings, the time he’d found himself tied up in a chair opposite someone who was absolutely ready to kill him—even Barry wasn’t surprised by his own death. In the series finale of Barry, which aired tonight, the hit man turned actor turned unconvincing family man (played by Bill Hader) reacted to being shot in the chest by his former acting teacher, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), with total resignation: “Oh wow,” he flatly declared, blood spreading through his shirt. The kill shot arrived a split  second later, and Barry’s head snapped back from a bullet to the dome—an unglamorous yet definitive ending.

Barry’s matter-of-fact reaction to his fate brought another of the show’s confrontations to my mind. Midway through Season 2, Barry was seemingly caught by John Loach (John Pirruccello), the former LAPD partner of Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), whom Barry had killed in order to cover up his involvement with a Chechen crime ring. But rather than arrest him, Loach asked Barry to murder his ex-wife’s new boyfriend in exchange for his freedom. Barry’s response to this request was a wide-eyed and full-throated “WHAT?!” (also the name of the episode)—the utter disbelief of someone shocked to yet again get away with murder. Barry had extricated himself from numerous delicate situations by brutal force of will, but here he was saved by dumb luck and the venal self-interest of others.

“WHAT?!” as astonished exhortation, and “wow” as joyless acceptance of the circumstances: These two reactions also describe how I’ve felt about Barry’s arc. With its finale, I can’t shake a sense of disappointment at watching Hader, who was both the star and a co-creator of the series, turn away from the tone that made the show such a surprise hit. When it debuted in 2018, the “hit man with a heart of gold” trope had already been explored throughout pop culture, but Barry plumbed new depth by leaning into goofball slapstick and mordant pathos. (And, befitting its subject, it found room for some of the most gripping action sequences I’d ever seen on television.) It was hardly the first show to straddle drama and comedy, but it was unique in how it chased extremes at both ends. I was frequently amazed at the way moments of unbelievable tension could be leavened by a ridiculous punch line; how comedic situations could quickly turn deadly.

Barry rejected not just genre and stereotypes, but one of prestige TV’s favorite themes. From the moment Tony Soprano stepped into Dr. Melfi’s office, Can a bad person be redeemed? has been the animating question of many acclaimed shows; Barry highlighted how clueless and self-serving the query could be. “Whatever lives these characters may be aspiring toward is irrelevant, because who they are right now is bad,” the show seemed to say. All of Barry’s attempts to improve himself were undercut by the people he continued to kill. Redemption might have come in the solitude of a jail cell, but Barry kept weaseling out of accountability while lying to himself about the moral weight of his actions. Time and time anew, he’d declare that he was turning over a new leaf, only to kill again, forcing himself to relaunch the betterment process: “Starting … now,” he kept saying, oblivious to the permanence of the red in his ledger.

Read: Barry and the banality of evil

This contradictory behavior was, in fact, the root of much of the show’s humor. Slowly, though, Hader ramped up Barry’s bad behavior—notably in his verbally abusive treatment of his girlfriend, Sally (Sarah Goldberg), in Season 3—while leaching the show’s comedic relief. The final, fourth season still had its moments of levity: I grinned at the stomach-turning sight gag of the Chechen mob boss NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) finding four bloody boxes in his office, each one presumably containing the head of the four killers he’d hired to murder a rival. But the characters’ moral descent simply made the show less funny, and more self-consciously serious than in prior seasons.

Here’s one example: Back in Season 2, NoHo Hank quipped that he couldn’t just walk into the “John Wick assassin hotel”—which, in those movies, serves as a neutral base for an assortment of hired guns—to find a competent contract killer. By the end of Season 4, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root) had evolved from Barry’s bumbling handler into the paterfamilias of a group of hit men he befriended in prison—in other words, a one-man proprietor of an assassin network. That Fuches became the type of cliché the show once mocked was sort of played for laughs—it was very, very silly to see the avuncular Fuches skulk around in a tank top and full-body tattoos—until it wasn’t. Getting beaten up in prison forced Fuches to accept who he was: “a man with no heart,” as he declares to NoHo Hank when they stand off in the final episode. Similarly, much of this season attempted to depict who these characters really were once their delusions were stripped away, and its joyless appraisals were more tedious than revelatory.

This happened repeatedly: The goofy and affable NoHo Hank was forced to abet the death of his lover, Cristobal (Michael Irby), and ugly-cry on multiple occasions, until his anticlimactic death. Sally killed a would-be assassin at the end of Season 3 and spent most of this season racked with guilt and haunted by her PTSD. And after watching Cousineau spend three seasons seeking justice for the murder of his girlfriend, the LAPD detective Janice, I found it hard to see him ultimately charged for the crime because of a procedural misunderstanding. Cousineau—a pathetic yet sweet-hearted actor still hanging on to his dreams of movie stardom, who so believably fell in love with Janice—became a breakout favorite, winning Winkler new acclaim in the late period of his career. His killing of Barry, the one person who could get him off the hook for Janice’s death, felt sour; Winkler had never played his character as someone who’d walk the route of pure vengeance, not with a chance of vindication still hanging in the air.

Yet I sort of understand why the hitherto innocent Cousineau had to take the blame. In Barry, ambition and self-deception were neatly entwined. Cousineau’s evergreen desire for the spotlight—he insisted that he didn’t want Janice’s murder to be adapted into Hollywood schlock, but reversed course when he thought he might be portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis—ended up being his downfall. Meanwhile Barry, right before he was shot, seemed to finally understand that it was time to drop his fantasies and accept blame for killing Janice—the first glimmer of legitimate growth he’d displayed throughout the show’s four seasons.

Good for him, but the breakthrough wasn’t cathartic or meaningful. By the end, the show was out of surprises. There were no more “WHAT?!” moments, no more inventive narrative jolts, few examples of that singular comedic register. But perhaps that’s the truth about bad people who’ve finally shed their delusions: They’re not that surprising, or funny. In its final episodes, Barry leaned into tragedy and resignation because that’s all its characters had left.