Today on this special episode of Morally Corrupt, our Bravo avengers assemble to discuss what might have been one of the greatest finales in Housewives history—The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 4, Episode 16. Rachel Lindsay, Jodi Walker, and Chelsea Stark-Jones give their initial reactions to this epic episode, debate the morality of having a secret finsta dedicated to taking down Jen Shah, break down the social media drama that followed, and more!
Host: Rachel Lindsay Guests: Jodi Walker and Chelsea Stark-Jones Producer: Devon Baroldi Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
Before the feminist movement really began to develop its momentum, there was a moment where Julia wasn’t certain who she was going to be, where she wasn’t always a champion of the right things. If we go into a third season—and we hope we will—I’m sure it’ll be complicated for all of the characters on our show, but WGBH itself is going to really start to change much more quickly. And everyone’s going to have to either get on board, or be left behind.
I find it puzzling when people refer to the show as a “comfort watch,” because that sometimes feels at odds with what’s actually going on. This season deals with issues of equality, of access to contraception. In the finale, characters are working to thwart the FBI! How doesthe “cozy” monikersit with you?
Goldfarb: I attribute it to the marriage, actually. There’s something about Julia and Paul’s love of each other and lust for each other that I think is very aspirational. And the food. But there’s something about them that I think makes people feel warm. There’s conflict in the marriage. The whole first season she had this big secret, and now in the second season starting with episode four, she has a secret again. But she’s keeping the secret to protect him, and then ultimately the secret comes out, and they get even closer. So I think that’s why people think the show is cozy and warm and kind.
But I agree with you. Episode five, where Paul’s twin brother comes, that’s an example of Julia in all her contradictions. She lies about the origins of the show and when Alice calls her on it, she says, “My brand is honesty,” when she’s just made something up. So we love leaning into Julia as an amazing, complicated, three-dimensional woman. So thank you for saying it’s not just cozy.
Keyser: We are very committed to the idea that the whole thing feels light as a feather, that it lands with weight, but you are not noticing because it has a breezy quality. The kind of person that Julia surrounded herself with is full of optimism about the idea that tomorrow could be better than today. They’re all open to the possibilities of life, even when it’s difficult.
If there’s anything that Daniel and I in the writers’ room focus on all the time, it’s how do you tell a potentially dramatic story, but—not to keep mixing metaphors—that on the inside just feels like a soufflé.
Juliet and Callie return to discuss the Bachelor in Paradise Season 9 finale (plus a few tangents)! First the ladies discuss the large amount of self-eliminating cast members, Kat and John Henry’s relationship, and some paddleboarding (1:51). They then chat about the cast members with the most appearances, which turns into a very interesting digression on caffeine and, of course, shopping (13:04)! The ladies also go deep into Kat’s character arc throughout the show and into Kylee and Aven’s relationship (20:54). They also discuss Rachel’s Bachelor journey, potential after-show love triangles, their final thoughts on all the cast members, and more (29:33)!
It’s been a long time coming, but the God of Mischief is officially no more. At the end of the second season of Loki, the Asgardian finally finds his glorious purpose as a deity deserving of a new title: the God of Stories.
Throughout six movies and one live-action TV series since 2011’s Thor, no character in the MCU has had a more significant evolution than Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. He started as a villain, became something of an antihero, and then a full-fledged superhero. But by the end of the Season 2 finale, aptly titled “Glorious Purpose,” Loki has transformed into something beyond such simple narrative archetypes. He has effectively become the multiverse itself, the gatekeeper of all hero’s journeys past, present, and future.
Loki’s 12th and potentially final episode is the culmination of more than a decade of the Asgardian’s appearances in the MCU. It’s at once a satisfying conclusion for Marvel’s flagship TV series and a bittersweet ending for one of its most tragic and beloved characters. The Prince of Lies once desired a royal throne over anything and anyone else, whether that meant hurting his brother, his parents, or millions of earthlings in the process. In “Glorious Purpose,” Loki ascends to a throne at last—it’s just not the one he had once dreamt of.
At the end of last week’s installment, Loki learned how to control his time slipping, turning what was once a problem into a potential solution to save all his friends. He used this new superpower to return to the TVA, moments before the Temporal Loom’s destruction, as he tried to understand what they could have done differently to prevent the disaster. When O.B. suggested that they took too long to even attempt to fix the Loom, Loki entered a time loop of his own making, trying again and again to speed up their process just enough for their mission to succeed. Loki had played with time loops for much of the second season, but with Loki’s emergent mastery of time, the finale takes this narrative device a step further as he creates his own Groundhog Day.
