I haven't listened to the always insightful podcasts Hader does with Sean Fennessey at The Ringer yet so I'm not sure how he'd present this season, but after 3 episodes it feels like an extreme flex. He's directing every episode apparently, and while the show can still be genuinely funny a lot of the humor seems to be tucked into the sort of film nerd details he's repeatedly expressed an appreciation for since the show began. For example, Patrick Fischer as a Vanity Fair profiler. The role is played really straight, but if audiences have a history with him, it's not just his Skittles habit that's worth a laugh.


Still, I'm willing to bet the people still watching this show are gonna either enjoy that it's doubling down on themes that have crept like a slug from the background to the foreground or feel like the show's gotten more serious than it ever implied it would and lost what made it such a curious balance of acutely believe goofball comedy with deadly serious noir tributes.


Personally, I think Hader's got too much of a mind for what's funny about dark stories (see: Henry Winkler and Fred Melamed breaking into a house in E3) to fully alter the feel of this show, but I think he and his writers have also come to recognize they don't like these characters much (see: everything with Barry, or Sally's first acting lesson) and, IMO bravely, have decided to - forgive the pun - bury them all.


I think this season, and ultimately how the show is seen as a whole, is going to be fascinatingly divisive. I'm of the belief Hader knows what he wants this show's ultimate message to be - he's directing every episode of this final season, right? - but I wonder if the audience will go for it.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

Because inevitably if a main character is in prison, you have to resort to familiar formulas. No drop off in quality otherwise though.

It looks like Barry might be out now though? Hopefully it will set up more interactions with the other characters for the rest of the series.

had no idea that was G Del toro he was great. the gadget foreshadowing with armisted n the pen gun was great too i was dyin.

fav show on tv right now.

got him speaking German and shit

The Fonz is about to get it

This show is fuckin genius sometimes.

Like the OP said, this show is flexing every chance it gets, and I love it.

Ultimately, I just don't find it funny.

That is the most compelling scene in tv I can recall in a long time. Also to be fair, I haven’t watched a lot of tv, but damn.

Maybe because he was blinded by love and had been recently buried in sand but why not play the role until you could gtfo safely?

>That is the most compelling scene in tv I can recall in a
>long time. Also to be fair, I haven’t watched a lot of tv,
>but damn.

...consistently. These last two eps in particular have been fucking downers in nearly every way possible. Hader is doing great acting work as someone who's trying to go from overt psycho to the world's most boring human. But there was only one attempt at a laugh this last episode.

Cherry-picking the YouTube videos as undeniable proof for everything was pretty hilarious

And I'm not mad at all, since those are my favorite seasons of two of my all time favorite shows.

I saw some talk online that Hader sat in in the writers room for BCS season 6. I didn't read details because I was avoiding spoilers at the time. The time-jump, for one thing, would have been a really big spoiler that they must be planning to contrast with BCS in some way.



I have a feeling we'll be back to some amount of overt comedy for the closing episodes. For one thing, Gene's back, and you can't have Gene for long without some great comedy ensuing.

I think this first post-time-jump episode just had to be especially austere to get the audience to feel the narrative weight. That said, I liked the more Lynchian elements and I feel like great shows should end how their creators want them to end, so I'll enjoy it regardless.

>I have a feeling we'll be back to some amount of overt comedy
>for the closing episodes. For one thing, Gene's back, and you
>can't have Gene for long without some great comedy ensuing.

I certainly hope so. Gene is about the only source of humor left on the show. The Noho Hank stuff in the first episodes was incredibly funny (especially everything involving Dave & Busters), but you can't go back to funny in that subplot. Even with Gene, it's tough because before the beard, the last thing we saw him do was shoot his son. It'll be a tough needle to thread in order to go back to him being ridiculous with his agent.

I wish it had been a dream sequence instead of this depressing mundane life. I also didn't see Sally's character arch going this way; after the last episode, it felt off for her to run away with Barry. But maybe she's just as crazy as he is.

I feel bad for their son; it will be a mess when it all comes crashing down, and I assume the cycle will repeat itself.

Seeing bearded Gene was the highlight for me; Winkler looked so silly with the long hair and beard.

Also, does this mean that Barry will end up going after everyone? I don't see him stopping at Cousineau if he can kill him. He has to go after Hank and everyone else who left him behind or tried to put him in Jail.

