'Barry' Season 4 Review: HBO's Bill Hader Dramedy Wraps With Its Most Thrilling and Ambitious Moves Yet

'Barry' Season 4 Review: HBO's Bill Hader Dramedy Wraps With Its Most Thrilling and Ambitious Moves Yet,Bill Hader returns for Barry's fourth and final season on HBO, about a hitman turned actor seeking redemption.

‘Barry’ Season 4 Review: HBO’s Bill Hader Dramedy Wraps With Its Most Thrilling and Ambitious Moves Yet

Bill Hader in ‘Barry’Merrick Morton/HBO

As Barry returns, its title character (Bill Hader), still reeling from the events of the season three finale, finds himself screaming at his own reflection in a prison bathroom. A guard — who happens to have been a fan of Barry’s work in Laws of Humanity — catches him and tries to provide a bit of reassurance.

“I know they say you did a bad thing. But I’m sure you’re not a bad guy,” he offers. It’s a tempting idea, and one Barry’s clung to all series long as the bodies pile up behind him. This time, though, he rejects the idea so forcefully he’s beaten bloody by the initially sympathetic guard. For a moment, it almost seems he’s been able to see himself clearly for who he truly is, how much damage he’s truly left in his wake.

Barry

The Bottom LineReaches new heights of ambition — and new depths of darkness.Airdate: 10 p.m. Sunday, April 16 (HBO)Cast: Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, Henry Winkler, Anthony Carrigan, Stephen Root, Robert WisdomCreators: Alec Berg, Bill Hader

Of course, it doesn’t last. In its fourth and final season, the HBO dramedy lays out some of its most thrilling and most ambitious moves yet, pushing its characters into territory we scarcely could have imagined at the start of their journeys. But it never loses sight of its darkest, funniest and most fundamental truth: Wherever these people go, there they are.

As with Succession and Better Call Saul, Barry seems to have taken its looming end as a challenge to dial up its ambitions, and fine-tune its established strengths. I’d argue that the show stopped really being a comedy at least a year ago, no matter what the Emmy nominations say. But this season’s first few chapters recapture some of the playful, almost sweet spirit of earlier installments. (Only on Barry would a pair of mobsters launch their latest scheme from “the bestest place on the earth” — a Dave & Buster’s in Torrance.)

While there’s no single bravura action set-piece a la “710N,” Hader, who directed the entire new season, once again demonstrates his knack for striking and fluid compositions. He nails the wit in a perfectly timed car crash, or the desolate beauty in an empty field.

Meanwhile, the show continues dancing on the tightrope between understanding these characters and forgiving their behavior, while drawing new notes from people with whom we’ve spent years. Perhaps none are more dramatically deepened than NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan). Initially, he seems to have found his happily-ever-after in Santa Fe with Cristobal (Michael Irby), who sighs that he feels like he’s “in a magical kingdom, finally able to feel happy and safe.” But after his harrowing escape from the Bolivians in “starting now,” the cheerful Chechen who used to get shit for being too “soft” increasingly reveals a more ruthless and more desperate edge — yielding some of Carrigan’s richest, and most devastating, work to date.

In retrospect, Hank’s hardening was probably inevitable on a series that’s long been concerned with the pesky tendency of one’s past to catch up to one’s present. History feels almost unnervingly present in the first few episodes.

From Barry’s mind’s eye, a cell wall gives way to the grassy plain where, as a child, he met Fuches (Stephen Root) for the very first time, while a set of stairs along the prison yard become the steps where acting students used to huddle before Gene (Henry Winkler) started class. Sally (Sarah Goldberg), too, finds herself looking backward. A trip to her Missouri hometown offers a glimpse of the chilly upbringing that made her into the dysfunctional woman we know her to be today: Her mother responds to the news that her daughter was dating a murderer not with concern or sympathy but with a withering, “You sure can pick ’em.”

But with its ending in sight, Barry increasingly sets its sights on the future as well. The series grapples with its own legacy in the process of leaving one. The usual showbiz-satire angle is muted in comparison to seasons past, to my very slight disappointment, as even Sally and Gene are mostly distracted by more urgent matters. (Sally does still find time to try and steal a role in a Wonder Woman-esque blockbuster directed, in a note-perfect touch, by CODA’s Sian Heder.) But the show’s awareness of its own place within that pop cultural landscape feels sharper than ever.

That prison guard gives Barry the benefit of the doubt because he knows him from TV, just as we’ve so often given this antihero the benefit of the doubt because we love watching him on TV. Later, when Barry’s story inevitably becomes fodder for an upcoming movie, his victim’s loved ones object that it’s “glorifying a psychopath.” The same could and has been argued about Barry and other antihero dramas of its ilk, not to mention true crime shows like [gestures vaguely, because there are too many to list].

It could also be said about any number of stories the characters in Barry tell about each other, and themselves. Whether the show succeeds in avoiding that trap will surely be left for viewers to argue about for months or years to come.

For its part, however, the series works to frame Barry and the ugly business surrounding him as disturbing rather than charming. It’s intentional about what it shows or obscures of the violence that’s woven into its characters’ lives — often leaving the acts themselves offscreen, while the camera lingers on the mottled bruises or shell-shocked expressions left behind. It spells out the fantasies that characters like Barry and Gene and Sally harbor about who they are or could become, and then watches as they shatter their own dreams one questionable decision at a time.

It makes for a rather bleak watch, even by Barry’s own harrowing standards — and even as Barry continues to turn in an awesome combination of artistry and entertainment week after week. After seeing seven of the season’s eight half-hour chapters, I could not tell you what I want to see happen for these characters, let alone what will. What is clear is that the show intends to go out with a bang.

Years ago, when the series started, its very premise sounded like a joke: A hitman? Who wants to act? Obvious comedy gold. Four years and countless bodies later, Barry is intent on showing us what the cost of that joke has been — for the people in the story but also for everyone else it reaches, unsuspecting bystanders and HBO viewers alike.