I feel like it’s almost unfair to evaluate the Barry finale right now if, like many of us, you watched it immediately after finishing Succession, which just knocked it out of the park. I do feel a little underwhelmed by Barry, but that could just be the inherent contrast between the styles of the respective shows – one with all the grandiosity of a Shakespearean tragedy, and one a left-handed pitch black Coen-esque satire. It’s like returning home from a performance of Macbeth by the Royal Shakespeare Company and immediately watching Barton Fink. It just feels slight in the afterglow of the Succession finale. I’m going to give it a few days and watch it again.
What I’m grappling with right now is the idea that, because subversion is so inherently baked into the DNA of Barry, this final season has at times felt like Bill Hader, co-creator Alec Berg, and the rest of the creative team were trying to subvert their own subversion, if that makes sense. I still think there has been an incredible economy of storytelling throughout Season 4 given the narrative corners into which they wrote themselves at the end of each previous season. The finale just hit me in a somewhat sudden, rushed, and muted way, similar to the way in which Barry is shot in the head by Cousineau; perhaps that’s the point. My knee-jerk reaction was that Barry ended in a less classically “satisfying” manner than Succession. The more I think about it though, the more I do think Hader, Berg, and crew kind of nailed it, and ended Barry on a fairly strong note that is fully in keeping with the established tone and vision of the show.
But I think Succession did as well, and perhaps slightly more effectively. I guess in the end, it comes down to personal preference/expectations. I just really enjoyed seeing the character seeds sown throughout the run of Succession finally reach full bloom – the violent, petulant entitlement of Kendall, the crumbling incompetence of Roman, Shiv being simultaneously the smoothest operator in the room and naively ill-equipped to combat the incessant misogyny that undermines her at every turn, the spineless yet efficient maneuvering of Tom, even Greg the parasite…those defining elements of their characters were perfectly crystalized in the finale. And that, to me, is ultimately the point of Succession – a character study that, in its examination of these abhorrent people, reflects the power lust that drives so many ambitious people in the world today, its accompanying ugliness and degradation of the soul, and how that intersection of ruthless enterprise and moral decay is increasingly best exemplified and amplified by the obscenely wealthy.
Ultimately, it was Tom, the human embodiment of obsequiousness, a man who wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who was able to most successfully satiate that lust and “come out on top,” so to speak. His whole life has seemingly been about striving, not even for the throne, but for a seat next to the throne. He has a reverence for the power he so nakedly desires that the Roy kids don’t have because, unlike them, he wasn’t to the manner born. His craven nature is also what makes him valuable to someone like Matsson – too cowardly to ever make a real power play against him, but competent and malleable enough to mold himself into whatever shape those in power need him to take (Donald Rumsfeld comes to mind as a comparable real life high-level stooge, equal parts opportunistic and non-threatening). Because the Roy kids have felt entitled to power and been groomed to inherit it from birth, they take it for granted, and therefore lack the “killer instinct” needed to ever actually seize it and wield it effectively (or for very long before tripping over their own hubris).
Barry, on the other hand, seems like a much more pointed story about the fragility of modern masculinity, the violence it begets, and the absurd degrees to which our society not only enables this, but celebrates it. With those parameters defined pretty early on, it allowed Hader to get really get avant-garde within that framework. It led to Seasons 2-4 featuring several really big, wild swings in both form and content (ronny/lily, the highway biker gang chase, the tiger, the evolution of Hank and Cristobal’s relationship, the time jump, etc.) that resulted in some of the most compelling television of the last few years. I also think that, due to the ever-changing structure and rapid pace of the show, the characters could, at times, become lost in the roles of purveyors of plot or vessels for experimental storytelling, particularly these last two seasons.
I do think Barry was incredibly successful in taking a somewhat boilerplate “troubled anti-hero” main character and by the end of four seasons, have the audience fully invested in his arc while simultaneously thinking, “Fuck. This. Guy.” He, in no uncertain terms, sucks. And by the end, he is so sociopathically devoid of self-awareness that the audience feels a sense of relief when Cousineau finally puts a bullet in his head. And that’s a pretty neat trick for a show to pull off – to get the audience to actively root against the protagonist.
It almost feels like, starting with Season 3, Hader is thinking, “I really, really don’t want people to celebrate Barry they way they did Walter White, so I’m going to make it painfully obvious that he is an irreparably damaged shell of a man incapable of positive change or growth, who’s only lasting legacy is violence, death, and the ruin of those unfortunate enough to get close to him. He sucks.” But it may have come at the expense of Barry feeling like a real person. I think Sally, Cousineau, Fuches, and Hank all acquit themselves nicely and find nuance and shades of humanity within their deeply flawed characters. By the end, Barry was just so cartoonishly narcissistic and delusional, to the point that it does feel like Bill Hader is taking the audience by the shoulders, shaking them, and screaming, “STOP LIONIZING MEN LIKE THIS, DUMMIES.”
The key difference, then, between these two shows might ultimately be how sympathy is employed. As Barry begins, we, the audience, are expected to sympathize with him. We are asked to see him as an unfortunate victim of circumstance. But the more time we spend with him, the more we see how he performs sensitivity and revels in the pain of his trauma as a way to smokescreen his own repugnant nature – both from himself and those close to him – and as a result, we sympathize with him less and less as the show progresses.
Conversely, the Roy family are so reprehensible and unlikable from the beginning that the more time we spend with them, the more we can see the faintest glimmer of humanity floundering inside their increasingly corroded souls. We learn more about them and begin to understand why they are the way that they are, which allows our sympathy for them to expand, whilst still finding their actions and the way they treat people to be utterly irredeemable.
Didn’t think I’d end up writing a whole dissertation on the contrasting natures of Barry and Succession, and I don’t know if any of the above actually makes any sense. But this was an exceptionally great night of television, and I have opinions about it, dammit!
