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.
Over Barry’s three seasons, its protagonist’s decisions – sometimes ruthlessly calculated, sometimes horribly rash – have snowballed into bigger and bigger problems, enveloping those in his orbit. There’s no sitcom-style reset after each half hour, here; actions have consequences, and those consequences often carry deadly weapons on them. (Somehow the series has also featured two of the most jaw-dropping action set-pieces I’ve seen in recent years, at a fraction of the budget of any of the Marvel or Star Wars series.) Meanwhile, Barry himself has evolved from prestige TV antihero into something else entirely, where even ever so slightly rooting for him – and it’s hard not to root for the titular character of the TV show you’re obsessively watching – feels deeply grubby. (There’s a reason that this show is often compared to Breaking Bad.)
Thematically the show tackles some whopping great subject matter: abusive relationships, PTSD, death’s gaping maw. That third season finale ratcheted things up even further, with some great comic set pieces but also some huge, gamechanging moments of drama (I was right to set my alarm – there was plenty to be spoiled here).
Yet, somehow, despite the dread hanging over the show, Barry still manages to be very funny, in impressively varying ways: there are cartoonishly daft characters, from the bumbling cops trailing Barry to NoHo Hank, a hairless, wide-eyed, endlessly Pollyanna-ish Chechen gangster played brilliantly by Anthony Carrigan; there are pinpoint satires of Hollywood, and its dehumanised, franchise-worshipping, increasingly algorithmic creative process; and there are moments of Lebowski-ish stoner surrealism, like the episode where a succession of characters visit a buzzy LA beignet shop to get life advice from its beatific surfer vendor dude.
The effect of all this is frankly whiplash-inducing. The last decade has seen TV be dominated by the dramedy, that comedy-drama hybrid packing the latter’s heavy subject matter into the former’s lighter, half-hour form (sadly, Alan Partridge’s preferred portmanteau, coma, hasn’t caught on). Yet, at its worst – and there have been some bad efforts over the years – the dramedy fails to do either of its component parts justice, feeling like a regular comedy with all the jokes removed, or a drama with a slightly strange, smirking tone. Barry, though, seems to have a completely different idea of what the dramedy can be. Rather than sitting unsatisfyingly somewhere in between the two genres, it smash-cuts wildly between the two, one minute nailing a moment of goofy slapstick, the next lingering on a devastating internalised moment – often involving the same person who was pratfalling a moment before. It’s a heady stew but – somehow – it works.
This is TV unafraid to plumb the depths of humanity, with a grin on its face – and definitely worth getting up early for.
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