Barry (HBO) - Season Three: A TV Review
/My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. Great acting, writing and directing make Barry one of the b est shows on TV.
I’ve been a huge fan of the black comedy series Barry ever since it premiered on HBO in March of 2018. The show, which is created by and stars Bill Hader, tells the story of Barry Berkman, a veteran of the Afghanistan war who becomes a hitman and then unsuccessfully tries to transition out of a life of violence by attempting to become an actor in Hollywood.
I loved Barry because of its gloriously dark humor, its insightful and incisive take on the inanity of acting classes and the pursuit of success in Hollywood, and its exquisite writing, directing and acting.
Season three of the series, which runs for eight episodes, finally premiered on HBO in late April and finished in mid-June, and I just completed watching it last night.
Season three gets off to a not-so-great start, in fact it was so not-so-great that I thought it had jumped the shark and lost its mojo entirely. But after a shaky first three episodes, Barry once again finds its rhythm and gets into an irresistible groove, so much so that the final three episodes are as good as it gets on television.
In order to avoid spoilers, I will only say that the mantra for season three of Barry is that ‘the bill has come due’. Barry spent the first two seasons being a reluctant but very good hitman (and very bad actor), but now the hunter has become the hunted as the families of his victims are out for revenge.
As Barry slips deeper and deeper into a tangled web of his own making, he simultaneously dives deeper and deeper into an existential ocean searching for answers, or meaning, or purpose.
Bill Hader is outstanding as he perfectly captures Barry’s increasing agitation with life in an ever-increasing pressure cooker. The fear in his eyes is palpable as he desperately tries to maintain his cool and his cover as his world crumbles around him.
Supporting characters go through their own tumultuous and tortuous journeys as well, with Barry’s girlfriend Sally (a fragile and combustible Sarah Goldberg) riding the nauseating roller coaster of the Hollywood machine for her profoundly unsatisfying 15 minutes of fame. Barry’s acting teacher, Gene Cousineau (a gloriously inimitable Henry Winkler), is stuck on the same narcissistic, self-immolating, humiliating Hollywood ride, but for the last 50 years.
Naïve dimwit Chechen gangster NoHo Hank, a truly terrific Anthony Carrigan, is navigating his own fantastically preposterous maze as well, which includes his closeted homosexuality, deadly Chechen gang politics and a love affair with Cristobal (Michael Irby), a leader in a rival Bolivian gang.
Both Carrigan and Winkler are so great in their roles that it makes me giddy. These aren’t the usual sitcom caricatures, these are well-written, multi-dimensional characters brought to life by gifted, committed actors of great skill, and the results are glorious.
The rest of the cast, from big roles to small, are top notch as well, from D’Arcy Carden as Natalie Greer, Sally’s assistant, to Elizabeth Perkins as Diane Villa the head of BanShe the network for women, to Tom Allen as Mitch the philosopher baker.
The writing is equally as good, and in the final half of season three is just fantastic. But what is most appealing about Barry, this season in particular, is the direction. Each sequence is so well designed, both cinematically and dramatically, that it feels like a master filmmaker is behind the camera.
Bill Hader and his co-creator Alec Berg directed all the episodes in season three, and their work is jaw-droppingly impressive. From the viscerally unnerving motorcycle sequence to the podcast sound-room sequence to the FaceTime to Chechnya/police raid/Bolivian hit sequence, all of the action sequences are unique in design and execution, and it makes Barry a glory to behold. Most television directors, even the good ones, have limited visual and creative imagination, usually because their ambition is stunted by the limitations of the medium and the business of television. But Hader and Berg are not infected by any such afflictions, and their vision is so clear and their direction so crisp, that Barry feels like cinema rather than tv.
As for the comedy, season three is less aggressively funny than its predecessors, but the humor that is there works because it is so deliciously dark. For example, there’s an action sequence, the aforementioned “sound-room” scene, that is incredibly disturbing, but which made me laugh out loud at a particularly bizarre moment amongst the depravity. This is what is so great about Barry, it isn’t forcing the laughs, it just lets you marinate in the madness of its premise and then jolts you with dark absurdities that are undeniably funny even if they are barbaric, or maybe even because they are barbaric.
Due to Covid and all the rest, we had to wait three years between season two and season three of Barry. Thankfully, HBO has greenlit season four of the series, and hopefully the wait between season three and four will be considerably shorter because Barry is undeniably one of the very best things on tv, and I’d like to think we deserve good things.
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