… so I’d imagine he found a good amount of the last episode pretty funny. I kept cracking up at all the Lincoln shit and the YouTube videos. Also loved him readjusting to the porch swing in order to create the perfect setting for his hero story.

But yeah, it’s definitely a show that’s been increasingly less funny with time. Or, at bare minimum, a different type of funny.

They were trying to establish where Barry & Sally are 8-10 years after we last saw them. That's a big jump & they had some big changes, so they were trying to set a baseline for us.

I laughed at those baseball videos and at the very end when he decides what he has to do about Cousineau. I mean, he just spent 10 years hiding in the desert because you kept doing this.

I agree that I do miss some of the funnier parts of the show. My girl is expecting the remaining eps to be dark. She doesn't think that ANYONE on the show will have a happy ending and I think I agree with her.

Its funny af still. Just dark(er) af

But I also think There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread are hilarious, or all three of Eggers’ movies, so I get that I’m primed for where it seems this is going.

I definitely think it helps to know Hader not only watches a lot of true crime, but finds the absurdity of its real stakes and consequences hilarious.

This is a bold turn for the show on its face, but I wouldn’t say it’s actually shifted that much. This is an admittedly stupid reference but he’s kind of asking us to hit the slopes like Cillian Murphy in the third act of Inception. He’s revealing his hand, not shuffling the deck.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

The guy's attempt to hook up with Sally for example.

For me, I enjoy this show most when all of our faves are interacting with each other. Hard to go wrong with a Barry and Hank scene for example. Barry spent the whole first half of the season in jail and now with the time jump everyone is even further apart. I go into every week thinking that they are going to get the band back together finally but it never happens.

Its funny af still. Just dark(er) af

What a gift


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

You know Bunny’s watching!

This is what I've been asking for!

This show is such fuckin genius.

And The Fonz is as indispensable as anyone.

Ep 7 is dynamite!

So random and so fucking good.

That narration from Bunny felt lifted straight out of that game, I even had to make sure they hadn't cast Lenval Brown to do it.


The housekeeper HR meeting was this show at its finest. Though the idea of DDL/Wahlberg is almost too funny to be funny. Awesome.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

Whole season has been flames.

I think it’s still funny as shit.

>
Oh, wow

Barry and Succession have no business being compared as they are two very different shows but I guess it's difficult not to as they've both ended tonight...I just don't get why people aren't as dialed into this as Succession (which I also enjoyed, don't get me wrong).

All of season 4 was basically prepping us for the fact that no one was really going to come out unscathed when this was all said and done...a promise that they mostly stuck with, but I still can't believe how floored I was by the ending.

MAN I wish Hader hadn't stopped doing the weekly Prestige TV podcasts due to the writer's strike...

this show never seems to spark that much discussion, but it's just so fucking good.

maybe that's a positive thing idk. some shows are really fun to deep dive into and talk about after the fact. Barry's just an experience, or something.

After he purchased the guns, he went through the toys aisle and the baby aisle with all that shit on his back and no one batted an eye or said a word. The fact he was able to buy the guns while being a fugitive…History being rewritten…Social commentary like a mug.

The way he just marched up to that Wal-Mart employee and snarled "guns!" and she was just like "which fuckin' ones, bud?!"


Couldn't help but cackle at that.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

Good season. I still can't really understand how this show works. It's such a weird premise with weird characters but it works so well.

I love the over top moments like that final battle.

I always hesitate to criticize a show that's as great as this show is, because a) what the hell do I know about how to construct a story of this scale?, and b) maybe I just haven't seen it enough and thought about it enough yet. Also, I wouldn't have been disappointed if not for the fact that this was such a stellar and tightly constructed story thus far.

But despite some great moments in the finale, overall it felt kinda rushed and I don't think they tied everything up as skillfully as they had before.

Ultimately I just think they had too much to clean up in a single half-hour show. I wish they'd given themselves a full hour. And I wish they'd planned out more elements of the finale in advance. (Hader has implied that they had the idea for the "Mask Collector" movie way back in season 2, but it doesn't seem like they figured out a clean way to get to that planned endpoint.)

My biggest complaint is the Jim Moss/Gene/Barry resolution. They'd set up Jim Moss as some kind of supercop, as masterful at his job as everybody else was ultimately incompetent (except Janice). But then he gets so thrown by the $250,000 that he shifts ALL of the blame to Gene? And he leaves Barry to wake up and escape the garage on his own with no further questions? If they'd taken the time, I guess a logical argument would have been that Jim couldn't question Barry legally anyway after he basically kidnapped him, so he'd have to let Barry go regardless -- but the way they showed it just looked like Jim suddenly dropped the ball. Or I guess this could just be another example of a character in this show seeming competent until their veneer is cracked and everything collapses.