For the beginning of “Glorious Purpose,” Loki retraces his steps over the course of the second season to see how every action can be executed faster, spending literal centuries this way to achieve an optimal sequencing, much to the confusion of his allies. (At one point, Mobius even pulls him aside and asks, “What the shit are you doing?!”) But when they finally succeed in expanding the capacity of the Loom to account for the growing number of branches, they realize their efforts—and lifetimes of Loki’s work—were all for nothing. “The Loom will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growing multiverse,” Victor Timely explains. And so what starts as a tour through the greatest hits of Season 2 soon extends to the first season, as Loki finally understands that the only way to prevent the destruction of the Loom and the TVA is to return to the moment when Sylvie unlocked the true potential of the multiverse, and stop her from killing He Who Remains.
At the Citadel at the End of Time, Loki finds himself in another futile cycle, trying and failing to save He Who Remains from getting stabbed by Sylvie in each attempt. Only when the TVA’s mastermind pulls Loki out of it, using his advanced time-twisting TemPad to freeze Sylvie in place, does the full extent of Loki’s impossible predicament begin to take shape. He Who Remains paved the road for Loki and Sylvie to find him at the End of Time at the end of the first season, and here, the villain reveals to Loki that everything that has happened since then—from his death to Loki’s time slipping—has all proceeded as he anticipated. All along, the Temporal Loom was just a fail-safe, designed to protect the Sacred Timeline from the inevitable multiversal war and nothing more. Despite Sylvie’s best efforts, free will was never a possibility. “Make the hard choice,” He Who Remains tells Loki. “Break the Loom and you cause a war that kills us all. Game over. Or, kill her, and we protect what we can.”
Beginning with this conversation with He Who Remains, Loki skips backward and forward through time to figure out what he must do, seeking counsel as he comes up with the words to rewrite the story of the entire multiverse. It’s a clever way of revisiting some of the most critical junctures in the series to display how far Loki has come, while also providing the chance for him to have one last chat with the show’s most important characters. At this point, Loki has learned how to transport his body through time and space, and he’s grown powerful enough to dictate time for those around him—much like HWR’s Time Twister. Though it seems as if Loki could return to any moment in the past, with Mobius, he chooses one of their very first conversations, when he was just learning about the existence of the TVA in the series premiere.
Loki picks a moment in time when he was still in restraints and when Mobius was no more than a TVA analyst trying to figure out what made a Loki tick. In some ways, that choice makes this version of Mobius more objective; he has yet to learn about all the lies and deceptions that the TVA was built on, and is still a faithful servant to an organization that prunes every variant and branching timeline without exception.
As the duo sit across from each other in the TVA’s time theater, they decide to skip the rewatch of Loki’s life. Mobius instead tells him a story about an incident involving a pair of Hunters, a thinly-veiled anecdote about himself. Mobius recounts how this Hunter once “lost sight of the big picture,” as he failed to prune a variant because he was just a little boy. Thanks to his hesitation, a couple of Hunters died in the process, and matters would have been even worse if his partner, Ravonna, hadn’t stepped in to intervene. “Most purpose is more burden than glory,” Mobius explains.
By now, it seems clear that Loki’s only option is to kill Sylvie. As Mobius’s story helps frame it, it is the burden that Loki must choose. And so Loki makes one final stop, finding Sylvie at A.D. Doug’s Pasadena workshop from last week’s “Science/Fiction” to tell his multiversal counterpart of the unfortunate reality. For one last time, they debate the need for the TVA, the choice between dying with freedom or living under unjust rule, and their positions of unparalleled power over the lives of everyone in every universe. Sylvie helps him recognize that protecting the Sacred Timeline isn’t enough; for all that she has preached about the necessity of free will, her position finally breaks through to Loki. “Who are you to decide we can’t die fighting?” Sylvie asks him.
Instead of returning to the End of Time, Loki goes back to the Temporal Core, to those familiar final moments before the Loom gets destroyed and the multiverse begins to decay. Rather than playing within HWR’s range of rules, though, Loki chooses his own path. He takes one last look at his friends before setting off to be forever alone, accepting the fate he was most afraid of. “I know what I want,” he says to Sylvie and Mobius. “I know what kind of god I need to be … for you. For all of us.”
The final climactic scene of Loki is a stunning visual sequence backed by an epic score from composer Natalie Holt, whose finest work in the series arrives near the end of this finale. As Loki replaces Victor on the gangway leading to the Loom, his TVA attire disintegrates due to the room’s temporal radiation, with his magic producing an iconic green costume in its place to match his new unofficial title as the God of Stories. A horned helmet manifests on his head, bearing a similar black-and-gold aesthetic to He Who Remains’s Citadel and technology. Loki destroys the Loom, dispersing the branches into the void before him as they begin to decompose. He proceeds to grab these vine-like threads, whole universes crumbling in the palms of his hands, and pulls them together through a portal to the End of Time. And as Loki wraps himself in the branches of the multiverse, imbuing them with his magic all the while, he sits on a solitary throne at his own Citadel, creating a new type of Loom that’s better suited for an Asgardian god: Yggdrasil, the World’s Tree.
