Warning: spoilers for Succession, Barry, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad ahead! Scroll straight down to Take Five to avoid them.
Bring me the head of HBO’s chief scheduler! Somehow the US network has landed on the baffling decision to air the final-ever episodes of two of the best shows of the last 10 years on the same Sunday night (Monday morning in the UK). The shows in question are Barry, Bill Hader’s absurdist comedy-drama about a board-treading hitman, and of course Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s cheerful look at fascist-courting media elites. These are shows that deserve space to be savoured, rather than being stacked together in some sort of “everything must go” sale. It seems particularly unfair on Barry, which is likely to be overlooked amid the attention lavished on the bigger, more buzzy Succession. But, here we are.
Naturally, the buildup to these finales has been full of rampant speculation about how they might end. (No preview episodes for either show have been given to critics, so we’re fumbling in the dark like everyone else). That speculation is understandable, because TV in the last 20 years has become unusually preoccupied with how things end. In 2023, sticking the landing has never been more important to the legacy of a show. One false move and you’re in How I Met Your Mother territory.
Perhaps we have The Sopranos to thank for this. Before that show’s contentious cut to black, TV finales largely concerned themselves with providing a satisfying bookend to a series, tying up loose ends, resolving simmering relationships, and giving fans a sense of closure. This isn’t to say that there weren’t finales that didn’t confound or surprise – St. Elsewhere’s snow globe conclusion or Dale Cooper sneering “how’s Annie” at the end of Twin Peaks would like a word about that. (Somehow David Lynch managed to top that moment a quarter of a century later with an even more unforgettable ending for Twin Peaks: The Return.) But TV by and large didn’t think of endings as a chance to make a statement. After all, even getting the chance to have a finale at all was a victory at a time when so many shows were subject to sudden cancellations. Back when the goal of much TV-making was keep churning the thing out until people got bored of it, the idea of ending a show on your own terms was fanciful, let alone determining when it would end, as Jesse Armstrong has been able to do with Succession, which is going out at the peak of its powers.
But The Sopranos’ rug pull ushered in a new benchmark for finales. Being satisfying was no longer the only requirement: now final episodes had to be daring, or have something big to say. The finales of TV’s recent golden age needed to encapsulate the show’s preoccupations in microcosm, or – even better – reorient them. Think of Mad Men and its “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” ending, which took three of the show’s prevailing themes – Don Draper’s tortured journey of self-discovery, the blossoming of the counter-culture and the increasing insinuation of advertising into American life – and merged them into a conclusion that either felt cynical or strangely beautiful, depending on your disposition.
On the other hand, Breaking Bad’s ending is, for my money, one of the weaker of the TV golden-agers, because of how closely it hews to the old way of doing finales. Walt’s strangely noble death, while saving Jesse from a horde of neo-Nazis, felt conventional and fan-servicey, with little to chew on compared to the heft and moral complexity of the episodes that preceded it. In fact, so unsatisfying is that finale that some, like New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum, have chosen to regard the far grimmer and grittier penultimate episode as the real finale, with the actual final episode serving as a fever dream for a dying Walt. (You could even go further and suggest that Ozymandias, the third-to-last episode, in which Walter’s carefully constructed world crumbles to dust, is the real finale, with the final two serving as an epilogue – although that is slightly undone by the fact that an actual epilogue, the Netflix film El Camino, was released years later. Confused? Me too!)
So yes: the stakes for Succession and Barry’s finales are high, and it will be interesting to see how these very different shows approach the task of wrapping things up. Succession has never been one for sudden volte-faces or rattlesnakes in the mailbox: what you see is usually what you get. It would be hard to envision the whole thing ending up being a dream in an autistic child’s head. (Besides, Succession has already dropped its big surprise of the season by killing off Logan suddenly in episode three). Instead, you would expect something that stays consistent to the show’s overarching ethos, mood, themes and commitment to devastating one-liners, while providing a resolution to the series-long question around which of the Roy children will actually claim the crown and, of course, making a larger statement about the venality of the game-playing, power-hoarding 1%.
When it comes to Barry’s ending though, all bets are off. This is a show that takes a perverse pride in disarming its viewers, with sudden, shocking deaths, near-silent stunt episodes, strange dream sequences and – in its current season – a time jump that briefly looked to have derailed the series entirely but instead has supercharged it. Barry’s unpredictability is its brand at this point. Anything could happen in its final half hour.
Whatever does happen in the final episodes of Succession and Barry, one thing is certain: you won’t hear its creators talking about them. Neither Armstrong nor Hader are doing promotional duties on their shows due to the writer’s strike, so – just as when David Chase refused to explain the Sopranos blackout 16 years ago – the endings of these two great shows will be left to stand alone.
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