Barry

Bill Hader's HBO comedy about a hitman with Hollywood aspirations is darker than ever in Season 3, which premieres Sunday after a three-year hiatus.

Every new ball added to Barry’s high-pressure juggling act threatens to ignite the tinderbox that is his psyche and unleash whatever it is — rage? Series creators and writers Hader and Alec Berg have always infused “Barry” with psychological depth, but in Season 3, the stoic, seemingly emotionless Barry is ready to blow. This season he’s sunk to new lows, playing video games all day and executing hits at night that he’s searched on the dark web. Barry ( Bill Hader) is still hoping to leave his killer life behind for a career in the dramatic arts, but at this point he’ll settle for convincing himself and others that he’s not a bad person. His quest for forgiveness begets ever more violence, pulling the story in masterfully funny, tense and disturbing directions, and proving that this half-hour comedy is still one of television’s best suspense-filled thrillers. And Season 3 is a master class

One of TV's best comedies finally returns as Barry season 3 makes up for lost time with a superb premiere.

Barry knows that he cannot be forgiven so easily, but then comes to some realization in which he claims that he’ll be able to make things up to Cousineau. Finally, the dark cloud and clear mental anguish that has been displayed from Barry’s face for the entirety of the episode is lifted, and with a smile, he asks Gene to get back in the trunk. Barry is clearly going for a darker tone this year, and the titular character’s violent past will be rearing its head more often, but its admirable that the show can still find ways to deliver out-loud laughs. In an inversion of Barry’s last interaction with Janice before he killed her in the season 1 finale, Gene pleads with Barry and promises that he’ll let everything go. Meanwhile, No-Ho Hank is forced to answer for Barry’s massacre at the monastery last season and the Chechen pin found near Moss’ body that Barry planted. It appears that Sally has leveraged her successful acting showcase, in which she lied about her true lived experience, into a television series and has Barry visit her on set to project the image of the perfect boyfriend, even though she ordered every facet of his “spontaneous visit.” Barry season 3 doesn’t immediately show us what Cousineau does with that information, but instead allows us to catch up with Barry. Never the picture of perfect mental health, Barry appears to be doing worse than ever.

HBO's favorite hitman/aspiring actor is depressed, out of work, and longing for forgiveness.

- Hader directs the episode, and his long tracking shot of Sally stalking through the Joplin soundstage is one of the most elegant sequences in the series. All we know is, season 3 is off to one hell of a start, the stakes are higher than ever, and no one is safe. At the station, Mae produces photographs placing Hank at the monastery around the time of the shooting, and then shows him the Chechen pin (“The Debt Has Been Paid”) that Hank gave to Barry and which Barry put in the trunk with Moss’s body to frame the Chechens for the killing that he did (keep up, please). Mae explains that they believe the two crimes are linked. For a second, the old Barry appears in Hader’s face. And try not to frame me on the way out.” Unable to hide his panic but thinking quick, Hank points at Fuches in a photograph and identifies him as a super-assassin called “The Raven,” which gets an audible scoff from the cops. Detective Mae Dunn (Sarah Burns)—who has moved up in the ranks after the death of Loach last season—rolls up with a couple of colleagues to ask Hank some questions down at the station. In the next scene they lie on bed watching TV with a bowl of popcorn. Barry and Sally live together, but their relationship consists of Barry playing video games on the couch while Sally runs off to another long day of meetings and shoots at the studio. And in the second, Barry tried multiple times to avoid murder, only to be sucked into mindless bloodshed: a spectacularly violent season finale as berserker Barry annihilated a monastery full of Chechens, Bolivians, and Burmese in search of Fuches. Clearly, the world of Barry has changed, and we need a sec to find our feet. Barry ( Bill Hader) and a betrayed husband have abducted the cuckolder and forced him to dig his grave by a forlorn tree somewhere in the desert hills outside L.A. The enraged husband tells an unshaven, hollow-eyed Barry, joylessly munching a doughnut, to slice off the offender’s eyelids before Barry shoots him.

Recap: Our favorite hitman is in pretty rough shape as 'Barry' kicks off its third season on HBO — and things are about to get rougher.

Barry quotes Hank, saying that “forgiveness has to be earned,” and Gene yells back: “Then f–king earn it!” That gives Barry an idea: “I know how I can make it up to you.” He breaks into a wide smile before ordering Gene: “Get back in the trunk.” “I know you killed Janice,” he says, pulling out his gun and telling Barry he can either turn himself in “or f–king die.” But then the gun falls apart in his hand, with the cylinder rolling harmlessly to Barry’s feet. (You know, the pin Hank gave to Barry.) Hank points the finger at Fuches, who he says goes by the name “The Raven.” He killed Moss and shot up the monastery, Hank claims. The cops think “The Raven” killed her, and they’ve cleared Barry of the crime. “Forgiveness is something that has to be earned,” he tells Barry before declaring he can’t help him. She asks him to bring her flowers to the set, adding: “If I say you can stay for lunch, just know that you can’t!” Thanks, babe!

