Oh, "Barry"

I made it through four episodes of "Barry" and quit. I really tried with this one, but I couldn't bring myself to get involved in another show where a depressed hitman gets into wacky hijinks that juxtapose outrageous amounts of violence with an eye-rolling journey of trite self-discovery and self-improvement. I may just not be in the right mood for this after seeing similar premises done badly by other genre shows.

Anyway, individual elements of "Barry" are better than the whole. Bill Hader plays the title character, an international assassin having a midlife crisis, who stumbles upon an acting class one day and unlocks a hidden passion that he now wants to pursue. This is a problem for his handler, Monroe (Stephen Root), as the new extracurriculars immediately impact Barry's latest job for Goran (Glenn Fleshler), a Chechen mobster operating out of Los Angeles. Then Barry falls for his acting classmate Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and is taken under the wing of his instructor Gene (Henry Winkler). There a several familiar faces among the other students, including characters played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste and D'Arcy Carden. And I'd be remiss in not mentioning the genial NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), one of Goran's minions.

My failure to connect with the show really boils down to my exasperation with Barry for getting himself into such contrived, ridiculous situations. I know that he's going through a tough time, but he's completely dropped the ball on a very delicate job, put a friend in danger, and put himself in danger. And for what? Getting in with the L.A. acting scene, full of desperate wannabes, washed up hasbeens, and raging narcissists. And make no mistake that Sally and Gene are both in that last category, desperately inflating their own egos and their own self-importance to keep the spectres of failure at bay. The show also uses the various acting lessons to push Barry to open up, which is very tedious and dull.

I respect and appreciate that "Barry" deglamorizes the acting profession, and is often pointedly critical of it, but this also makes "Barry" a tough watch. A lot of Barry's fascination with acting comes off as intense navel-gazing, aimed at assuaging Hader and co-creator Alec Berg's own insecurities about creative work. Also, while I like that Sally is a self-absorbed parasite, and yet actually talented, I have absolutely no desire to watch her story unfold. Sarah Goldberg is lovely, but a little of Sally goes a long way, and her interaction with Barry often left me cringing. One of the reasons I bailed on the show was that it was starting to shift more and more of its focus over to Sally.

The mobster side of the show is also lacking, mostly due to the absence of proper development of the Chechens. At least they're more lively than Barry's actor friends, and used as a way to make fun of organized crime stereotypes. I especially enjoy NoHo Hank, for both his unflappable positive attitude and his remarkable personal style. I hear that he gets a much bigger role in the second season, but I'm not willing to sit through the rest of the show for him. I feel a little bad about it, but Corrigan has been getting plenty of attention for his performance, so bygones.

I'd much rather shine a light on the work of the eternally underappreciated Stephen Root, as Barry's hapless handler. Or on Henry Winkler for his lovable old grifter, playing the part of esteemed acting guru with everything he's got. And that brings me to the biggest strike against "Barry" - I'm just not getting anything out of Bill Hader in the lead role. And I've generally been a fan of Hader these past few years. It's been great seeing him in more dramatic work like "The Skeleton Twins" and "Trainwreck." As Barry, however, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

As I said, I only made it through four episodes, so there should be a heap of caveats attached to this post. I suspect I'd like the show more if it were only about the mob and hitman story instead of the struggling gang of actors, but there's no use reviewing the show that doesn't exist, instead of the one that does.
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