Barry | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On What Makes a Great Series Finale…

Posted on June 14, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the recent wrap-up of shows like Barry and Succession, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at what makes a great television finale.

Interestingly, from The Sopranos to The Leftovers, one of the hallmarks of a truly impressive television finale is the way that it leaves room for the audiece. After all, television shows involve considerable investment from viewers, and offer a chance for the audience to really get to know and understand the characters and the themes of this world. The best of these finales are clear endings to the story being told, but which leave room for the viewer to reach their own conclusion about these characters and their journey.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: arcs, audience, Barry, endings, finale, out of focus, Succession, Television, television show, the escapist, the leftovers | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Myths and Lies of “Barry”…

Posted on May 31, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the end of Barry this week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look the show’s final season.

Barry is a show about Hollywood, but it is also a show about America. It is a show about mythmaking and self-delusion, about the stories that people tell themselves to feel better and about the stories that are told about people to make everybody else feel better. It’s a black comedy about a hitman who becomes an actor, but over the course of its four seasons it evolved into something decidedly more complex and compelling. Like Succession, it is a show that speaks perfectly to the current moment, holding a mirror to a nation in crisis.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: america, american history, Barry, Bill Hader, delusions, fantasies, hbo, hollywood, lies, myths, out of focus, prestige television, Season finale, wow | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The Recap – “Succession and Barry Are Masterclasses in Series Finales…”

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Darren

We’re thrilled to be launching a weekly multimedia podcast at The Escapist, called The Recap. I’m hoping to be a regular fixture of it, stremaing live every Tuesday evening. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film content – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.

This week, with the ending of Succession, Barry and Ted Lasso, it seemed like a good opportunity to ruminate on what it means to actually end a long-running series. What is is that makes a finale compelling and effective?

Filed under: Television | Tagged: ambiguity, Barry, conclusions, endings, finale, season finales, storytelling, Succession, ted lasso, the escapist, the recap | Leave a comment »

Flash: Rebirth (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Darren

This January, I’m going to take a look at some of DC’s biggest “events.” I’ll be starting with the most recent one, Flashpoint, but – in the spirit of the character – we’re going to have a marathon run through Flash stories before we get there. Check back daily this week for more Flash-ified goodness…

From the outset, Flash: Rebirth was going to be an infinitely more complex endeavour for writer Geoff Johns than Green Lantern: Rebirth had been. Both miniseries aimed to firmly establish an older legacy character (in both cases, the iteration of the character active in the late fifties/early sixties) as the core of that particular franchise, replacing their replacements, as it were. However, Hal Jordan had been absent for about ten years, and had been hovering around the DC Universe in various guises during his absence from the role of Green Lantern. Barry Allen, on the other hand, had been gone twenty years and his appearances had been far scarcer. There had been a whole generation of fans (including the author of this miniseries) who grew up with Wally West as the Flash. Bringing Barry back was always going to be tricky, but here it becomes evident just how tricky.