Screenshots via Disney+
The 12th episode of Loki serves as the second-season finale, but it’s also something of a creation myth. So much of this season was built on the themes of ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail in an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. And as Loki travels from one end of the series to its beginning, two episodes that share the title of “Glorious Purpose,” these paradoxes of time and infinity start to apply to the TV show at large. Was Loki the one who was responsible for pulling his friends—Mobius, B-15, O.B., and Casey—out of their lives to begin with? Was it Loki who created the TVA?
“Glorious Purpose” is the last chapter of a story that finds Loki sacrificing his desires to become a divine being with all the power one could ever dream of, and yet no one to enjoy it with. He has claimed his throne at the End of Time, a purpose of all burden, and no glory. Loki never actually declares its protagonist as the God of Stories, as he becomes in the comics, but it gives him the same fate, on the series’ own terms. Loki has now established a new multiverse for the rest of the MCU to live and grow in, one that is more alive and dynamic than the Sacred Timeline was ever designed to be.
The Epilogue
“Glorious Purpose” effectively ends with Loki restructuring the multiverse into a new type of World’s Tree. But rather than leaving the episode on something of a cliff-hanger, Loki tacks on a few brief scenes to show what happens in the aftermath of the Asgardian’s sacrifice. When Loki destroyed the Loom and took sole responsibility for managing an infinitely-growing multiverse, he all but ended any need for the TVA to continue existing as it had. But in its place, he has allowed a new organization to grow, find a new purpose, and do things a little differently this time.
O.B. has returned to the TVA to reassume his position as its tech expert, rebooting Miss Minutes—who will hopefully not try to kill them all this time—and writing a second edition of the TVA guidebook, with Victor Timely sharing an author credit. Casey and B-15 are both back as well and have received more power in what appears to be a more democratic restructuring of the TVA’s leadership: When they return to the War Room, it isn’t filled with a handful of judges or generals sitting in to debate among themselves, but one that is packed with new faces and more voices to reflect the shift in the organization’s mission and values. One interaction between B-15 and Mobius reveals that at least part of the TVA’s new goal is to monitor the other variants of He Who Remains and prevent the multiversal war from happening.
(In Mobius’s report, he cites an incident with a variant in a 616-adjacent realm that was handled. He’s referring to Kang the Conqueror and the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is thankfully the one time that that movie ever really came up this entire season.)
As for Ravonna Renslayer, whose fate had all been forgotten by Loki since she was pruned in Episode 4, we see her waking up in the Void. Just as Loki did in Season 1, Ravonna now finds herself in an unfamiliar world that exists out of time, facing down the realm’s guardian, the trans-temporal purple entity known as Alioth. It isn’t clear whether this is the end of the line for the former TVA judge or a tease that her story isn’t done quite yet; a shot of a pyramid and a Sphinx could be suggesting a potential connection between her and another Kang variant who appeared at the end of Quantumania, the time-traveling pharaoh known as Rama-Tut.
Meanwhile, the adult Victor Timely is nowhere to be seen. However, we see a young version of him back in Chicago. “Glorious Purpose” returns to that moment when he received his TVA guidebook in “1893,” except when Victor turns around to look at his windowsill, he sees that nothing is there—just the curtain blowing in the wind. In this new reality, Timely’s future is never altered, and instead of being put on a path that could lead him to become the next He Who Remains, the boy simply turns back to focus on making his candles.
Finally, the episode ends with two of the show’s most important characters behind Loki: Mobius and Sylvie. After Sylvie chewed out Mobius in “Heart of the TVA” for never even bothering to look into his past life on the Sacred Timeline, Mobius decides it’s time to leave the TVA and see what he’s been protecting all of these years. With Sylvie at his side, he watches from a distance as his variant counterpart, Don, plays with his two sons on the lawn in front of their home. “Where you gonna go?” he asks her, only to receive a carefree shrug in response.
“You?” she asks.
“I might just wait here for a little bit,” Mobius replies. “Let time pass.”
Sylvie leaves through a Time Door and Mobius is left alone, watching the distant life that he once had. It’s a wonderfully simple moment, as Mobius stands there in blissful peace, with just a tinge of sadness knowing that the family he’s watching is not his. It’s all the more devastating as the camera zooms back out to reveal that Loki is right there watching with him, from another place, at another time, taking solace in the fact that his sacrifice was not in vain. What’s in store for either Mobius or Sylvie in the future is, for once, completely unknown. And that’s the beauty of it.
What’s Next for Loki?
For Loki, the God of Stories doesn’t exactly get a happy ending. But as he watches his friends continue on in their lives with the freedom of choice they’d never had, the episode ends with Loki looking on with a tearful smile, suggesting that it was all worth it.
