Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the series finale of Barry.Much has been made of Barry’s transformation from a high-concept crime comedy with dramatic elements to a tar-black tale of a hyper-destructive narcissist — arguably too much, considering the strain of dry, Coen-esque humor that runs through all but the darkest episodes. But even as the show’s tonal shifts grew ever more disorienting, one element remained consistent throughout Barry’s run: its trenchant, bitter Hollywood satire. It’s there from the very first episode, which introduces the titular hitman (Bill Hader) to a world of pompous acting coaches and hopeless mediocrities with delusions of stardom, and it’s there in the last episode, too.
There is, of course, no shortage of Hollywood satire; whether it’s in film or television, few subjects fascinate Tinseltown more than itself. But Barry separated itself from the pack by focusing its satire on the state of the industry right now, instead of the things that have always been true about it. In Barry’s Hollywood, streaming services cancel promising new shows based on arbitrary metrics; Oscar-winning directors are put in charge of empty superhero spectacles and expected to act happy about it; the creators of brainless sitcom fluff go on talk shows and get choked up over the importance of their work. It is, in short, our Hollywood, and the end of the series finale drives that point home.
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How Does 'Barry' End?
Barry Berkman was never going to live his dream life. Even in the heightened reality of Barry, where important gang business is conducted inside a Dave & Buster’s, some things just aren’t possible. A psychologically damaged hitman, wanted by both the law and the criminal underworld, is never going to become a famous movie star with a loving family, especially when said hitman refuses to take responsibility for his crimes in any real way. Even when he got the opportunity to escape and have some kind of normal life with his love interest Sally (Sarah Goldberg), he turned it into a nightmare, his paranoid, controlling nature making Sally miserable and their son John (Zachary Golinger) lonely and maladjusted. The best he could hope for, then, is to leave some kind of positive legacy behind, to make his mark on the world — maybe even in Hollywood. And against all odds, that’s exactly what happened. Well, sort of.
At the end of “wow,” Barry’s final episode, Sally is now a single mother and a high school drama teacher, as well-adjusted as she could possibly hope to be. She allows John (now played by Jaeden Martell) to go to a sleepover with his friend, and the two sit down to watch a movie: The Mask Collector, the “true story” of John’s dad, Barry Berkman. Instead of showing what actually happened — Barry being manipulated into crime by his handler Fuches (Stephen Root), then spiraling and destroying dozens of lives thanks to his own ego — The Mask Collector portrays “Barry” (played here by Jim Cummings) as blameless throughout, and recasts one of his victims, acting coach Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), as the true mastermind.
Here, it’s “Gene” (Michael Cumpsty, ominous and British) who got Barry involved with the Chechens, not Fuches (who is completely absent); instead of showing Barry killing Gene’s detective love interest Janice Moss, the movie has “Gene” do it himself before informing on “Barry.” After escaping from prison, “Barry” rescues his family from the Chechens and confronts “Gene,” who fatally shoots him. Finally, at the end of The Mask Collector, we learn the final fates of both men: Gene has been blamed and imprisoned for the deaths of Janice and Barry, and Barry has been buried in Arlington with full military honors. It’s a moment of bitter irony: a decent man framed as a murderer, and a monster remembered by all (including his son) as a hero.
'Barry's Outstanding Direction Makes 'The Mask Collector' Look Like Hackwork
At first, it reads like a typical criticism of Hollywood’s tendency to reject the truth in favor of sensational fiction. But then again, as far as anyone in the Barry universe knows (aside from Gene, Sally, and a few others), this is the true story. Gene became the fall guy, and any record of Barry’s prolific career as a hitman has disappeared into the criminal underworld with Fuches. The audience knows better because they watched the rest of the show — and because they watched the rest of the show, another layer of irony reveals itself, and Barry’s Hollywood satire gets a nice cherry placed on top.
Throughout its four-season run, Barry has been one of the best-directed shows on television. Bill Hader started directing with Season 2’s exhilarating “ronny/lily,” and proved himself to be an absolute natural; from there, he directed most of Season 3 and the entirety of Season 4. Hader demonstrated outstanding command of action set pieces ("710N"'s dizzying motorcycle chase as well as the entirety of “ronny/lily”), nailed moments of suspense and horror (that lingering shot of an empty doorway in “it takes a psycho,” Sally’s hallucination in “tricky legacies”), and sustained a disorienting atmosphere pitched somewhere between the Coens and David Lynch. Hader has spoken of making movies after Barry, and we can only hope he’s given the budget and freedom to do whatever he wants.
The Mask Collector does not look like it was directed by Bill Hader. It looks exactly like hundreds of other pieces of mediocre true crime content, the kind of glossy “prestige” schlock currently clogging cable TV and streaming services. The camera moves exactly as you imagine it would, filming conversations with dutiful shot-reverse coverage and moving into shaky handheld mode whenever “Barry” has war flashbacks. The lighting and cinematography suggest an anonymous Netflix movie straining for a “cinematic” style. There’s an omnipresent soundtrack of ambient music cues that sound like placeholder music on NCIS. A few episodes earlier, the Barry Berkman biopic was high-profile enough that there were talks of Daniel Day-Lewis playing Gene; instead, it’s just another forgettable TV movie for people to half-watch while folding their laundry.
At the end of Babylon, another work with plenty to say about Hollywood, the disillusioned main character watches Singin’ in the Rain in a movie theater, his anger at the entertainment machine melting away through the magic of cinema. His friends and coworkers from the Silent era may all be dead or forgotten, but through celluloid, they achieve something like immortality. The final scene in Barry plays like a modern, more cynical version of that ending. John may shed a tear after watching a movie about his father, but no one else will. After four seasons of watching this gripping story unfold under the skillful eye of a masterful director, we see what it amounted to for the world of Barry at large: nothing but content, churned out by an indifferent entertainment industry, likely to be forgotten in a week or two. As far as modern Hollywood satire goes, you couldn’t ask for a more fitting capper.
