Barry (2018-Present)

My brother and I like to exchange show recommendations, and this is one he turned me onto. You might consider Barry the sitcom corollary to Breaking Bad: a dark comedy with elements of strong drama and heavy subject matter starring an actor heretofore best known for unambiguous comedy. An all-around excellent show.

Barry, a disillusioned hit man, glimpses the possibility of a different life when an assignment sends him to LA to do a hit for the Chechen mob. While there, his path crosses with a ramshackle but very dedicated acting class, and Barry starts to dream of learning how to express himself through acting, leaving his life of violence behind him. But of course, a life like that isn’t easy to get out of, and no matter how hard Barry tries to start something new for himself, lingering complications from his old life keep calling.

I love this show’s strong mix of ridiculous comedy and intense drama. For every excitable emoji-using gangster and self-indulgent original piece by one of the acting students, there’s a scene of Barry (a veteran) grappling with his PTSD or acting student Sally confronting the deeply-sexist reality of trying to make it in Hollywood. All the major characters similarly bring both humor and pathos in equal turn, and the supporting cast is populated by memorable personalities with amusing quirks.

To continue with the Breaking Bad-corollary thing, Barry starts out in the opposite position of Walter White: a man who’s done unspeakable things who wants to get out of his life of crime and go legit. So, instead of seeing the slow descent of an ordinary man, we see a guy trying to climb out of the descent that began a long time ago, trying to rehearse scenes for class and vibe awkwardly with a fellow student, all the while continuing to be hounded by contacts from his past. The show is unflinching in how it depicts Barry’s PTSD, something that all the other characters almost uniformly fail to understand: on the acting-class side, other students are jealous of Barry’s well of dark memories to draw from for dramatic scenes, and on the hitman side, we see multiple people exploiting Barry’s psychological damage for their personal profit.

When it comes to the cast, Bill Hader as Barry is of course the headline. He’s fantastic in the role, switching fluidly between awkward, tortured, and dangerous as the story calls for it. Also excellent are Sarah Goldberg as Sally, an ambitious actress made up of equal parts self-absorption and barely-restrained desperation, and Anthony Carrigan (Zsaz from Gotham) as Hank, a happy-go-lucky gangster looking to make friends and work his way up in the enterprise. The show also features a great performance from Stephen Root, a subtly scenery-chewing Henry Winkler (that sounds paradoxical, but that’s what he’s doing,) and minor roles for two The Good Place cast members, D’Arcy Carden (Janet!) and Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Simone.)

Warnings

Strong thematic elements (including PTSD,) violence (including domestic violence,) sexual content, language, and drinking/smoking/drug use.