The Barry Series Finale: Are Audiences Wrong To Want A Feel-Good Ending?
Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist
While Succession was driving the online conversation for HBO this year, ‘Barry’ was flying under the radar with its final season wrapping up, probably coincidentally, on the same night as Succession. While Succession had more audience-friendly intrigue about who would “win,” Barry’s intrigue was mostly over how badly the titular character would lose.
We’ve had anti-heroes in television before, to the point that, arguably, the five best TV dramas are all centered around anti-heroes. But we’ve never had an anti-hero quite like Barry Berkman, in that calling him a hero, even with an “anti” in front, seems to spit in the face of all heroes and anti-heroes alike.
From the moment Barry famously said, “Starting……..now” at the end of season 1, there was no doubt that Barry’s future was not in Happy Ending Land. Sure, television has a funny way of turning around even the darkest of souls on television. However, the intelligent audience knew that any positive transformation for Barry Berkman would be insulting to who the character was.
Yes, he is a tragic figure in a sense; war brought out the worst in him. But his choices after the war, blinded by irrationality, were based on self-preservation and short-term thinking.
So the anticipation of the series finale of ‘Barry” was based on wondering how badly he would meet his fate and whether his family would be collateral damage.
However, the show ends in a bit of a surprise, not with how Barry meets his end, but with the autobiographical movie “The Mask Collector,” finally released by Warner Bros, closing the series. The surprise is how it spins Barry as the hero of his story and Gene Cousineau as the cold-blooded villain. With the show ending with a slight smile from Berkman’s son, ‘Barry’ seemingly points the finger at the audience for preferring tidy, feel-good stories with clear delineations of heroes and villains vs. more nuanced portrayals of good and evil.
As much as I love this show, I wonder if this was the proper ending. For starters, unlike other anti-hero shows, where audiences were rooting for the bad guy to succeed (see Walter White, Tony Soprano) and receive satisfying endings (Walter White, Saul Goodman), there was never any audience doubt that Barry Berkman was a bad guy and irredeemable. Maybe the commentary is more aimed at Hollywood than audiences, but I want to explore whether it is bad for audiences to want a straightforward morality tale.
Most of us (outside of die-hard cable news watchers, and don’t worry, we’ll get back to them) understand that humanity’s soul is messy, with heroes being flawed and bad guys having some good inside them. But the fundamental purpose of entertainment is to be inspirational, not just for greedy reasons (leaving a movie feeling good about humanity is an addictive feeling), but also because it leaves the audience wanting to better themselves.
I think of the movie ‘Braveheart’ as it relates to this because Fuches, in season 2, specifically brought up how the famous William Wallace speech before the battle of Stirling was made up, feeding into the notion that Hollywood and audiences would prefer feel-good b.s. than realistic portrayals of life.
I won’t dive into the argument that historical accuracy doesn’t matter in movies like ‘Braveheart’, but one piece of the argument matters here. ‘Braveheart’ is not meant to be a faithful retelling of the life of William Wallace. It’s intended to be a movie about the importance of ideals like freedom from tyrannies, and William Wallace’s speech beautifully amplifies that message (it still gives me chills today).
Programming that centers around more subtle and complicated messages gets lavished with critical praise, but that doesn’t mean programming around feel-good messaging doesn’t, and shouldn’t matter.
Take a more recent movie, Top Gun: Maverick, which might have saved the movie industry, according to Steven Spielberg, the master of feel-good cinema. Top Gun: Maverick could have been a more nuanced, darker movie about how dangerous a grown man with juvenile instincts would be for the armed forces and our country.
But what does that messaging achieve in the end?
Oh, it might make us look more critically at our heroes and the armed forces, but does it inspire us to recognize that you can remedy past mistakes and live the life you have always wanted, the way Top Gun: Maverick did?
Which version of that movie is better for the soul?
When it comes back to the Barry Berkman movie in the series finale, no one wants a movie that grossly distorts the past like that version did, portraying an innocent man as guilty as sin. And, if it needs to be said, that choice was made for comedy more than any serious commentary (if only they could have convinced Daniel Day-Lewis to play Cousineau).
You could make the same point about William Wallace in Braveheart. Given his era, he most likely was a horrible person by today’s standards. Should William Wallace be portrayed as a good man, a hero?
Historians might scoff, but I need to remind you again: movies aren’t meant to be documentaries. More to the point, there’s something, dare I say, Christian, about the notion that there’s something good to say about even the worst of humanity. And even if the only thing good about William Wallace was that he fought bravely for freedom for his people, an ideal we still hold today, that is something worth lauding.
Much like we criticize sin without criticizing the sinner, we can still laud the good in someone without calling the person good. After all, if a person cannot do anything praiseworthy once he has done some evil acts, what is the point of the person trying to do anything good?
But, if Hollywood did make a Barry Berkman movie, without a doubt, they would have portrayed Berkman as sympathetically as possible (American Sniper would have been the model), which is ‘Barry’s’ point and not an illegitimate one.
However, we could look at Barry Berkman’s life and see it two ways: the way Bill Hader sees it, which is there’s a point of no return for certain types of people or the way I see it: there is always a new path forward towards goodness no matter how low you have sunk, and sometimes they need society’s help to do that.
Ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer: that’s the beauty of life and art. You can find examples of both in a world of 6 billion people. But in a world where the movie Hollywood would make out of Barry Berkman’s life emphasizes how society failed Berkman and he tried to be good, but we let him down, it is not an inherently false message. It may inspire us to look at our veterans differently and treat them with all the compassion and respect they deserve, and most importantly, encouraging them to channel their trauma through the arts is an ideal worth emphasizing.
The message I’ve decided to take from ‘Barry’ is no one is ever irredeemable, but redemption isn’t luck or fate; it’s a choice: a choice to either look at the world egocentrically or look at how, despite the life you’ve lived, and the choices you have made, there is always a new opportunity to do good, to make someone’s life better.
It’s not an impossible choice; after all, it’s a choice Fuches made successfully in the series finale, sparing Barry’s son after vowing vengeance. Fuches (in an admittedly twisted, comical way) may be the character we all feel good about in Barry.
It is not wrong to want a more straightforward, audience-friendly morality tale because, in the end, what we will be remembered by is the good that we have done in life, even if, for some people, that still leaves them a bad person. The good is what we want to live on because the good is always the best of us, and we should always celebrate what is the best of humanity.
Epilogue
I brought up die-hard cable news fans earlier. I wonder if Barry’s last episode was also aimed at them. If you are a Fox News/MSNBC viewer, the world of politics has clear lines of heroes and villains. There is no gray, no nuance, and everything will be spun in a way that comforts the audiences’ preexisting political viewpoints.
To put it another way, the Barry Berkman movie that came out would not have been released as is by Warner Bros (as said before, this was for comedic intent). While Hollywood does prefer less nuanced storytelling, they wouldn’t put out such a jingoistic, feel-good movie about a guy like Berkman in 2023. But, if Berkman were a right-wing hero, for whatever reason (maybe because he’s a war vet!), wouldn’t Fox News be the first to tell a story almost blow for blow in the same fashion as the movie?
Maybe our Hollywood storytellers are not the problem; maybe our news media wanting to be storytellers instead of nuanced reporters is the real problem.
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