After all of Loki’s dastardly deeds during his time in the MCU, the Asgardian has finally become a god whom Thor, Odin, and Frigga would be proud of—making it all the more tragic that none of them are around to see him become the person they always hoped he’d become. While Marvel has yet to announce whether there will be a third season of Loki, this certainly feels like it’s the end. Any alternative would be a mistake, for as good as the series has been. Though Season 2 had its ups and downs, it returned Loki to the pinnacle of MCU TV, rivaled only by the lone season of 2021’s WandaVision. With two tremendous season finales, though, Loki has achieved what few of Marvel Studios’ movies or TV series have ever been able to, providing satisfying conclusions to a character’s story that wasn’t whittled down by a messy CGI spectacle or outsized concerns for promoting the next project coming down the pipeline. Loki’s character arc fully realizes his journey throughout the years, and he now holds a position of power in the MCU that not only allows the Multiverse Saga to continue, but also invests it with greater meaning, knowing that the Asgardian is the force that binds it all together.
As head writer Eric Martin sees it, the story of Loki has come to an end—at least as far as this series goes. “We approached this as like two halves of a book,” Martin recently told CinemaBlend. “Season 1, first half. Season 2, we close the book on Loki and the TVA. Where it goes beyond that, I don’t know. I just wanted to tell a full and complete story across those two seasons.”
However, in an interview with Variety, executive producer Kevin Wright shared a different perspective on the character’s future, citing that “the hope” is for Marvel to one day reunite Loki with his brother Thor for the first time since 2018’s Infinity War. “The sun shining on Loki and Thor once again has always been the priority of the story we’re telling,” Wright said. “But for that meeting to really be fulfilling, we have to get Loki to a certain place emotionally. I think that’s been the goal of these two seasons.”
It’s a bit jarring to read the Loki producer saying that the “priority” of Loki is to essentially promote another MCU project, but hey, this is still Marvel Studios, after all. What’s in store for the former God of Mischief, his new responsibility to the MCU’s multiverse, and what Marvel will do about its Jonathan Majors–Kang the Conqueror situation can be dissected another day. For now, it’s time to appreciate a Marvel series that gave its title character a proper ending.
Her words eerily echo in the final moments of season three’s finale, in which Sazz Pataki, Charles’s former acting stand-in played by Jane Lynch, is shot within the Arconia’s walls. Murder is nothing new in this Manhattan apartment building, but given that the bullet was fired from across the courtyard, this killer might be close to home. As for Mabel (Selena Gomez), Oliver (Martin Short), and Charles (Steve Martin), whose apartment Sazz was standing in at the time of the murder—their podcasting days have landed them directly in the line of fire.
All of that will be uncovered in the show’s fourth season, which was officially announced on Tuesday. Cocreator John Hoffman confirms to Vanity Fair that the Only Murders writers room reconvenes this upcoming Monday following the Writers Guild of America deal. Until then, we have season three to unpack.
In the finale, it’s revealed that the death of Paul Rudd’s Ben Glenroy was orchestrated by a mother-and-son duo. But contrary to early season clues, the culprits are not leading lady Loretta (Meryl Streep) and her long-lost son, Dickie (Jeremy Shamos), with whom she reunites during the production. After obtaining an advance copy of a scathing review for Oliver’s play, Broadway producer Donna DeMeo (Linda Emond) poisons the show’s leading man in order to buy herself some time to retool. It’s her son, Cliff (Wesley Taylor), eager to prove himself as a first-time producer, who then commits the murder. Mother and son are escorted from Death Rattle Dazzle’s opening night in handcuffs, allowing our main trio only minutes to process their findings before another death blow is dealt.
Hoffman chats with VF about the personal tragedy that inspired this season’s big reveal, and Lynch’s surprising reaction to news of her character’s demise.
Vanity Fair:I want to start with the big reveal that Cliff killed Ben. In the second season, youworked backwards from the murderer’s identityin crafting the season. Did you take a similar approach in season 3?
John Hoffman: Yes, we knew early. I’m a wreck of insecurity as a writer in a lot of ways. So I need the confidence to understand how to build these stories both logistically and narratively. Then we have to ask ourselves 4,000 questions: what have we done before? What’s new about it? Do we buy it? Blah, blah, blah. You go through all of these processes to land at all this.
My mother passed away a year ago, so in the midst of writing this season, suddenly these tracks of motherhood and protection and mothers and sons became threads for the season. That felt where it was guided. So my insecurities and the confidence around that felt on the emotional level, like, oh, that’s interesting terrain for me right now to sort of process. And then the writers took over and did amazing things.
