Posted in: HBO, Max, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: barry, bill hader, HBO, Henry Winkler, opinion

Barry Season 4 Was Largely Driven By Worst Season 1 Plot Hole

As Barry enters its final run, the plot hole at the end of Season 1 that set off everything in the show ever since is more glaring than ever.

Barry, Bill Hader's critical darling HBO series, is considered one of the most original and dark hitman comedy series on television, the kind of unique show that HBO likes to hang its brand reputation on. It is, however, far from perfect, and the big crucial plot point that has driven the show ever since the end of season one is a terrible and dumb TV cliché.

Hader has turned the show from a dry satire about crime and show business to an increasingly surreal and phantasmagoric morality tale about self-serving, narcissistic people who do terrible things while lying to themselves they're good people, particularly the main character Barry Berkman, played by Hader himself, and it trickles down to all the main characters, from his acting coach Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) to Barry's girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) to Chechen gangster Soho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) to Barry's mentor/nemesis Fuchs (Stephen Root). These characters all circle around each other, trying to kill each other in the final season after Barry's worst deed at the end of the first season, which set the motion for all the seasons ever since. That event is Barry's reluctant killing of LAPD Homicide detective Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), who was also Gene's girlfriend.

A Reminder of Barry's Idiot Ball Plot Hole

In season one, Moss is the cop trying to find a killer that she doesn't know is Barry. When Gene invites Barry, Sally, and Moss to a weekend at his cabin in the middle of nowhere, her suspicions lead her to find Barry's Facebook page and a picture of him with the friend he killed. This is a dumb TV cliché. It also makes no sense at all. She doesn't even have a murder weapon in evidence. Finding a photo of Barry with his buddy on Facebook is at best circumstantial evidence that only indicates he knew the dead guy and no proof Barry killed him or anyone at all. Suddenly Moss decides to be a complete idiot and tries to arrest Barry in the dead of night with no legal basis whatsoever?!

In real life, no cop would go after a dangerous suspect without backup or concrete evidence. And why the rush to arrest Barry in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere? It's not like he was going anywhere. Why not wait till the weekend was over, and they all returned to Los Angeles? Everyone would go home and go about their lives, and Moss could have just gotten her partner and some uniforms to just show up at Barry's workplace or Gene's class and quietly arrest him. That's what a sensible cop would do. That results in Barry killing her and setting in motion everything that happens in the show from season two onwards. Her death also turns her extremely dangerous father, Jim (Robert Wisdom), into Barry's deadliest pursuer. The dumb reasons for Janice Moss' death are even more glaring than ever in Season Four.

The Curse of the Idiot Ball

Moss becoming a moron for the sake of the plot is a classic example of what TV writers call "the idiot ball." That's when they write a character who suddenly becomes stupid and a plot puppet for the rest of the story to happen. This stops Barry from being a truly good story because the writers took a lazy TV cliché shortcut to get an ending for the first season. The Idiot Ball isn't absent in the final season of Barry either – Soho Hank's boyfriend Cristobal (Michael Irby) is so disillusioned that Hank killed the gangsters they made a pact with that he insists on breaking up with Hank, which results in the Chechen mob killing him. Cristobal had been a boss in a Cartel for years, so he must know he would be killed if he broke up with Hank since he knew too much about Hank and the Chechens' operations. It made no sense for him, a gangster, to act like the naïve, emotional spouse who leaves the gangster for being, well, a gangster.

Bill Hader has been candid about making mistakes in Barry and then having his writers correct those ideas before having to rewrite or reshoot major scenes in the show. Television plots can be hard and are constantly being fixed during production, and sometimes they still end up with the Idiot Ball option because they ran out of time or perspective. That's the curse of television writing, and AI will probably not be able to solve it either.

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