‘Barry’ Ending After Season 4, Amid Strew Of ‘Peak TV’ Cancellations Including ‘Succession’ And Likely ‘Ted Lasso’

Topline

HBO dark comedy Barry is ending after Season 4, co-creator Bill Hader told Variety in an interview published Tuesday, on the heels of the cancelation announcements of two other popular and critically-lauded series, Succession and likely Ted Lasso.

Bill Hader attends the season 3 premiere of HBO’s “Barry” at Rolling Greens on April 18, 2022 in … [+] Culver City, California.

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Key Facts

The final season of Barry will air on April 16, Hader told Variety.

Hader said when he and co-creator Alec Berg were writing the season, “a very clear ending presented itself,” and “it really does feel like it’s the right time to finish the show.”

Ted Lasso, a beloved AppleTV+ comedy, will most-likely end after Season 3 airs starting in March, creator Jason Sudeikis said on Wednesday.

Sudeikis told Deadline that Season 3 “is the end of this story that we wanted to tell, that we were hoping to tell,” and later clarified to Entertainment Weekly that though a series finale has been written, he doesn’t want to give “a definitive answer of if it were to come back and not set myself up to being called a liar.”

Last month, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong told the New Yorker that Season 4, which airs starting on March 26, would be the show’s last, saying “there’s a promise in the title of Succession. I’ve never thought this could go on forever.”

Big Number

9. That’s how many Emmy Awards that Barry has won since it premiered in 2018. It has been nominated for 44. Ted Lasso has been nominated for 40 and has won 11. Succession has been nominated for 48 and has won 13.

Key Background

Barry, about a hitman turned actor, has a 99% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 90% rating from fans. Ted Lasso, which tells the story of an American coach of a U.K. soccer team, has a 95% score from critics and a 86% score from fans on the site. Succession, about a brutal business mogul struggling to hand his company off to his children, has a 94% score from critics and a 87% score from fans. Fans have believed for some time that Ted Lasso could be coming to an end sooner than later. In June, co-writer and star Brett Goldstein said the show would end in Season 3. “It was planned as three. Spoiler alert: everyone dies,” he said. Succession star Brian Cox made a similar slip in 2021. “I would say possibly two more [seasons]

and then I think we’re done. But it just depends and may just be only one more [season],” the actor told British GQ. The writers have “got an endgame. They haven’t told us what the ending is, but there is an endgame.”

Tangent

Succession could be ending on a series high. The Season 3 finale episode, which aired in December 2021, had a record-high audience for the show, with 1.7 million viewers in same-day viewing. The Season 2 finale of Ted Lasso pushed the series into the top 10 of Nielsen’s Streaming Content Ratings rankings for the week ending October 10, 2021, with 507 million minutes of the series viewed that week.

Surprising Fact

Hader and Sudeikis starred on Saturday Night Live together from 2005 to 2013.