Donna and Cliff being introduced in a fairly ridiculous way felt fun for the Broadway nature of where we were going, and then to deepen that through the season and find touchstone points where you got a little more dimension. Donna wasn’t looking to kill him. She was looking to pause for the play, and everything that followed from that she didn’t control, but then was taken up by her son. That’s all being threaded through with the Dickie and Loretta story, and the ridiculous Death Rattle Dazzle story. So all three of those weave [together] by the end of a season.
This post contains plot details forSex Educationseason 4.
When Sex Education’s first season dropped on Netflix at the start of 2019, it felt like a raunchy, cringe-inducing relief from Trump and Brexit-era politics. Set in a retro parallel universe, it had one foot in the past (lots of 80s music and clothing) and the other in the present (iPhones, contemporary pop culture references). The series initially revolved around virginal teenager Otis (Asa Butterfield), who picks up a knack for advice from his sex therapist mother Jean (Gillian Anderson). With encouragement from tough girl-with-a-heart-of-gold Maeve (Emma Mackey), Otis begins an underground counseling service for his schoolmates at Moordale Secondary School, offering often graphic tips on a startling array of carnal challenges. Vaginismus, revenge porn, alien sex fantasies, breast-binding, chlamydia, abortion, anal douching, slut shaming, sexual assault: Sex Education explored them all with its trademark humor and kindness.
It seemed like a fun, wholesomely filthy update of classic American teen comedies as reimagined by a smart young British playwright (creator Laurie Nunn). But four years later, as the series comes to a close, Sex Education feels less like an escapist romp and more like a front on the cultural battlefield. At a moment when American schools are increasingly banning books and blocking classroom instruction on LGBTQ+ topics and sex education generally, when abortion rights are ever more threatened and attacks on gender-affirming care for trans youth mount in both the US and UK, a series that sprinkles sex positivity over every surface resonates in a whole different way. Especially when this series is a massive global success.
As if recognizing this, Sex Education ended season three in a blaze of rebellion against the forces of repression. Over the course of that season, new Moordale headmaster Hope Haddon (Jemima Kirke) had attempted to repair the school’s bad reputation (it was labeled “sex school” by a local tabloid) by forcing students to wear uniforms, censoring sex ed classes, and publicly shaming those she deemed sexually deviant. Moordale’s student body exploded in glorious insolence, mounting an extravaganza—complete with a school band version of Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away” and a student-painted Wall of Vulva—that led to the school being defunded and shut down.
Now some of the characters have transferred to Cavendish. A ”student-led” school, Cavendish could not be more different from stuffy Moordale, thanks to its candy-colored color palette, its daily meditation practice and its flamboyantly progressive values. “Everyone seems happy,” Otis marvels to his best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) when they first arrive. “And queer!” adds Eric, who has learned not to hide his own queerness over the last three seasons. He is delighted to discover that Cavendish’s most popular kids—Abbi (Anthony Lexa) and Roman (Felix Mufti) —are trans. They quickly absorb him into their clique, creating a small rift between Eric and Otis. “He’s always been my person, but sometimes I feel he doesn’t entirely get me,” Eric tells his new friends of Otis. When Eric later gently tries to explain that he and Otis really don’t talk about their racial or financial or religious differences, Otis squirms away from the conversation.
Otis has always been alternatively endearing and self-centered. His brattiness takes center stage this season as he arrives at the new school assuming that he will resume his role as sex therapist, and finds a young woman named O (Thaddea Graham) already operating a practice at Cavendish. He asserts his privilege over O, nastily trying to swipe her clients. But his attempts to introduce himself to the school backfires when he inadvertently broadcasts his sad attempt at a dick pic (complete with poorly trimmed pubic hair) to his classmates. “No one will want to have therapy with creepy pube man,” he says mournfully afterwards.
Series creator Tim Federle peels back the curtain on original-cast cameos, Olivia Rodrigo’s career trajectory, and why this was “the season to go crazy.”
When you’re doing it, the whole world turns on it, and it matters more than anything in the world to me. But then when it’s over, it’s, it’s like vapor. So I feel very detached from it. As an audience member, it feels like I’m watching somebody else.
In the months since you wrapped, have you stayed in touch with the cast?
I haven’t, really. We’ll always have, uh, having shared this experience. But the truth is, when you work on movies, you become very close to people and you share something very intimate, and then when it’s done, you know, the circus kind of folds up its tents and leaves town, and you’re kind of back to your life. I feel connected to everyone, but in a way, my involvement and my work finished on March 1st in Barbados.
The kitchen scene seems like a fun way to have ended.
It was, it was! I loved doing that scene, and it’s rare that I didn’t feel an obligation as an actor to carry a tremendous weight with me into any scene. The characters were at ease, and [Kendall was] enjoying the company of his brother and sister. And my God, they put the nastiest shit you can possibly imagine into that blender! So every take, I had to go outside and retch and then jump in the ocean to reset. But it was fun.
