In the ‘Barry’ Finale, Hollywood Gets Away with Murder
This article includes spoilers for the “Barry” series finale.
When “Barry” premiered, the dark HBO comedy seemed like a classic two-track TV series: There was the crime story, and there was the showbiz story. Its oddball premise followed Barry Berkman (the star, co-creator and director Bill Hader), a traumatized ex-Marine turned hit man who took up acting as a respite from his deadly day job.
One path of the series tabulated Barry’s body count as he became entangled in the L.A. mob wars, made fitful attempts at redemption and blazed through a series of one last jobs. Another path circled the outskirts of Hollywood fame, as Barry joined an acting class taught by the well-cured ham Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and dated Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), a talented but struggling fellow student.
But by the final season, which ended Sunday, those two paths had merged like strands of L.A. freeway. The brutality of show business, the performativity of murder — they are all, in “Barry,” part of the same production.
Series like “The Sopranos,” whose mobsters quoted “The Godfather” like gospel, have played with the idea of criminals imitating the Hollywood conception of themselves. But most such stories tend to be more comfortable on one side of the divide than the other; Christopher Moltisanti’s attempt to break into screenwriting on “The Sopranos,” for instance, was not among the series’s finest moments.
Source: The New York Times
