Bill Hader's 'Barry' delivers a bleak and brilliant final season (2024)

In Barry's first season finale, Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) climbed back into bed with his girlfriend and vowed to stop killing people for a living. As his latest victim, Detective Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), lay dead outside, the former Marine-turned-hitman-turned-mediocre actor pledged to begin a new, crime-free life — "starting now."

Now never came. Barry kept on killing — compelled by unavoidable circ*mstances, bad decisions, the wrath of others, and the sheer intractability of human nature — and Barry got progressively darker, even as it maintained a firm foothold in surreal silliness. The despairing 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 season premiere, "yikes," picks up shortly after last summer's finale. Back home in Joplin, Missouri, after killing a biker who attacked her, Sally (Sarah Goldberg) is further traumatized by the dysfunctional reception she gets from her dismissive, belittling mom (Romy Rosemont) and frantically solicitous dad (Michael Dempsey). NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) is now ensconced in a quiet rental house in Santa Fe with his boyfriend, Cristobal (Michael Irby), but he's still haunted by his horrifying ordeal at the hands of the Bolivian mafia. Having helped put Barry behind bars, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) can't suppress his outsized ego, which hungers more for glory than justice.

Meanwhile, a heartbroken Barry seethes in prison, pounding his knuckles bloody on the concrete wall and otherwise beating himself up for all the mistakes that led him there. "When I was feeling low, my mom used to say, 'Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done,'" says a prison guard (Michael Villar), hoping to calm the agitated inmate down. "I always liked that. It gave me hope."

In the final season, creators Hader and Alec Berg thoroughly interrogate that hope, continually questioning the belief that salvation is attainable even for the most damaged, and damage-causing, soul. None of the characters is ready to shed the destructive patterns of their past, and they seem stubbornly stymied by the idea that they have any other choice. Barry and his mentor-turned-tormentor, Fuches (Stephen Root), reunite in prison and have a brief rapprochement. "If I hadn't tried to understand myself, we wouldn't be here," Barry laments. Sally returns to L.A., where she's still Hollywood-toxic due to her "entitled c---" elevator rant last season. She finds herself back in Cousineau's studio, this time as the disgraced actor leading the class. After berating a nervous hopeful named Kristen (Ellyn Jameson) into delivering an emotional performance, the other students call out Sally for embracing Cousineau's abusive methods: "Just because it was done to you does not mean you need to do it to us."

It's a risk, having the characters revert to their calamitous, well-documented coping mechanisms — especially after the psyche-shattering events of season 3, which stripped Barry and everyone in his orbit down to a tangle of exposed nerves. This season's first two episodes feel tame by comparison. But just as an unsettling sense of sameness begins to seep in around the edges of the storytelling, Barry veers in an entirely different direction for the second half of the eight-episode season. (HBO made seven episodes available for review.) Spoiler sensitivity precludes much explanation, but everyone is forced to confront old challenges in new ways. The episodes prove to be an especially effective showcase for Goldberg, who brings a haunting, almost palpable gravity to Sally's deepening emotional ruin.

Hader continues to astonish. The star directs every episode this season, pacing the action with impressive equanimity and making profound use of sound over kinetic visuals. When Barry goads the prison guard into giving him a beating, the camera zooms slowly in on his face as he stands motionless, watching the guard approach. We hear footsteps on the concrete, and then the surge of surf crashing on sand — a callback to Barry's vision of the watery purgatory that awaits him when he dies, and a representation of his inner anguish. The camera pulls in closer and closer on Barry's face; the surf is replaced by the sounds of wind whooshing over an open plain, and blood begins to trickle down his forehead. For Barry Berkman, the true violence is internal. Hader was robbed of a directing Emmy for last season's magnificently tense motorcycle chase in "710N," and the Academy would be foolish to snub him again.

Barry breaks up the bleakness with regular bursts of playful absurdity. Hoping to launch a new money-making venture, Hank and Cristobal hold a summit between two rival cartels at Dave & Busters. Guillermo del Toro pops up as an imposing, fedora-wearing fixer; several of Fuches' associates engage in an earnest debate about which sequel is the loudest. Patrick Fischler (Twin Peaks) has a snappy arc as Lon O'Neil, a Skittles-eating Vanity Fair reporter looking to interview Cousineau, and the always-essential Robert Wisdom makes a welcome return as Janice Moss' impassively terrifying father.

Anthony Carrigan can still make a wide-eyed reaction shot hit harder than most punchlines, but the actor also delivers an increasingly heart-wrenching performance as Hank and Cristobal's relationship faces unexpected pressure from outside. He and Irby have wonderfully endearing chemistry, and our attachment to them is deepened by the very real fear that their dream of a happily ever after is impossible.

It stands to reason that if people can't be defined by the worst thing they've ever done, they can't expect to be redefined by all the good they do later. At one point in the season, Barry becomes fascinated with Abraham Lincoln. "He had this beautiful combination of pragmatism, optimism, and compromise," he marvels. But additional internet research unearths some less-than-savory facts about Honest Abe. "Turns out, he had a bunch of Native Americans killed. Executed. He also proposed to Black people that they go back to Africa," Barry says with a sigh. "News to me." The episode is called "tricky legacies," which could easily serve as a subtitle for this final season. The harder Barry's characters work to expunge their past from the emotional record, the deader they become. Grade: A-

Barry season 4 premieres Sunday, April 16, on HBO.

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