You actually drank what they put in that blender?
I guess my feeling is, I would not be committed enough to what that character wants in that moment if I didn’t drink that thing. She’s saying, “we’ll give this to you if you drink this thing.” So —yeah, that’s just me. Mark [Mylod] knew at a certain point he had to call cut, because if he didn’t call cut, I’m gonna do it, you know?
Brian Cox said he gets people on the street coming up to him and saying, “Fuck off.” Do you have people come up to you who are sort of worried about Ken?
This character invites all kind of responses from people. Some people think he’s cringeworthy, and despicable or pitiable because he’s quite vulnerable. And then there’s other people who I think embrace that vulnerability and fallibility, and care for him. It’s a bit of a litmus test, actually—it tells you a lot about how people respond. I get: “Is he okay? Are you okay?”
Are you okay?
I am okay. This is just a character.
There’s a thread in the show about masculinity and will to power. Kendall is always trying to find his own version of how to be a man.
I remember going to the writers’ room in Brixton six years ago or something, and seeing all the note cards on the wall. And at the very top was this question of: can you escape legacy? Does it define you? And by escaping it, are you still defined by it? So I think he is trying to attain a version of manhood or personhood. He’s trying to individuate, I think, in a certain way, but he has never been able to escape the tractor beam of his father. I wanted for him so badly to get on that boat with Naomi Pierce and just leave it all. But he couldn’t do that.
This post contains spoilers about the series finale of Barry.
From the moment he stepped into Gene Cousineau’s acting class for the first time, Bill Hader’s Barry Berkman looked up to Henry Winkler’s self-involved teacher as a kind of father figure—a man with a method, helping him get in touch with his emotions, or maybe just find a safer place to put them. But that dynamic was never quite reciprocated. Over Barry’s four seasons, our deeply damaged hitman turned performer steadily, somewhat inadvertently ruined his mentor’s life: killing Gene’s girlfriend, effectively ending his class, and eventually sending him into exile. Following an audacious time jump and another plot to frame Gene for the death of his lover, it’s no wonder that when put in the same room with Barry again, Gene decided to shoot his former student dead, then and there.
In the scene, Barry only has time for two short words as he realizes what’s about to happen: “Oh, wow.” That’s more than Winkler could muster when Hader, who also cocreated the show and directed the final season, rather matter-of-factly pitched the idea to his costar. “I was speechless,” Winkler tells Vanity Fair. “I just made sounds.” Gene goes on to serve a lifetime prison sentence—not that we see this fate play out for ourselves. It’s revealed in the parodic film that fills Barry’s final scenes, recreating the events of Barry through a bizarro Hollywood lens. As to how Winkler is feeling about it all? We get into it.
Vanity Fair: Barryis officially finished. How are you feeling?
Henry Winkler: I’m now just sad. We finished in early December; we had some re-shoots. We’ve had the premiere party. Then I don’t see anybody anymore. Sarah is in England. Stephen is off shooting something. Everybody is everywhere. And I am sad.
Let’s get into this finale. What was your initial reaction, particularly to Gene’s ending?
Oh my God. So, halfway through the season, Bill said, “I think we finally broke the eighth episode, the end. You want to know how it ends?” And I went, “Sure.” And he said, “You shoot me.” [Pause] I’m a pretty verbal guy. I was speechless. I just made sounds. I didn’t even know how to react to that. I shoot you. Wow. Okay, that’s—okay. I went and had a burrito. And then we got there and we did it.
What did you make of Gene killing him? How did you play it?
That was scary. The moment really started when I was lured into the hotel room at the end of [episode] seven, and then they’re blaming me for everything. How did that happen? Then I had nowhere to turn, and I think at that moment I went insane. I literally—the switch flipped and led me to the point of no return.
Compare that to season one. Is there some reflection for you in the performance and just in the experience of making the show, of what Gene has been through? Of how this relationship between him and Barry led to this incredibly violent end?
You think about that first year, the teaching and buffoonery and charlatan, and how that led to this ending of the entire show—I never in my wildest actor’s imagination would have come up to this, would have figured that this was going to happen, no matter what this man put me through.
What was it like to actually film it? How did you block it out with Bill? How many takes did you do?
We did two takes. The first take I remember, I shot him in the shoulder. He sat down in the chair, he flopped down in the chair, and he said, “You don’t have to do this, Mr. Cousineau.” And I shot him twice. But then in the final, he just went, “Oh, wow.” It was like he was in disbelief. You could hear a pin drop [on set]. Our armorer and our prop people were extraordinary in how careful they were when we handled a gun on that set. That was my experience. And it still was so scary to think of holding a gun on this human being—my character who hates this character who loves me, who looks at me as his father figure. It is so complicated that I had no idea what I was doing.
