A hitman walks into a theatre class to kill an aspiring actor and discovers he really loves acting. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the premise of Barry sounds like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, the show that shot Bill Hader, Barry’s star and co-creator, to comedy fame.
I was drawn to Barry as a fan of Hader – one of SNL’s best impressionists – and went in expecting fun, high-concept laughs. But over its two seasons (a third is on the way), the series is maturing into something more, becoming a superb meditation on violence and performance.
Created by Hader and Alec Berg, the show follows traumatised ex-Marine and killer-for-hire Barry Berkman (Hader), who has accepted a job to kill an amateur actor in LA. He travels from the midwest and does the job – then stays to enrol in the class his target was in. Barry fumbles his way through finding new friends, a romance and improving his craft – all very relatable to any aspiring creative, except that Barry must juggle all this with gang conflicts, an encroaching police investigation and his handler, Fuches (a diabolically slimy Stephen Root), who wants him to quit acting to focus on killing.
This hotpot of comedy and brutal action makes for a delicious and surprisingly cohesive mix. And for a man constantly managing different identities, what better metaphor is there than theatre? When his class takes on Macbeth, Barry is so overwhelmed by the moral questions of the Scottish play that he has a meltdown. “I’ve killed people,” he says. “I should just go blow my brains out because there’s no hope for me, right?” He’s not alone in struggling with the thin line between reality and performance. In one memorable storyline, Barry’s girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) writes an autobiographical play in which she leaves an abusive relationship with her head held high, when in reality she still lives in a state of constant fear and shame because of her ex.
Yes, Barry can be heavy stuff but it still manages to be one of the funniest shows in recent memory, with plots involving bumbling criminals, supergluing stab wounds and a feral little girl with terrifying strength. The stellar ensemble cast sees breakout actors mixed with household names. Henry Winkler does his best work in years as Barry’s blowhard acting coach Gene Cousineau, while fan fave Anthony Carrigan is deeply lovable as the Chechen mobster NoHo Hank, who imprints on Barry like a duckling after dubbing him “the Air Jordans of assassins”. Kirby Howell-Baptiste also gets to spoof her much-lampooned Australian accent from The Good Place.
But the beating heart of the show is Hader, whose performance nabbed him an Emmy in 2018. Though Hader has joked about HBO execs being sceptical of his casting (and he can be goofy), he’s completely electrifying as Barry, flipping from endearing sincerity to menacing rage.
Barry’s immoral actions aren’t motivated by a need to channel his bloodlust like Showtime’s serial killer Dexter, or a mounting god complex à la Walter White. Barry is irrevocably shaped by his time in the US military and its disturbing, gleeful embrace of violence. He is terrifyingly capable, and constantly in pain. When someone finally confronts Barry, he pleads: “We want the same thing. We wanna be happy. We want love. We want a life.”
Barry is so compulsively watchable due to this unbreakable cycle of self-validation, as he scrambles to cover his tracks and his murders and lies pile up, the show challenges the limits of our empathy. At the same time, it exposes how people compartmentalise their own bad behaviour. Though most of us can (hopefully) say we’ve never killed anyone for gain, how many of us have presented a false image to maintain our lifestyles, avoid conflict, or feel powerful, absolved or loved?
The showrunners wrestle with these questions while never letting Barry off the hook. The second season leaves him hurtling towards a long dark night of the soul, and I’m desperate for a resolution. Covid-19 has delayed the production of the third season – but while we wait, watch the first two to experience a wonderfully experimental comedy-thriller and its often repulsive, yet always delightful, array of characters.
Barry is available to stream on Binge now
