Violence is the currency of the show,but it has never been simple to pigeonhole. Like the least inspired of crime dramas,killings would happen with abrupt ease. Hader’s Barry Berkman – his stage name is Barry Block – would be baffled by both the people he was hired to off,and his own lack of reaction. Was it ludicrous or tragic that Barry would go from one murder to the next,unaware of the trauma he’d brought back from war and how it had damaged him? Laughing,the show’s first season suggested,might be the safest response.
But over three seasons that comic detachment slowly disappeared. One way of looking atBarry is that it was about the ramifications of your heinous acts catching up with you. With each batch the pace quickened and the impact deepened. In the first season,when Barry stuck around to take Cousineau’s class,he had to hear the father of a murdered student express his profound grief;by the third season the families of various victims were pursuing Barry for revenge and those closest to him had been indelibly marked by his actions.
Somehow Hader and Berg contrasted this with entertainment industry satire and mordant gags. A Chechen gangster,Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan),who’d fallen in love with the L.A. lifestyle,was a source of comic relief. But the more Barry tried to leave his life as a hitman behind,the more he simply infected those he was attracted to. Hoping to abandon his manipulative fixer,Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root),Barry transferred his respect and affection to Cousineau. Yet by the end of the show’s first season Barry had killed someone the veteran actor loved.
No one fell deeper into Barry’s world than Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg),another acting student who had her own buried trauma. Pursued by Barry,she became his girlfriend even as her talent shone through. But when her TV show got torpedoed,Sally spiralled out of control,embracing the violence Barry carried inside him and finally expressing it in a cathartic scene in the final episode where she fought for her life and then brutally took another. “Barry did this,” Barry coached her afterwards – he thought he was protecting her,but it was the truth.
As the storytelling became bleaker – the laughter,still expertly marshalled,hid less and less – the visual language ofBarry became richer and more pronounced. The third season,with Hader and Berg directing every instalment between them,might be the closest we’ll ever get to a Coen brothers series,with shards of dream logic and deadpan action sequences. At one point a suburban street simply turned into a beach,a step away from reality that somehow served to focus Barry’s journey.