You’ve had quite a long, distinguished career. Have you ever had to do something like that before on camera?
Do you know? Not that I can think of. I’ve handled a gun before, when I did a show called Numb3rs. I had to go to a shooting range. I had an FBI tech telling me how to hold the gun. But I never was in a situation that was so fraught that I literally took a human being’s life.
Did the transformation that came with the time jump help you get into that space?
The physicality for Gene was a costume. We stopped filming Gene [for awhile]. I grew a beard. I took a picture of the beard every week. I sent it to [production manager] Aida Rodgers and Bill. They said, “Keep growing. Nope, keep growing.” And then finally, it was long enough, they called me and we started filming again. And I had been on a kibbutz where I was helping people build their homes. I was learning to be a better human being. The only thing is, what they didn’t show you was that the homes fell down.
Spoilers for the season 2 finale of *__Abbott Elementary __*ahead.
Nearly all of the action in Abbott Elementary’s season 2 finale, “Franklin Institute,” takes place beyond the familiar hallways of Abbott Elementary. In fact, much of the Emmy-winning comedy’s 22-episode second season has been an excursion, offering viewers their first glance at their beloved teachers’ extracurricular activities.
“We definitely had an agenda in the first season—this is just going to be a workplace thing, about what’s said within the walls of Abbott,” co-showrunner and executive producer Patrick Schumacker tells Vanity Fair over Zoom. “Season two we wanted to start to get to know a bit about their personal lives. We’re going to meet siblings, we’re going to meet romantic partners.” Enter characters like Janine’s (Quinta Brunson) responsibility-averse sister (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri); their emotionally coaxing, Versace-clad mother (Taraji P. Henson); and Jacob’s (Chris Perfetti) sneakerhead boyfriend Zach (Larry Owens).
But would the crew that’s ostensibly filming Abbott’s students and staff for a documentary about public school funding actually follow their subjects to, say, a hookah lounge, as they did in the show’s holiday episode? “It brings up one of my favorite Onion headlines of all time, which is, ‘The Office documentary crew feels like they have enough footage,’” jokes co-showrunner and EP Justin Halpern.
While expanding Abbott’s orbit presented logistical challenges—how to shoot a confrontation between Janine and her sister that she wants to shield from cameras, for instance—it also allows for tonal harmony. That aforementioned “Holiday Hookah” episode, where will they/won’t they co-workers Janine and Gregory (Tyler James Williams) edge ever closer to their eventual first kiss, has the characters seeing each other in a fresh, after-hours light just as the audience does.
Below, the showrunning duo talks about the closure Janine and Gregory find in the season 2 finale and the “tension” that awaits them in season 3, as well as the role awards season played in making everyone involved not want to “fuck this up.”
Vanity Fair: The 22-episode network season is a bit of a lost art. Walk me through how you went about tackling it.
Justin Halpern: The fun thing about 22 is that you have some episodes where you can drill down on one part of a character. You can take some swings you wouldn’t normally, like the episode where Barbara [Sheryl Lee Ralph] starts a fire. That episode is solely about how Barbara deals with mental health and stress, things that affect her at work that she wishes wouldn’t. If you’re doing 13, you probably can’t do that episode because you’ve got to keep things moving.
Was there a period in the season that you felt the stretch and challenge of 22 the most?
Patrick Schumacker: I believe we did seven episodes straight. Episode five happened to coincide with the Emmys. There was pressure for people to make all of these commitments to promote the show and get the word out during award season. And you could just tell that everybody was exhausted. We’re like, “We can’t do more than five moving forward, ideally four.” That was the pressure of award season, but then also of knowing that after episode five, we still had 17 more to do. So yeah, man, that was where it really, really hit us.
The “Educator of the Year” episode felt like acknowledgement of the incredible awards success *__Abbott __*achieved in its first season. How did that attention impact the second season?
Halpern: I don’t think we ever felt the pressure of, “Oh, man, everybody loves it. How are we going to fuck this up?” We felt like, “Hey, let’s just keep making the same show we made in the first season because that’s the show that we all love.” You can get caught up in a lot of shit in this business. For Quinta, and for us it was like, “Are we making episodes that we would want to watch? All right, let’s keep doing that.” So, we try to keep the noise out of it.
As a white woman I know I’m probably experiencing episodes differently than some Black viewers watching the show. Did you discuss those different audiences while making the show?
That’s kind of the great thing about making this show is you’re hovering at this intersection of different cultural gazes. It’s scripted and created by two guys who grew up in Atlanta in a very Black neighborhood, and a lot of that stuff is presented very matter-of-factly in the show—it’s not presented for white viewers, and it is put in there without any ceremony or explanation. This show’s also very aware that a big chunk of the audience, we’re not accustomed to Southern Black culture, and I think we try to construct it in a way where the show feels welcoming to anyone who walks into the room, whether they understand the context or not. That’s in the tone of the show, and also just in the performances and the warmth of these characters.
