3 Years After Its Finale, HBO’s 4-Part Crime Epic Still Isn’t Getting Its Due
From The Sopranos and The Wire to Game of Thrones, Veep, Succession and The White Lotus, HBO hasn’t just made hits—it’s defined television for three straight decades. Here’s how its era-shaping series stack up now.
If you need a reminder of how deep HBO 's bench really is, here you go: while everyone likes to rattle off the usuals — The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Veep, Succession, The White Lotus — Barry quietly hit a milestone. The series finale aired three years ago today. And if you skipped it or let it slip your mind, that might be because it wrapped on the exact same night as Succession. Yeah, that scheduling choice did it no favors.
How it started
Back in early 2016, HBO handed Bill Hader and his co-writer Alec Berg a pilot production order. Fans were understandably curious — Hader was the Saturday Night Live standout known for broader, sillier stuff like Superbad and Trainwreck. By that summer, HBO upgraded the pilot to a full series. Hader wanted to steer hard into darker territory this time, and that became Barry.
The hook
Barry Berkman is a working hitman who wants out. A job sends him undercover into a local acting class, and the whole thing scrambles his brain chemistry. He falls for aspiring actor Sally Reed and signs up as a student under teacher Gene Cousineau. Those two relationships become the show’s spine as Barry tries (and repeatedly fails) to outrun who he is.
The run at a glance
- Premiere: March 25, 2018 — strong start for what would become one of HBO's best shows of the last decade.
- Season 1 ends on a cliffhanger, setting up a darker, messier fallout.
- Season 2 (2019): even bigger acclaim and a noticeable bump in popularity.
- Hiatus after Season 2 — a long pause before the next chapter.
- Season 3 lands in 2022.
- Season 4 (2023): more divisive because it takes big, weird swings; if it clicked for you, it was because it refused to just rehash the earlier tone.
- Series finale: May 28, 2023 — the same night as Succession's finale, which absolutely overshadowed it.
Why it still hits
Barry is a crime story with a black-comedy streak that gets sharper the longer it stares at its own choices. The final season pushes into riskier, more experimental territory instead of coasting on what worked before, and that split people. Fair. But if you like your comedy jet-black and your character drama stubbornly honest, the full series is sitting there now, complete, and absolutely worth the ride.