Who’s laughing now? Barry is game-changing TV with a point to prove | CMscreens
was always a delicious deception. The absurdity kept you off-balance, one step behind the mood and one layer removed from the real Barry . Trailing a target to the acting class run by Gene Cousineau , the former marine was a terrible thespian – it was only when he spoke honestly about how he had killed people, whether in Afghanistan or America, that he was acclaimed for a worthy performance.
Bill Hader plays a disaffected hitman who remakes himself as a Hollywood actor in the black comedy Barry.Violence is the currency of the show, but it has never been simple to pigeonhole. Like the least inspired of crime dramas, killings would happen with abrupt ease. Hader’s Barry Berkman – his stage name is Barry Block – would be baffled by both the people he was hired to off, and his own lack of reaction.
Somehow Hader and Berg contrasted this with entertainment industry satire and mordant gags. A Chechen gangster, Noho Hank , who’d fallen in love with the L.A. lifestyle, was a source of comic relief. But the more Barry tried to leave his life as a hitman behind, the more he simply infected those he was attracted to. Hoping to abandon his manipulative fixer, Monroe Fuches , Barry transferred his respect and affection to Cousineau.
No one fell deeper into Barry’s world than Sally Reed , another acting student who had her own buried trauma. Pursued by Barry, she became his girlfriend even as her talent shone through. But when her TV show got torpedoed, Sally spiralled out of control, embracing the violence Barry carried inside him and finally expressing it in a cathartic scene in the final episode where she fought for her life and then brutally took another.
As the storytelling became bleaker – the laughter, still expertly marshalled, hid less and less – the visual language ofbecame richer and more pronounced. The third season, with Hader and Berg directing every instalment between them, might be the closest we’ll ever get to a Coen brothers series, with shards of dream logic and deadpan action sequences. At one point a suburban street simply turned into a beach, a step away from reality that somehow served to focus Barry’s journey.