Henry Winkler discusses 'Barry' Season 3 and shooting the confrontation between Cousineau and Barry.

And all of a sudden, as we were doing it, I moved to the side of the stage, and D’Arcy ran the class, because she is one of the great improvisors of America. And then how about, I adore this woman, D’Arcy [Carden]? You know, before the pandemic, I was asked to go to South by Southwest and and I took D’Arcy. And I taught a class in two classes, one in acting and one in improv. My jaw fell on the floor, I sat down in a chair and I went, “I didn’t just see what I saw.” And then in the next moment, I’m on my feet out of my chair cheering. You pay in cash, you’re Olivier. You’re a Brad Pitt if you leave the check behind on time. And then you remember that she started, I think having never done it before, in “Eighth Grade.” She is like a duck to water. He loves the image of himself he sees in the mirrors in his mind that reflect only him. And how do I — as a discombobulated human being in the first place, who’s so self-centered he has no idea there’s anything outside his own mind — how do I deal with that? We see him in this episode, he has a better relationship with his son and his grandson. Do you think he would have pulled the trigger, or was that just a bluff? Not the actuality of it, but the people in it, the people who populate it. How does that change the dynamic for the cast? After the police ignore his report, Cousineau confronts Barry at the climax of the episode, intending to force him to confess his crime to the cops.

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But a gun snafu suddenly leads to Gene on his knees in the desert at the receiving end of Barry’s gun, no different from any other loose end that needs tying. None of the cops on Barry’s trail have been particularly competent since Janice, so it’ll be interesting to see where this thread goes, especially with Burns now a series regular. Maybe he was right in the very first scene of this dark, dark premiere: At a certain point, there’s no more forgiving. We’ve seen Barry’s efforts to curb his violence backfire in the past, so Gene certainly isn’t out of the woods yet. “Forgiveness is something that has to be earned,” Hank tells Barry, shutting him down when he shows up looking for work and a purpose. But that all changed when she changed the ending of her story to make it more shallowly empowering, falling back on a comforting fantasy — and it worked. As tragic as the loss of all their “buddies” in the monastery was, at least they’ve had the freedom to live in Barry-free domestic bliss. So when the guy who hired Barry to kill his buddy Jeff decides he wants to cut Jeff’s eyelids off himself, Barry reacts to it with all the indifference of a bored cashier on a late-night shift. Actually, you know what, when I’m in a meeting, that’s a great time for you to be making my snack.” The camera pushes in close on Natalie’s wounded expression, Sally offscreen as she bosses around the woman who was her peer so recently. If killing is Barry’s drug, and season two was his attempt at coming down, the monastery massacre that ended that season represented his relapse — a disturbing, bloody reversion to the old Barry, overdosing on single-minded fury. When he walked into Gene Cousineau’s acting class way back in the pilot episode, it felt like the first time he’d ever realized something different was possible — and in season two, he put that to the test, quitting the hitman life cold turkey. But it is a skill he knows well, one he retreats to when he doesn’t know what else to do.

The actor and comedian rose to fame as 'the impressions guy' on Saturday Night Live. Now he's the star of an Emmy-winning sitcom, which he also writes and ...

That was a big eye-opener for me and it made me back up a bit and say, ‘Wait, maybe people see this character a different way.’ Because I really love Stefon and it never occurred to me that he would be seen as a stereotype, and that really hurt,” he says. “It was a nice form of rebellion: ‘Everyone’s going to the football game but I’m going to watch Aguirre, the Wrath of God. All alone, in my house. He jobbed around as a PA on film sets and did some comedy with friends, one of whom was the brother of Nick Offerman, a star of Parks and Recreation. After Offerman’s wife, Megan Mullally, saw them perform, she recommended Hader to SNL’s creator and producer, Lorne Michaels, and that was that. “I was always waiting for the shoe to drop so I could never enjoy things in the moment, only in retrospect. And that’s OK. But I really did love playing those characters, and I hope that when people saw them, they saw them as human beings,” he says. He’s not exactly reluctant to answer the question, but the diffidence has returned, which suggests to me he wants to move on. He’s said that some of the stuff we’re doing in the new season is the most intense he’s ever done in his career, and that’s because we always try to get to some emotional truth and show the consequences of violence, whether emotional or real. I say I can go for a walk until the appointed time, but he makes a “Don’t be ridiculous” shrug and tells me to come on in. “I’d been wanting to do something different for a while, but I was only being in comedies. He went from being a total unknown to a genuine star in his eight years on Saturday Night Live (SNL), where he was known for his impressions, and he brightens up good comedies in small roles (Superbad, Tropic Thunder), and redeems so-so movies in big roles (Trainwreck). In Barry, the comedy largely comes from the people in Barry’s drama class, which he attends in the hope of swapping killing for acting. It’s just, I’m happy moving towards the thing, not being the thing,” he says. Most people in Hollywood communicate only in hyperbole (“This kale is TO DIE FOR”), while irony is the lingua franca of the comedy world.