Barry's widely-acclaimed third season finale certainly could have been a great end to Bill Hader & Alec Berg’s HBO dramedy, giving the award-winning series the kind of wrap-up that’d make various “Best of” lists for years to come, but there's certainly no doubt that Barry’s upcoming final season will continue the upward trend. Everything that’s been presented suggests no reason to think otherwise, considering the increasingly creative and well-made episodes delivered by Hader and all others involved over the years. Season 3 in particular feels as if it leaned into giving life to the emotions and feelings of everyone’s situations more than explaining particular plot beats. To spend time diving into specifics of how Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) escapes or the realism of the whole chase sequence in "710N" would be missing the point of Barry. Real life has plenty of minutiae, so Barry concerns itself more with the countless ways that life is odd or forever unpredictable and how it affects these entertaining people.
Hader, Sarah Goldberg, Stephen Root, Anthony Carrigan, and Henry Winkler are all seasoned pros at making whatever they’re doing seem entirely believable for their character, whether it’s letting their eyes and actions do all the heavy lifting (Winkler in the Season 2 finale) or Goldberg absolutely nailing an extended monologue in Season 2’s “The Audition” that seems like pure stream of consciousness flowing out of her mouth. Hader hasn't just made a show where he gets to shine, though he obviously does (especially as a director), but instead allowed plenty of room for others to make their impression. Aside from giving in to predictability more often, or getting increasingly outlandish to the point of jumping the shark, the creative team behind Barry, one of 2022's best shows, has wisely decided to let the curtains close on their time being center stage as they’d rather put a bullet in it amidst the shouts of "Encore!" and leave the people wanting more.
'Barry' Gets Away With Murder
While it would likely be tempting to want to keep the party going, no TV series can exist on an extended high like this forever. At some point, just because it’s inevitable, there would be a lesser season where writers simply find themselves out of ideas on how to put off Barry being found out as a murderer yet again — or perhaps somebody on the cast would burn out and want to leave, so wrapping things up while everyone’s creative juices are still flowing and passions are burning bright is a path that more series should follow. The pandemic-inspired gap of three years between Seasons 2 and 3, which definitely did the show no favors when it came to ratings consistency, almost seems to have energized the cast and crew to come back with the best product possible. They clearly still had stories they wanted to tell with these characters, or at the very least enjoyed working together so much that they weren’t ready to go their separate ways. Whatever the inspiration, though, Barry didn’t come back with a whimper, but firing wildly from multiple weapons. That’s perhaps what led to him finally being arrested in the closing moments of Season 3, opening up the door to a wildly different dénouement season compared to what the series has been so far.
Many others have no doubt been essential to Barry’s success, of course, but as the actor playing the title character who has also written and sat in the director’s chair for much of the show’s run, including directing all eight episodes of the upcoming fourth season, it seems fair to single Hader out a bit. Based on what he's done here, a feature film directing credit seems a good guess for the future. It also seems a fair bet that, as the one most responsible for its continued success, there’s only so much one person can give to something before needing to stretch their wings. It should also be noted that Barry’s end was probably just as much a business decision as anything else, because the ratings from season to season weren’t exactly anything to brag about, to put it kindly. The third season does have the solid excuse of coming several years after the second, as at a certain point many people just move on, but this show was never a ratings powerhouse. Even when it got a prime post-Game of Thrones Season 8 time slot for most of Season 2, the specific numbers were always better left unsaid. Why linger on those when there are varied and multiple award nominations, as well as wins to focus on? Not to mention the round after round of positive reviews from damn near everyone who watches.
'Barry' Put Out a Hit on Itself
Some shows go on for years, ebbing and flowing with cast departures or a new showrunner, but Barry is not that kind of show — and that’s one of the great things about it. While it’s wonderfully darkly comedic and can yield some hearty laughs, this is no sitcom that can continue for a decade with a couple hundred episodes of mostly unchanged hijinks, nor is it an SVU-like procedural that will apparently last until time stops because there will always be work for Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay). Barry is telling a story with a limited shelf life, which even Winkler suspected would end soon, as Barry's hitman days could only be ignored or held at bay for so long. Every other major character has also had their lives completely upended, not just Barry, and largely finds themselves needing to make a new path in a post-Barry existence — not because they can’t live without him, or any such romanticism, but because knowing him has fundamentally changed them.
Instead of dragging something on to the point of wondering “Oh, is that still on?”, more series should go the Barry route of making a definitive splash and then — fingers crossed — end on a high note. There will always be that hunger for more, or fans wondering what could have happened if "this or that," as opposed to going the Dexter, Homeland, Weeds, Shameless, etc. road of not ending until the series has become either an afterthought or a joke. Thanks to ending on their own terms while they still can, the only punchlines to come from Barry’s finale will be those written by Hader’s trigger-happy hand.
The first episode of Barry Season 4 will premiere on HBO and HBO Max on April 16. Read up on everything we know so far about the final season, including the episode count and official plot synopsis.