Has there ever been a comedy series that’s been darker than Barry? Every season we think that the show can’t get any darker or any more violent, and it ends up doing both. The show’s final season starts with Barry Berkman in prison and very much in his own head, and we have no doubts that it’s not going to suddenly turn into some chipper guffaw-fest.
Opening Shot: As a couple of corrections officers watch the press conference about the arrest off Barry Berkman (Bill Hader), Barry is being led to his cell in the background.
The Gist: Barry is in prison because of the successful sting to capture him, led by his acting teacher/substitute father Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom), for the murder of Jim’s daughter and Gene’s girlfriend, Detective Janice Moss (Paula Newsome).
Barry’s first phone call is to Gene, who’s at the press conference. Even though Barry expresses his love for Gene, all Gene says is, “I got you.”
Meanwhile, Sally (Sarah Goldberg) is on her way to her hometown of Joplin, and she’s still reeling from killing the biker that threatened Barry and almost strangled her. She finds out about Barry as she lands, and as she lets out her rage over dating a murderer, her mom just thinks she’s being her usual dramatic self.
Fuches (Stephen Root) sees Barry in the prison lunchroom and understandable fears for his life. He goes to the feds and tells them he’ll wear a wire and get Barry to admit to the murders he committed when he and Fuches worked together. His first clumsy attempt at trying to get Barry to talk, though, just elicits an apology from Barry; if Barry didn’t take that acting class to work on himself, they both wouldn’t be there.
Hank (Anthony Carrigan) and Cristobal (Michael Irby) are living in domestic bliss in Santa Fe, but when they hear from their landlord about the shortage of construction-grade sand, Cristobal gets an idea about a new racket that will get them back to Los Angeles. Hank is at first reluctant; he wants to put down roots with Cristobal in New Mexico. But when he sees the news about Barry, he changes his mind, figuring he needs to help his friend.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At this point, it’s hard to envision a show that combines absurdly funny moments with extraordinarily frightening violence and psychological drama quite like Barry does.
Our Take: Hader and his co-creator, Alec Berg, likely has this four-season arc in mind for Barry Berkman at some point early in the show’s run. We knew that at some point Barry’s violent nature was going to catch up with him, despite the cool efficiency with which he did his job. This all comes to a head in the final season, which looks like it’s going to get even darker than the first three.
The dramatic moments of Barry are so dramatic now, like Barry’s desperate phone call to Gene or, in Season 2, his scene with Sarah when she visits, asking whether “our dog Muffin” (i.e. the biker) was going to be taken care of, that sometimes the comedic moments are pure absurdity. The correction officers treating Barry like a celebrity, for instance, or the myriad animal heads Sarah’s dad has mounted in her former room. But they’re still funny, and it helps to balance out the pure dramatic moments.
And, outside of Barry, there are still character moments that are funny and consistent with what we saw before. Sarah is still one of the most self-centered characters on the show, and now her career is in a shambles because of the viral c-word rant to Natalie (D’Arcy Carden) and the fact that she dated a killer. But now that we’ve seen her parents, we’re actually more empathetic towards her; her dad is a feckless goofball (“Murder? Yikes.”) and her mother is a toxic mess.
Gene is Gene; he’s going to take the whole Barry thing and make it all about himself, because that’s what Gene does. He warns Jim to not talk to a Vanity Fair reporter about the case, then he contacts the same reporter and tells him he wants to talk.
Fuches is always about self-preservation, but he seems to take a turn at the end of the episode when he sees Barry after Barry baited one of the starstruck COs into beating him. Will he become that father figure Barry always wanted? Nah, that’s just not Fuches.
Then we get to Hank and Cristobal. Carrigan has done such a fantastic job of balancing Hank’s inherent silliness with a nuanced dramatic side that has been satisfying to watch over the years, and Hank is as serious as he’s ever been this season. But, because of Carrigan’s performance for the entire series, we believe Hank has this toughness in him. After all, he’s survived far longer than both his fellow Chechens and Cristobal’s fellow Bolivians have, so there has to be something there, right?
Usually, when a show gets to the point where all the primary characters are in their own worlds, it’s a sign that the creators are running out of story ideas, and the fact that these characters aren’t bouncing off each other anymore diminishes what made the show so good in the first place. Barry is certainly the exception to that, mainly because everyone’s individual journeys into darkness are so compellingly written.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Gene sits in his kitchen and calls the reporter, “I’m going to tell you how Gene Cousineau caught Barry Berkman.”
Sleeper Star: Romy Rosemont plays Sally’s mother, and she plays her toxicity very well, ignoring Sally’s primal screams in the car and caring more about what the family of Sally’s abusive ex Sam thinks about Sally naming him in her pilot than about Sarah’s actual feelings.
Most Pilot-y Line: There really wasn’t a bad line in this first episode, but a scene where Barry is in the prison yard and hallucinates Sally and the rest of the acting class congregating by the wall reminded us how much we’ve missed the dynamic of that setting during the last two seasons.
Our Call: STREAM IT. 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.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.