As a non-Black director, presumably there were times when you’ve had to try to understand the implications of something unfamiliar to you.
It’s a conversation that me, Donald, and Steve have all the time. Sometimes I’ll get the context of something wrong and present it in a weird way and then they end up liking it! That’s the combustible, exciting thing at the center of the show, like an overlap of multiple perspectives. All of our hands are on the Ouija board in some way, and we trust each other enough that we just tend to let it take us wherever it wants to go.
You just talked about getting the context wrong sometimes. So manyAtlantaepisodes dig into how white people project things onto Blackness, or depictwhitenessand wrestle over cultural co-optation.
That’s absolutely true. And also, in the pilot, Earn was an outsider. He’s a Princeton dropout who walked into this world where his cousin was an upcoming rapper and he got roasted by people in this world for not understanding the culture, you know? So I think it’s always been about people who are slightly outside looking in.
In the finale, there’s the scene where the Black sushi chef is lecturing the gang about how Popeyes sells a fake version of Black culture back to the community. But the chef is a pretty terrifying figure, so the viewer is being pulled in multiple directions.
Yeah, I think the Atlanta code is that everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong at the same time.
You’re continuing your collaboration with Donald Glover, working on his new showMr. & Mrs. Smith.Does it require a completely different kind of visual vocabulary?
Yeah, it’s a completely different thing. The incredible thing about Atlanta is, it doesn’t promise you anything other than that you’ll be with these people for 30 minutes. There’s no set expectations for language or genre or how much comedy or drama should be in it. But you expect certain things out of a spy-related story, so it becomes a conversation about when do we lean into those, and when do we subvert them?
So what are the chances of bringingAtlantacharacters back to life in the future? Between Alfred’s dancing in “Crank that Killer” and his and Earn’s rendition of “Old MacDonald” in the finale, I’d like to see a special Broadway musical episode ofAtlanta.
The only way this show comes back is as a Broadway musical! [Laughs.]
So a future season or one-off is not something you’ve toyed with?
We often joke that we’ll come back when we’re all 70. It’ll be called Atlanta: Lottie’s Revenge. If there’s a good story to tell, I think we’re all open to the idea of reopening the door. But it feels right to have this [finale] as a punctuation point.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I’m curious how that builds to, as you said, a very simple moment like this that’s also setting up a whole new avenue for these two characters who have been on these sort of parallel journeys until now.
I don’t know that we paid it too much thought. There was a line—is it there? I haven’t seen it, but do I ask her for a diaper in the scene?
Yes, you do. That’s the last line of the season.
Oh, my gosh. Okay. So they kept that. [Laughs] Yeah, we had honestly so much, the most discussion about the line. On paper it’s this big season finale, and here I am asking for a diaper. So it’s kind of like, That’s a bit weird! How do we make it so it’s not obviously about the diaper, but about what’s going on between these two women? We did many different takes of the ending. We did versions without the line. We did versions where I just said her name and she said mine. We did versions with the diaper line, then we changed up the diaper line. It was a whole different smorgasbord of potential endings with or without the diaper. Excited to see where they landed with that. [Laughs]
It’s kind of sweet in a weird way—whichever take they used, that was my takeaway.
There was also the practical conversation of, my baby’s much smaller than yours. Does it make sense to ask for a diaper? How many would I have already?
To me the line really spoke in a lot of ways just to the characters’ history. There’s a humor to the moment of them recognizing, well, here we are.
Yes. Maybe that’s why we didn’t talk too much about the scene itself, because I think we both felt like there was a lightness in this scene. We never kind of thought to lean into seriousness. The irony of it is what it felt like we should be leaning into. And therefore it was like, Oh, my gosh, of course, of course you are here.
In terms of the episode structure and really the whole season’s structure, this reveal is obviously a surprise for the audience. In those kinds of moments where we’re not with Serena for a chunk of time, do you fill in the gaps, just in terms of what happened that we don’t get to see, that’s not on the page?
Yeah, I thought about a lot of what might have happened to her. There was also that question of, Well, is she recognizable at this point? How expansive is that? Or how small is that kind of idea that she might be recognizable to some people? I was like, Well, what path would she have taken? In my mind, she would’ve ended up at some shelter where she could be anonymous and dressed down and receive aid of some kind, like clothing. She’s wearing super-normal stuff like jeans and somehow gets herself on that train, which I think would’ve been the biggest gamble. There was a discussion about how you’d have to receive a pass of some kind, a refugee pass, and be anonymous. I mean, she’s smart, so she would’ve had to figure it out.
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