On That ‘Barry’ Finale and Why Some Shows Are So Good, They Need to End

The end of the first season of “Barry” was so good it made me never want to watch the show again.

Over the course of HBO’s dark comedy — beat it if you don’t want to know what happened — Barry (Bill Hader), a hit man in Los Angeles, fell out of love with his profession and in love with a woman from his acting class, who was unaware of his day job.

By the last episode, which ran Sunday night, he’d won her over and sworn off murder — or so he told himself until, on a weekend getaway, he was confronted by a police detective who connected him with his crimes. Trapped, he apparently swallowed his qualms and killed the officer. In the final scene, he crawled into bed next to his girlfriend, grimaced and said to himself: “Starting n—” Cut to black.

It was such an effective ending, in fact, that before I wrote my review I had to check to make sure that “Barry” was not a limited-run miniseries. It is not; HBO has since picked it up for another season.

“Barry” will likely be one of the best new series I see all year, so I should be happy. And I am, mostly, I guess.

At the same time, this doesn’t feel like a series that should stretch on more than a few seasons. “Barry” commits to a bold premise, but could you sustain it for six years, seven, more?

Either Barry is capable of change or he’s not. If he is, that seems like material for one more very good season or two. If he’s not, and the series brings him back into the criminal life, then the character’s drive (you, and Barry, want him to redeem himself) is at odds with the needs of the plot (you, and the network, want the story to keep going).

I get this feeling more and more often lately, as with Season 2 of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I like what I’ve seen so far (about half the season). Expanding the story past the end of Margaret Atwood’s novel expands the world fruitfully, filling in the details of its patriarchal dictatorship and exploring how all the parts of a system of oppression work.

But there’s a hitch. June (Elisabeth Moss) ended the first season as she ended the novel, headed either for rescue or punishment. The series decided to make it both: First, she was brought to a horrific mock execution, then was liberated by the resistance, then was recaptured. There is only so long, in a series about bondage and rape, that you can string out the cycle of raising and dashing hopes without numbing or traumatizing your audience.

Wanting a good series not to last too long is a high-class problem, and a fairly recent one. In the early decades of TV, series were endless, until they ended. This was fine, since most shows essentially returned every episode to the status quo ante. (Or, in the case of a soap like “Dallas,” the absurdity of endless plot twists was taken for granted.) A story might get tired but it wouldn’t really get old, because TV took place in a time warp where time didn’t pass.

In the cable era, TV got more ambitious and more serial. Things changed by the end of an episode. Characters would be in very different circumstances a few years after we met them. Once TV was telling stories that changed, it suggested that the stories needed to end, properly, rather than just stop.

So David Chase ended “The Sopranos” when he was done with it, not necessarily when his viewers were. “Lost” set its ending date three seasons in advance. We now had the notion that a fresh TV idea, like fresh produce, had an expiration date.

And when it passed that date — whew, could you smell it. Take “Dexter.” Like “Barry,” it was about a murderer for whom we had mixed sympathies (a serial killer who tried to follow a code to whack only deserving victims). The first season was excellent, and popular. So it had another, and another, and another, stringing itself out for eight seasons of implausible dilemmas until its final mercy-killing.

“The Office” should have departed when Michael Scott did. You may be a bigger fan of the later seasons of “Homeland” than I am, but had it ended after its first, it would have been a legend.

In part, this situation is the side effect of a good thing: With more TV outlets serving more-targeted audiences, a daring, unconventional show has a decent chance of surviving. With dozens of cable outlets and the seemingly bottomless pockets of Netflix and Amazon (soon to be joined by Apple), TV is becoming a “more” machine. TV series are becoming like athletes going on a season or three past when they should have retired.

Netflix’s “American Vandal,” for instance, was one of my favorite shows of 2017 — an inventive, filthily funny story that ended with closure and didn’t overstay its welcome. But Netflix is bringing it back for a second season, anyway. Ditto HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” constructed elegantly around a finite story based on its source novel.

I can’t judge a season of TV that doesn’t exist, of course. Both these second seasons might pleasantly surprise me the way “Stranger Things 2” did. But as a larger pattern, sequel-driven TV does not make me any more hopeful than sequel-driven movies.

Beyond that, it feels like we’re losing the idea that you should leave people wanting more, that you can love something without needing twice as much of it. This involves not just overextended series but the growing list of revivals. Seize the monkey’s-paw remote control, and nothing ever needs to truly die. Wish there was more “Arrested Development”? You got it! Ever wondered what Roseanne Conner’s up to 20 years later? We’ll tell you! (You may not like it!)

All this has given me a strange appreciation for the disappointments of TV past. “Freaks and Geeks” broke my heart when it was canceled in 2000, and not a few times have I wondered whether, had it come along a dozen years later, it might have lasted for years.

On the other hand, like most high school shows, it probably shouldn’t have had more than three seasons or so. There’s a reason we feel sad for the former prom king who keeps hanging around after graduation.

I realize that complaining about too much of a good thing makes me sound like a crank. No one’s forcing me to watch this revival or that sequel, to stick with a show that’s lasted too long.

But we lose something when we lose a sense of finality. It gives meaning to art the way that the knowledge of death gives meaning to life. When no ending is permanent — even if it means resurrecting dead characters — the power of endings is compromised. And often an ending that comes before we want it to comes exactly at the right time.

So I hope the second season of “Barry” wows me as much as the first. But I also hope that, when it knows the time has come, it will not hesitate to pull the trigger.