Hitman on A Hit Show: Barry Season 2 Review

As I’ve probably mentioned way too many times on this blog, there are so many series on the air that even the most devoted professional critic couldn’t cover them all. So when HBO’s Barry debuted last year to massive critical acclaim and big ratings, I was intrigued but chose to follow Billions instead. Part of my reluctance came because I had never been impressed by the work of Bill Hader before. He’d done superb work as an impressionist on SNL for almost a decade, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to great things. Then after the Emmys came out and Hader triumphed (as well as at almost ever other awards series in between), I realized I must at least give this series a chance. Having seen the first two episodes of Season 2, I now see that it’s nothing like I expected.

Hader plays Barry Berkman, a contract killer from Cleveland, who after coming to LA for a job, decides to try and take an acting class, and assumes a separate identity to do so. However, in order to cover his tracks, he continues to kill and in the course of just eight episodes, he racked up a body count Tony Soprano would envy, usually in connection with the Chechnian mobster. In the final episode, he ended up killing a detective who’d been tracking him all season, and who had become the girlfriend of the man running his class Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler).

Barry seems to be trying to move on in Season 2. He’s taken up a job at a sporting goods store, and actually has a girlfriend Sally Reed (Sara Goldberg). But he still seems unable to juggle the two worlds. The mobster whose been protecting him from one of the murders he committed, now wants him to kill an Ecuadorian mob boss in order to protect himself. His former partner Monroe Fuchs (the always reliable Stephen Root) has retreated to Cleveland, but when his tooth was found at a quadruple homicide, he returns to LA, unaware that the police are following him. And Gene, though he seems to have recovered from the death of his girlfriend, is still clearly very damaged.

This series, frankly, plays more like one of the early Showtime dramedies that the network used to specialize in – Nurse Jackie or Weeds, and I mean this as a compliment. And a lot of the credit must go to Hader, who until I’ve seen these episodes, I didn’t think was remotely capable of plumbing such dramatic depths. There is something in Barry that really wants to be a different men, who doesn’t want to be a murderer. But the world seems to think that’s what he’s good in. When he asked the mobster: “Am I an evil person?”, the mobster doesn’t even hesitate before saying: “You’re the most evil person I know.:” And there are parts of it he just can’t admit to anyone: when he tries to tell the acting class of the first killings he ever committed as a soldier in Afghanistan, under Gene’s instructions, they act it out, and it plays as self-parody. But they can’t even consider the reality – that Barry felt nothing about killing the enemy. And when he tries to avoid going further, Gene more or less tells him he is not going to be able to hide from it. Hader does some of the best work as a bifurcated person I’ve seen since the days of Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan. Who would have thought Stefan was capable of such dark moods?

Strangely enough, most of the comedy works better around Hader than actually from him. Root, who is blissfully incompetent in his job as a criminal delivers some of the series best lines. And Goldberg, the Rita Bennett of this series, is equally impressive – the typical LA flake aspiring actress one moment, revealing her soul of being a battered woman the next. But by far, the most incredible work on this series comes from Henry Winkler as Gene. A man who truly does think that the world revolves around him (he seems to have tapes and diaries of every meeting he’s ever done), he is incapable of being sincere even when he earnestly he thinks he is.  A satire of every failed actor in Hollywood, Winkler has the ability to make this role his own, and in every scene, he more than demonstrates why he got the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor last year and should be in the conversation again this year.

But I think what makes Barry find its own muse in that it’s a tragedy in a way that so many series with antiheroes are not. Barry wants to be an actor, but he is still very capable of violence. The fact that the thought of Sally managed to keep him from acting last night doesn’t hide that fact. When will the cops catch up to him? When will Gene learn the truth about what Barry did? And what happens when he stops acting? There were a lot of critics who thought Barry should have stopped after his initial season – live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse – or corpses. Just having seen the first two episodes of this season, that sounds like a terrible idea.  I think this series may end in the same wondrous darkness Breaking Bad did, and I can’t wait to see it unfold.

My score: 4.5 stars.