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 aired 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 her. In the final scene, he crawled into bed next to his girlfriend, grimaced and said to himself: “Starting n—” Cut to black.

It was an excellent season finale. But it would have been one hell of a gutsy series finale. That uncompleted syllable would have suggested so much: Barry’s ultimate inability to change, a series of self-deceptions and one last times stretching on forever.

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 mini-series. It is not; HBO has since picked it up for another season.