Bill Hader’s new hit (man)
SNL alum’s Barry on HBO is strange fun.
You’re not used to seeing Bill Hader like this.
The comedian is best-known for broad comedies like Trainwreck and
Saturday Night Live.
But with Barry, a new HBO comedy about a hit man who tries to be an actor in Los Angeles (Sunday, 10:30 ET/PT, ★★★g), Hader steps out of his shell and into the shoes of Barry Berkman, a depressed and aimless hit man who tries his hand at acting in Hollywood. It’s an out-there concept that results in a series that’s simultaneously hopeful and incredibly cynical, comedic and violent, heightened and grounded. And Hader is the perfect man to balance these disparate elements.
The series kicks off when Barry is down on his luck as a hit man. The exMarine turned to the life after his military retirement left him feeling lost and purposeless. A fatherly figure (Stephen Root) swooped in and manipulated the vulnerable Barry into a life of crime.
But when he’s sent from Cleveland to Los Angeles to take out an amateur actor, he stumbles into a hack theater class taught by a washed-up actor (Henry Winkler, an absolute treat) and finds both his calling and a crush in struggling actress Sally (Sarah Goldberg). More than anything, learning how to act helps teach Barry how to feel again, and he tries to balance the rewards of his new life with the consequences of his old one.
Barry is strange: There’s no other way to say it, but that’s a compliment. The series is a mash-up of Hollywood satire and crime drama, a pairing that really shouldn’t work but is carried by Hader’s sympathetic and subtle performance and the series’ overall strong scripts from Hader and his co-creator, Alec Berg ( Silicon Valley).
It’s alternately funny and horrifying, and it manages to make jokes about its criminal elements without being too ex- ploitative or blasé, as when a group of Chechen mobsters is as excited about the appearance of a famous assassin as a group of tween girls might be about Justin Bieber.
Much of the success of the show rests on Hader, though, and he is fantastic. His expressive face carries the audience from scene to scene, tone to tone. The actor somehow masters playing a hit man trying to be an actor who is simultaneously pretending not to be a hit man to his friends and the police. He does it all in a way that is hilarious and seemingly effortless.
The ensemble is superb as well. Winkler is right at home as an overthe-hill and overcompensating actor with a thing for the detective (Paula Newsome) investigating a murder to which Barry is connected. Barry’s acting class is a delightful assortment of Hollywood wannabes. But Barry’s big standout is Anthony Carrigan as Chechen mobster NoHo Hank, a goofy, cartoonish villain who walks away with every scene he’s in, and he and his boss Goran (Glenn Fleshler) gamely carry much of the show’s comedy.
Barry may not be for everyone, but if you can buy into this strange world, you might fall for it as hard as Barry falls for the stage.