Because I would like to follow the news—the awful, depressing, when-is-this-all-going-to-end news—all day at work, I just about watch only fictional, scripted TV shows at home. Last week I finally finished the primary season of “Barry,” the HBO dark comedy about an expert assassin who tries to go straight and grow to be an expert actor, mostly because I feel obligated to maintain up with critically praised shows. It isn’t any spoiler to say that Barry continues to be an expert assassin by the tip of the primary season, and that the show’s body count just keeps going up with almost every episode.
If “Barry” were a movie, or a single episode of against the law series, I would prefer it. After a few hours with a story, I don’t necessarily feel cheated by a bleak or nihilistic conclusion. Sometimes I would like a story to make me work to search out the goodness and purpose of life; I don’t all the time want an escape from a reality of random violence and a political system that sometimes rewards immoral behavior.
Watching the identical character fall in need of redemption, or meaningful contrition, over and all over again, dozens of times, is torture.
But watching the identical character fall in need of redemption, or meaningful contrition, over and all over again, dozens of times, is torture. I even have little doubt that “Barry” introduces some interesting characters and clever plot twists over its subsequent seasons (a fourth one is on its way), but how much time should I spend on it? What number of nights after work should I spend in a universe where God (i.e., the scriptwriters) keeps intervening to forestall any of the essential characters from finding peace or happiness? Imagine a liturgical yr where every Mass looks toward Easter but in some way you never get there.
“Barry” is very exhausting, but it surely is typical of high-brow or “prestige” television as of late. Last week, the Emmy nominations for the 2021-22 season were announced, and so far as I can tell, almost the entire 16 nominees for Best Comedy (including “Barry”) and Best Drama are serialized to a point, meaning that they avoid stories which can be resolved in a single episode. It is a complete reversal from the early days of television, when almost every episode of prime-time TV was written to face by itself. (There was also a time when Best Comedy nominees aimed for laughs, often earned from a live audience, slightly than silent smirks.)
If “Barry” were a movie, or a single episode of against the law series, I would prefer it.
Certainly one of the Best Drama nominees, “Stranger Things,” has dragged its basic plot (small-town residents threatened by a parallel universe called the Upside Down) right into a fourth season and is now facing a backlash for the excessive length of its episodes. Two other nominees, “Squid Game” and “Yellowjackets,” have perfectly good movie premises (a seemingly benign games tournament turns deadly, and a girls’ soccer team tries to survive after a plane crash strands them within the wilderness), but their popularity has doomed them to second seasons. One other nominee, “Ozark,” got here to an end this spring after 4 seasons about an all-American family in some way surviving their involvement with organized crime.
I’m sure that’s an inadequate description of “Ozark,” but the primary episode filled me with a lot dread about indestructible villains and latest characters getting introduced simply to get killed that I couldn’t go any further. I had to provide it a likelihood since it was being favorably in comparison with “Breaking Bad,” which I did mostly like (with mixed feelings in regards to the fan-service bloodbath of the previous couple of episodes) since it focused on one character’s downward spiral, and the consequences on those around him, without dangling the prospect of a glad ending before the subsequent burst of violence. And I loved “The Sopranos,” which satirized the American dream on a broader canvas than the Hollywood-focused “Barry.” (That said, I may need loved “Barry” if it had premiered in 1999, before the “anti-hero” genre took over premium cable networks.)
Over the past couple of years, I even have also enjoyed several miniseries with uncomfortable or unsettling moments, including “I May Destroy You,” “Mare of Easttown,” “Midnight Mass” (so way more efficient than the 169 episodes, to date, of “The Walking Dead”), “The White Lotus” (back for a second season but with a special setting and storyline) and “The Queen’s Gambit.” The undeniable fact that they resolved their stories in an inexpensive period of time, while leaving enough ambiguities to spark discussions amongst fans, made them feel like escapes from the 24-hour news cycle and the drip-drip-drip of horrors on the homepage of The Latest York Times.
By now, a few of you might consider me the best way I believed of my parents after they watched cozy mysteries like “Matlock” and “Murder, She Wrote,” where criminals were caught and loose ends tied up at the tip of every episode. But my ideal TV show is closer to “The Twilight Zone,” or “Black Mirror,” where you never know whether an episode goes to depart you with hope or despair. By now, nothing shocks me once I check my Twitter feed upon waking up within the morning; I’d still wish to be surprised once I switch to my TV at night.
[Read next: “The church isn’t alone. Americans are losing their trust in (almost all) major institutions.”]
