HBO’s ‘Barry’ Season 3: TV Review

It’s been a month short of three years since HBO aired the last episode of the hitman comedy Barry — enough time to have forgotten all of the individual plotlines from the second season and more than enough time to come to a realization that feels damning but really needn’t be: I love Barry and care deeply about most of the show’s characters and their respective journeys toward redemption and fulfillment. But I don’t actually care at all about the narrative specifics of what’s happening on Barry.

The show is invested in the convoluted drug war between the Chechens, the Bolivians and, occasionally, the Burmese, while also treating most of the human pawns in the conflict as fodder for future massacres. I care only insofar as the drug war gives Barry an excuse to keep the wonderfully weird Anthony Carrigan’s NoHo Hank around.

The show is invested in the acting careers of Barry (Bill Hader) and Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and several of their classmates. I care only insofar as I care about Barry and Sally as characters, which is a lot.

Keeping Henry Winkler’s Gene Cousineau in the picture is the only reason I care about the police investigation into Barry’s myriad misdeeds; ditto with Stephen Root’s Fuches and his connection to Barry’s backstory.

Hader and Berg’s series has a very busy structure that, to me, exists just as a platform or a wire hanger on which to position a group of wonderful, tortured characters, increasingly ambitious physical comedy set-pieces and veins of variably sharp Hollywood satire.

This came to my mind several times watching the first six episodes of the new season. The new installments feature returning characters I barely recalled ever having seen before and callbacks to threads whose progress I’d lost entirely. And yet the episodes feel more suspenseful and more hilarious than the start of season two in their exploration of second chances and the complicated backsliding that’s inevitable when you try to wildly change your life.

We pick up an unspecified number of weeks or months after the events of the last season. After taking out a monastery of stooges and henchmen, Barry has fallen into a desperate spiral of freelance assassin duties picked up off of drolly ridiculous online message boards. Last season’s audition for Jay Roach seems not to have gone anywhere, and when Barry isn’t killing people, he’s glued to the couch playing video games with little forward momentum.

Sally, however, somehow followed up last finale’s talent showcase with a deal to write, direct and star in a semiautobiographical series for a fledgling streaming service. That development opens the door for behind-the-scenes mockery of the current state of television, entertainment journalism and the almighty power of the online algorithm.

Despite their both having lost almost all of their disposable foot soldiers, NoHo Hank and Cristobal (Michael Irby) have formed an uneasy alliance pushing drugs through Los Angeles.

Mr. Cousineau is still reeling from Janice Moss’ death and what Fuches revealed about Barry’s role in that death, while Fuches himself is … well, he’s initially out of the picture, but very much still in the series.

When the second season premiered, I thought that the first few episodes suggested Barry was shifting from a half-hour comedy with dramatic elements to a half-hour drama with fleeting comic beats. That was before “ronny/lily,” the pinnacle of the show’s anarchic approach to ultra-violent, cartoonish hilarity, as well as “The Audition,” which I thought was probably the show’s most purely amusing episode since the relative levity of the opening episodes. The takeaway from the season ended up not being that the show had undergone an evolution that made it more one genre than another — but that its confidence was so great that it no longer was tethered to being exclusively one thing or another.

The third season, thus far, is even more confident in its ability to be zany one moment, scary the next, silly for a little bit after that, and unexpectedly emotional throughout. It’s held together by Hader’s Emmy-winning performance, which continues to exhibit some of the widest range of any acting on television. Hader can bury grace notes in the most deadpan of minimalist beats and then he can enter a room yelling, nostrils flaring without a scintilla of evident subtlety, and somehow make both appear like genuine facets of what may be TV’s most brilliant-yet-guileless character.

The thing I find most interesting about Barry Berkman is how he never seems to have an ulterior motive. If he says he wants to kill you, he definitely wants to kill you. If he’s aggressively apologetic, it’s because he’s genuinely in search of redemption. And if the character frequently reads as contradictory, Barry doesn’t care or see the irony in his behavior.

The third season is, thus far, digging deeper into the piece of the show that I’ve always been halfway between curious about and unconvinced by: the entire Barry/Sally relationship. Last season gave us a big window into Sally’s history with abuse, and here we get new insights into what might be drawing her to Barry, as well as her strengths and weaknesses creatively. This is the best that Goldberg has ever been, and the most that Sally’s conflicting traits have come together as a believable whole, far from the aspiring starlet caricature we initially met. Her show’s premiere leads to Sally making a speech that will doubtlessly be the centerpiece of this year’s Emmy campaign for Goldberg.

Sally’s career progression opens the door for more Hollywood satire than ever before, ranging from broad and obvious to breathtaking. Jokes build around how Netflix (not the service that houses Sally’s show) promotes and cancels series are good for light chuckles, but guest turns from Elizabeth Perkins and especially An Unannounced Guest Star bring real mirth. The new season features Elsie Fisher in a solid supporting role and contrives to expand on the great D’Arcy Carden’s place on the show.

Hader and Berg, who split directing duties on the first six episodes, continue to make refinements to the show’s love of extended gags that blend action and lunacy. The sixth episode includes both the tremendous scene with That Unannounced Guest Star (HBO’s coyness, not mine), matched with and by Jessy Hodges as Sally’s agent Lindsay, as well as an epic series of well-choreographed stunts punctuated by a pair of the hardest laughs of the season.

Barry wants to be a better man, but his past makes that nearly impossible. The same is true this season for NoHo Hank, Mr. Cousineau and Fuches, offering showcases for Carrigan’s uniquely weird line-readings, Winkler’s hangdog perfection and Root occupying the middle ground between the two.

None of this has me invested in whether the Bolivians or Chechens get to distribute heroin, but if that’s what it takes to keep Carrigan around, I don’t care. None of it has me able to keep track of which figures from Barry’s past have appeared previously and where we left those interactions, but I understand how they fit into Barry’s ongoing self-analysis. I’m not sure that various potential assassinations and discoveries matter all that much to me. But every performance is a treasure, nearly every piece of comic business is a delight and every undercurrent of sadness and remorse is earned.

I care about so much of Barry that I don’t care about the things that I don’t care about.