On Monday morning I woke up early to watch the season finale of a TV show before work. I was keen to avoid any of those spoiler booby traps – deaths, maimings, other assorted life-altering events befalling key characters – that tend to be scattered all over social media in the wake of climactic episodes. I’m sure some of you have done the same, setting your alarms to catch a crucial episode of Game of Thrones or Succession. The difference here was that the show in question wasn’t a swaggering prestige drama epic, but instead a half-hour comedy.
But that’s the thing about HBO’s Barry, which finished its third season last week: it might nominally be a comedy, but it is able to match the intensity of the most propulsive of dramas. The premise – a hitman on a job walks into an LA acting class and realises he has found his true calling – resembles a rejected sketch for Saturday Night Live, where creator, star and director Bill Hader chiselled his comic chops. Plenty of comic potential there, right? Well yes, but if you flesh this idea out beyond a three-minute SNL sketch, the stakes are raised substantially. The hitman can’t just turn his back on his day job because he’s caught the acting bug: there are plenty of scary people – among them his handler, his clients and gangsters – relying on him to continue. The police are still going to be investigating the deaths of those he has killed. And there are others who, inevitably, will be out for revenge.
