Perfect layers anythology8/13/2023 In lesser hands, we’d have had an entire season of Barry in prison or on the run, padding episodes with needless exposition and pointless action scenes, stretching out the suspense until the pacing bottoms out, spreading the same amount of story over super-sized episodes or longer seasons. ![]() ![]() Over a couple of episodes, Barry and Sally become parents after they elope, Cousineau is a runaway after shooting his son, NoHo Hank, a hugely successful entrepreneur after murdering his team and lover, and Fuches is an ex-con badass coated in tattoos. So far, with one episode left this season, the fourth season already has enough plot to fill multiple seasons of the average TV show but remarkably sticks to a tight thirty minutes per episode. If we’re living in an epidemic of bloat, then “ Barry” is our survival bunker. “ Stranger Things” did the same in its fourth season, building episodes as mini-movies to accommodate the growing cast, interlocking plotlines, and big-budget scale, delivering a season with dazzling highs but a few exhausting lows. Shows like “ Ozark,” “ Ted Lasso,” and “ Game of Thrones” stretched episodes to occasionally fatiguing effect, lumbering marathons instead of sprints. “ No Time to Die” is the longest James Bond movie to date, and this year we have new movies by Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese pushing three hours each (I suspect both will be great). More and more movies are pushing two-and-a-half to three-hour runtimes, with some earning the investment (“ Avatar: The Way of Water,” “ Drive My Car“) and some not (“ Eternals“). Whether the screen is big or small, runtimes seem to be getting longer and longer, and our patience is more and more tested. “ Barry,” by contrast, is a rare example of clockwork storytelling, where even as the plot accelerates and the tone darkens, it has a powerful narrative economy where every scene still counts. We are in a time where every other series seems to take a “super-size-me” approach to episode length, doing in three or four scenes (or even multiple episodes) what they should do in one or two. It’s potent, upsetting television, demanding that its audience deal with who these flawed, desperate characters really are as they count the cost of their mistakes. All these arcs come to a mid-point collision of cascading consequences, leaving blood, bodies, and last chances in their wake. Cristobal and NoHo Hank have a new business venture they’re going straight– until they don’t. Minutes later, it’s years in the future, and she’s suddenly a struggling mom with a fridge of alcohol and a single donut. ![]() When we catch up with Sally, she is in the throes of anguish in her parent’s living room, a new low, but by episode 4, she has the offer to reignite her acting career. The final season of “ Barry” begins as a prison drama with Barry incarcerated, but it’s become a quasi-Western by the halfway point.
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