Bill Hader’s hitman-goes-Hollywood show looks rejuvenated in a long-awaited season 3.
I’ve never seen violence like the violence onBarry.
Surprising blood keeps erupting from seemingly healthy foreheads, another brain full of bullets.
Bill Hader on HBO’s ‘Barry.'.Merrick Morton/HBO
Several human lives depend on the functionality of an iPhone app.
The premiere picks up some time after the massacre that wrapped season 2.
His mentors have turned on him one way or another.
Partner-turned-enemy Fuches (Stephen Root) is in the Chechen mafia version of witness protection.
Things are looking up for other characters.
He’s running a whole operation and he’s found true love.
But even the lighthearted subplots in this new season carry a bleak mood of oncoming retribution.
The past keeps coming back, brutally, to haunt the present.
A hundred years ago, in 2018,Barry’s debut season was flat-out perfect TV.
Hader’s natural likability turned his melancholy mega-killer into an unusual protagonist.
Was he eccentric, insane, or a fully self-aware evil man?
Those first eight episodes pivoted deftly from satire into doomed tragedy.
but the season 3 premiere cuts to the chase, tightening the screws on the Barry-Gene relationship.
The soundstage introduction to Sally’s new showrunner reality feels like a short film unto itself.
Fuches seems to have found himself in some kind of fairy tale.
Any TV show about people who kill each other has to struggle against its own brinksmanship.
Tremendous drama comes from the possibility that beloved characters might die.
Goldberg has the toughest job of any performer on the show.
Some of the inside-Hollywood gags around Sally’s subplot are a bit on the nose.
I worry this review is getting a bit vague.
Suffice it to say that the six episodes I’ve seen pick up momentum quickly.
One massive battle scene takes place almost entirely in an extreme long shot.
There are also, wow, some motorcycles.
Barry has never been scarier, and Hader has never been better.
In season 3, some of Barry’s closest friends and loved ones start to wonder about him.
You keep watching their foreheads, waiting for a hole to appear.
There’s nothing on TV quite likeBarry.
The laughter is loud, but that makes the terrified silence more deafening.A-
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