If there’s one thing that defines HBO-era TV, it’s dramas about violent men. If there’s a second thing, it’s comedies set in and around the entertainment business.
“Barry,” which begins Sunday on HBO, is both, an audacious mash-up that puts the chocolate of premium cable into its peanut butter, its gun into its greasepaint.
The title character (Bill Hader), a Midwestern hit man, jets off to Los Angeles, where his handler, Fuches (Stephen Root), has arranged for him to handle some “personal business” for the Chechen mob.
That “business” concerns an aspiring actor and personal trainer who’s been having an affair with a mobster’s wife. But the hit job gets complicated when Barry, doing his research, stumbles into an acting class and becomes smitten not only with one of the students, Sally (Sarah Goldberg), but also with acting itself.
He’s no good at it. What he excels at is shooting people, a skill he sharpened as a Marine in Afghanistan, and Fuches urges him to stay in his lane. “Acting is a very face-forward kind of job,” he says. “You could take up painting! Hitler painted! John Wayne Gacy painted! It’s a good, solid hobby.”
The series, created by Mr. Hader and Alec Berg (“Silicon Valley”), ingeniously mixes wetwork and dry irony. (The relationship between Barry and Fuches, as it develops, is very much that of a frustrated actor and a money-minded agent.)
But it would be a cold satire without the transformation of Mr. Hader, best known for playing outlandish characters like Stefon on “Saturday Night Live.” His Barry is wound so tight he hums — he’s like a slightly zanier Michael Shannon character — but Mr. Hader also shows you the light flicking on inside him for the first time.
The criminal going straight, or pretending to, is a mini genre unto itself (“Banshee,”“Lilyhammer”). There are a couple ways you might expect a hit-man-in-Hollywood story to go: The killer teaches a few lessons to the showbiz phonies, or he discovers that crime has given him unique insights into human nature.
Not so in “Barry.” Murder is a soul-numbing day job for Barry that’s done no good for him except pay the bills. It’s a messier, better remunerated version of slinging coffee.
There’s a recurring theme in cable dramas that criminality is, if not admirable, at least more authentic and exhilarating than the overcivilized straight life. Walter White in “Breaking Bad” says that crime made him feel “alive.” Tony Soprano, monster though he may be, is continually contrasted with pathetic and envious civilian schnooks like Artie Bucco.
Here, Barry’s the schnook. He’s not animated by his work but drained by it. For someone who kills for a living, he’s awfully passive, having let his hit-man career happen to him more than having pursued it.
When Barry tries to win Sally over by buying her an outlandishly expensive gift, she’s put off by the “weird-ass Tony Soprano move.” When she calls him out on his “toxic masculinity” — having no idea how toxic it really is — Barry actually takes it to heart, even if he has a hard time applying the lesson.
Because of Sally’s role as a foil in what is indeed a very male show, I wish her character were better fleshed out. “Barry” is well-cast top to bottom, though, from Henry Winkler as Gene, the acting class’s passionate but fatuous instructor, to a scene-stealing Anthony Carrigan as NoHo Hank, an incongruously polite Chechen lieutenant.
The spatter comedy is not for the squeamish, but “Barry” plays cleverly with the contrast between Barry’s two worlds. His mob clients have their own Hollywood-inspired sense of theatrics, as when Hank needlessly complicates a hit by insisting on express-mailing the target a bullet, because it will be cooler.
This all might come across glib if “Barry” weren’t also willing to go dark when necessary, and if Mr. Hader were less effective at finding the drama in his comic character. The season’s last half finds another gear, as the guilt-racked Barry has a harder and harder time compartmentalizing his vocation from his avocation.
By pushing its story to an extreme, “Barry” hits on a universal conflict. Like many of us who are not trained assassins, Barry wants to believe he can make moral compromises while telling himself, “This is not who I am.” (He sees himself in the character of Macbeth, but in his reading, Shakespeare’s murderous Scot was “just following orders.”)
But there comes a point — Barry crosses that point, and then some — where that’s a crock. What you do is who you are. Barry’s targets, were they still alive, would testify that the guy who killed them was plenty real.
It’s a tricky game “Barry” is playing, cultivating our empathy for its protagonist, then confronting us with this recognition. And the season finale does raise the question of how long the series can string out its double-life premise.
But mostly, “Barry” pulls off the feat, developing into something more profound than its high-concept premise suggests. You don’t expect this comedy to find its target in the way it does. And as Barry could tell you, that element of surprise is the mark of a professional.
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