Final descent

• Published date: 02 May 2023
• Publication title: Signal

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 now screening, 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...