![]() Goldberg, who plays Sally, showcases more depth and capability in one scene in the third episode than she was able to do throughout Season 1-and the direction her story seems to be headed truly sent chills up my spine.īarry is dark, and it’s cynical, and from one perspective, it makes light of interrelated murder sprees. Barry is especially amused by the types of people that flock to Hollywood-though these types move beyond caricature in Season 2, as the show begins to flesh out its marginal characters. Someone should maybe tell that to Gene’s students. A believable performance, they argue, requires more truth-telling than fabrication. In Barry’s hands, though, these inside-baseball references aren’t just Hollywood gossip Hader and Berg are asking questions about what it means to make art, about the difference between acting and lying. Just as it’s a twist on antihero tropes, Barry is also yet another show about show business. Of course, this truth comes couched through the fabulations of theater, a dramatic irony the show mercilessly mines for humor. Their every interaction carries a heightened anxiety, made so much worse by Barry’s discovery that his truth is what keeps Gene interested in the class. Janice’s murder, at the end of Season 1, set up a particularly awful confrontation: the inevitable one between Barry and darling, doddering Gene, who did not realize he was letting a viper into his life when he welcomed the wild-eyed monologuist to his acting class. But his very niceness also widens his blast radius, as the people he cares about keep getting chewed up by the ugly world of crime he’s trying to leave behind. That prevents this comedy from retreading the hallowed, crowded ground of numerous antihero dramas-the sort where bad men keep getting worse, even as the corpses and devastation pile up around them.īarry means to be a nice guy-or he thinks he does. And the screaming, in essence, is where Barry’s second season focuses its interest. This is why Barry likes acting: it’s what he’s been doing all along.Īnd Barry feels so tightly drawn because Barry himself is such a circumscribed, limited character: he can only let himself take up so much space, before he starts screaming. (The character himself is both a bad actor, and a bad actor.) Season 2 opens by showing Barry as the compartmentalized killing machine he has been all along-a man who has the gall to brush aside Janice’s disappearance because of his inane commitment to performing in an amateur production of a 1928 Broadway comedy. The first season engaged the viewer in the question of Barry’s goodness-and then, at the end, brought the ax down hard on any hopes for Barry’s good nature or better angels. ![]() It’s Barry who is altered.īarry is a kind of antihero comedy about a lovable bad guy. By the end, the rest of the class is riveted Gene is back on board with his hapless, mediocre students and the viewer has learned a little more about how Barry became a ruthless assassin. In a devastating sequence at the end of the first episode, Barry describes the first time he took a life, as a sniper in the war in Afghanistan. ![]() Which is why, in a last-ditch effort to revive Gene’s enthusiasm for acting, Barry takes the biggest risk of his life: he tells the truth. So Barry-desperate for everything to be fine-tries to gin up enthusiasm for The Front Page, though even Sally ( Sarah Goldberg), his sadistically career-savvy girlfriend-who is so self-absorbed she hasn’t picked up that he’s a contract killer!-isn’t into the idea. Barry is less concerned about Janice’s disappearance-because he murdered her, as soon as she discovered that he is a killer for hire.īut no one else knows that. He’s determined to perform his heart out in his acting class’s performance of The Front Page, even though their beloved teacher, Gene ( Henry Winkler), has ditched rehearsals because he’s mourning the disappearance of his girlfriend, police detective Janice ( Paula Newsome). Hitman-turned-actor Barry ( Bill Hader, also the show’s co-creator, executive producer, writer, and sometime director) is trying to leave his past behind. Throughout the first three wonderful episodes of Barry Season 2, everything is on the verge of falling to pieces.
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