Let’s put a hit on this dark comedy, 3.5 readers.
I have been avoiding this show for a while. I love comedy and I have long believed that comedians are the unsung heroes of Hollywood. Laughter is an involuntary response, you can’t hold it back when the humor floodgates call, so anyone who can make it happen has a gift.
One such gifted person is Bill Hader, who I would argue is perhaps one of, if not the best celebrity impressionists of his generation. Like Dana Carvey, who I admired as a kid, Hader was SNL’s go to guy for mocking the famous. He just has that uncanny ability to change his face, to change his voice, to mimic another person, make you think he’s them for awhile, then make you laugh as he does funny things as that person.
But Dana Carvey, the great SNL impressionist of a previous generation, made cinematic forays outside of SNL and flopped, with the exception of his Garth character in Wayne’s World. Sometimes comedic actors go the dramatic route with great success, as Adam Sandler did in Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, then again their dramatic efforts flop, like Adam Sandler in Spanglish.
All of this is my longwinded way of explaining why I avoided this show for years because I felt like by trying to do drama, Hader was like Michael Jordan who could have given us a few more seasons of his great NBA career, but decided to fizzle as a baseball player instead. Surely, Bill should do his own sketch comedy show and keep capitalizing on his comedy gift rather than do something different.
But honestly, this show works and I’m glad I finally started watching it. Alas, I started watching it a few weeks ago only to discover it ended this year. I’m half way through so if you know how it ends, don’t tell me.
The premise? Hader’s protagonist Barry is a battle-hardened Afghanistan war veteran, having seen and done some awful things that haunt him to this day. He is emotionally crippled, distant and depressed, yearning for a happier life but happiness is an emotion that eludes him. From the start, I wondered if this character choice was on purpose, as it allows Hader to play a dramatic role without having to display a range of emotion as usually the best comedians can only play a funny person but struggle when they have to play someone who is up, down or in the middle. Make no mistake that throughout the series, Barry experiences a range of emotion, but in such a frazzled way that you can tell he’s such a depressed guy that we should all just applaud him for getting out of bed in the morning.
The show rests that on that old Hollywood cliche that war veterans can’t function in a civilian job that doesn’t require killing. I would argue that there are cops, firefighters, security guards, veterans working in paramilitary jobs and doing well but ok, Barry doesn’t have their mental stability. Got it.
And so, at the start of the show, we learn that Barry is a hitman in the employ of his handler/father figure Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root, another veteran character actor you might know as the voice of Bill on King of the Hill).
To the show’s credit, the life of a hitman is not sugar coated. There are so many hitman shows/movies where the hitman is very suave and sophisticated and conveniently only dispatches bad people so that the audience doesn’t dislike him. All the people who ever get killed are very bad, usually criminals and killers themselves.
Sure, Barry deep-sixes plenty of baddies, but as a murderer for hire, he kills plenty of people who arguably don’t deserve it. Spouses who want revenge on a cheating spouse or the spouse’s lover, people who would stand to benefit if someone else was out of the picture, bottomline if you want someone dead and you know how to reach Fuches, and you’re willing to pay, then Barry will kill that problem person in your life, zero morality questions asked.
Oh, and if there’s a witness, just some poor schmuck who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Barry will shuffle that person off their mortal coil as well. We even get a look into the sad lives of family members of those whose loved ones were taken from them by Barry. Their suffering is very real.
All in all, this isn’t your standard hit man show. The real consequences of a death for cash biz are seen.
Then how, you might ask, is this show funny? Truth be told, it is a very dark comedy.
As our show begins, Barry tracks a target to LA, only to discover the dude he’s been hired to snuff is an aspiring actor. He stalks said target to an acting class run by the wacky Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler in literally his best role since Fonzi.)
As he sits back and watches the fledgling thespians work on their craft, Barry instantly falls in love with the acting profession, seeing it as a way to work through his own emotional problems as what is acting other than humans trying to understand and recreate emotions?
And thus our anti-hero’s journey begins. Much to Fuches’ dismay, Barry dives into the world of acting, going to acting classes, trying out for parts in plays and movies, the works. Not the best move for a man who has committed multiple heinous crimes because you know, the more famous you get, the more people will sniff around your past.
Somehow, Barry must learn to juggle his acting work with his hitman work. It’s not a profession that is easily quit. Fuches keeps dragging him back in, as does NoHo Hank, Anthony Carrigan in a show stealing role as a Chechen mobster who is a fan of Barry’s murderous skills and won’t take no for an answer when it comes to dispatching his rivals. The humor in this character comes from a guy with an outlandish Russian accent saying very silly American things. The best description I can give is if Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin’s hard partying, East European accented “wild and crazy guys” from 70s SNL had a grown up son.
As if he didn’t have enough to hide, Barry finds a love interest in Sally (Sarah Goldberg), a fellow struggling actor from Cousineau’s class. If you divide the show into two halves, one part is about Barry’s murderous secret life and the other part is about Barry and Sally navigating the ins and outs of Hollywood, from those early years where they struggle to get any part, to those later years when they find success but have to deal with schmuck executives who want to water down their success in the name of profits. And of course, Barry is always murdering people between auditions and then going to great lengths to cover it up.
The true show stealer here is our beloved Fonz. Cousineau is portrayed as one of the most despised and reviled actors in Hollywood, his behavior so boorish that he was blackballed from ever getting a part again and subsists on his own personal acting studio where he overcharges young naive wannabes for copies of his lousy book, his lessons and other products unlikely to get them anywhere. “No refunds” is his constant refrain.
As the show progresses, occasional real-life actors playing themselves stop by just to dump on Cousineau and relay to the audience the horrors of what this self-absorbed prick has done to them. People who work behind the scenes also have tales to tell. One producer humorously recounts a story about how as a young production assistant, Cousineau threw an omelette at him, plate and all, because he forgot the chives.
But like Barry, Gene is on his own journey toward growth and change, trying to make amends for the wrongs he did in his youth and convince the industry that he offended to give him one last shot as an old man. Barry becomes torn between dueling father figures, the handler that wants him to keep killing for money, the acting coach who wants him to be a success, and of course, the girlfriend/love of his life who would be horrified if she knew about his night job.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Again, don’t tell me what happens if you know, but I’m wagering the ending is not happy. While I can’t say the show is realistic (I don’t think anyone could kill as many people as Barry has without being caught in the first season) it doesn’t sugar coat things and it recognizes that bad deeds lead to bad consequences so those who do bad eventually get theirs.
My one criticism would be the episodes are a half hour and the whole series feels like it could all be just one season. It all centers around Barry trying to be an actor and being with Sally but getting pulled back into crime by Fuches and Hank and if the show had been given more seasons, who knows what villains Barry might have encountered by day while he scores those big parts by day.
Watch on HBO Max, which is now just Max. How pretentious. Bonus that some of Hader’s past SNL friends stop by once in a while.
Bookshelf Battle 