Barry (2018-): Season 1

Title: Barry

Year: 2018

Genre:  Action  | Comedy | Crime  |

Seasons: 1 | 2 | 3 |

Runtime:  30 min

Creator: Alex Berg & Bill Hader

Starring: Bill Hader, Herny Winkler, Sarah Goldberg

8.4/10

Barry follows Barry Berkman, a U.S. Marine and Afghanistan veteran from Cleveland, who works as a hitman. Lonely and dissatisfied with life, he travels to Los Angeles to kill a target and finds a new sense of purpose when he joins a class full of aspiring actors. Despite his efforts to leave behind his criminal history and become an actor himself, he struggles to escape his dark past.

A QUESTION OF MORALITY

It’s always strange when actors try to be anticipating or struggling actors. Often set in Hollywood, Los Angeles. It surrounds an acting class, and everyone is so dedicated in the beginning to only leave it in destruction. There are a ton of series and films depicting how tough life is in Hollywood. The struggle for a famous life is real and the competition is fierce. The Kominsky Method did this in three seasons with Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin. Barry tries to emulate the same feeling with a struggling acting class. Instead of a class listen to Douglas, we got an eccentric teacher and a clumsy hitman who doesn’t seem to get things right. The whole class is an obvious charade. Then we have the Chechia mafia and the police investigating the crimes.

Bill Hader plays out decent in his role as the lead. He often does things on others’ initiative but not his own. A none drive character that always follows others’ interests. At the same time, he is incompetent to lay low for the cops, he kills people brutally. There’s an odd balance. It works at some times and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it becomes unreal and it’s just actors reading lines from the script. Like Breaking Bad, this HBO series deems to make a similar approach.

Stephen Root and Henry Winkler are surprisingly good fit for the series with their dark creepy humour. The root is playing Monroe Fuches and Winkler is Barry’s eccentric acting coach Gene Cousineau. Sarah Goldberg can be a little too intense as Barry’s love interest Sally. She’s an uneven, complicated character with egoistic choices.

The first season, compared to the others, has small beginnings. It shows potential and it’s frustrated that it loses one of the key characters. Here’s one of the struggles. Everyone that the makers have laid out is occasionally very predictable. Some twist and turns but it’s still predictable. Every episode is about 30 minutes. It’s easy to binge-watch and take in. It’s a solid start.