And then Barry gets completely exonerated and buried in Arlington, despite military records of his dishonorable discharge and his old friend in the FBI knowing basically everything? Maybe he wouldn't want to admit that he figured it out and let Barry off, but he'd then allow Gene to go away for life just to cover his own ass? Maybe, and maybe clarifying this point would have been too much of a distraction in the story.

More implausible, for me, is the idea that Sally's testimony couldn't have implicated Barry and earned Gene at least a mistrial. She's obviously living publicly as Sally Reed by then, and she wanted Barry to turn himself in anyway. She didn't have much to be afraid of (she did kill that guy, but that was entirely in self defense, and everyone would have been reasonable to conclude that Barry killed him anyway). She would have let Gene get locked up for life over this?


I have seen one fan theory that *probably* isn't something the writers intended, but it does give the finale a different (and more plausible) spin: maybe the "real" end of the episode was just the moment that Barry got shot in the head, and everything after that moment was images in Barry's mind, the epilogue that Barry himself wanted to have. That epilogue kinda did wipe away all of Barry's sins in just the way that Barry asked for in that amazing prayer earlier in the episode.

And whether or not God or death-visions might have been involved, it was interesting that Barry was ultimately redeemed through the power of Hollywood storytelling, just as he'd dreamed of since the pilot episode. And it was all just an empty facade, as he should have also known since the pilot. That idea: that you can remake yourself by remaking your outward appearances, but it doesn't last for long, was the core of this show and I think they closed it out beautifully.

Okay maybe I'm coming around on this episode, lol.

Weirdly, I think the (obviously intentional!) hacky and jingoistic movie scenes at the end kinda yanked me away from the much better show that I'd rather be watching, and it might have put me in a mood to be cranky about the whole episode.


Some elements were undeniably great. Hank's character was always such a cartoon figure, engulfed in such deep, rich stories, that I don't think it could have possibly been resolved fully. But they gave us more than we could have hoped for and more. Anthony Carrigan gave the performance of a lifetime in his closing minutes, outdone only by one of the best actors alive today, Stephen Root, who also totally outdid himself. The one story (other than Hank), that I thought they could never possibly tie up in a satisfying way was Fuches, but they did it with some of the best dialogue in the series and one of the best in a long line of great performances from Root.


Shit I'm gonna go watch this again now, disappointed or not.

In the big shootout scene in the finale. Barry and Sally's kid's jacket is yellow on the bottom, blue on the top, and it looks like just the same shades as the Ukrainian flag.

I can't think of a reason they'd intentionally do that, except maybe some kind of comment that mass media commodifies suffering and that we should expect the Ukrainian flag to be a pop icon eight years from now...

Probably just a coincidence, but it jumped out to me on two viewings.

Like, the final 3-4 episodes, SO fucking much happens so quickly. Would've preferred a 9-10 episode season, especially considering how great the show is whenever they take those narrative detours. Could've let it breathe (shout out to Fred Melamed).

But still really good. Great final moments too.

I definitely didn’t like it as much as everyone else in here. I did not feel the same impact or excitement as in previous seasons whenever something big and dramatic happened. I’m not exactly sure why, but it just didn’t click for me. The rushed pace that people are pointing out might be part of it. It also wasn’t as funny, in general.

Hilarious and twisted ending though. Nice touch there.

The darkness of this season wouldn't bother me if the humor was still in place.

I think it also had a hard time living up to some of the moments of the previous seasons. I kept waiting for them to have a moment that overtakes the motorcycle chase but it never even got close.

I've enjoyed the show overall though.

sprinkled throughout

but it wasn't on the level of seasons 1-3

i wasn't a big fan of the time skip at all.. it just felt really forced and not well-executed

Hader went full film-school nerd with his directing, but I don't know if it really suited the show.. this isn't Better Call Saul..

lot of the silliness was gone after ep 3.

didn't like:

- family stuff with barry was too much/too serious
- too much focus on cousineau
- cristobal and noho's love story too serious

but yea, just wasnt as funny in later episodes.

with going super born-again Christian was too much. I get they were doing it an ironic way, but it just didn't work for me