Last summer my colleague Mike Hilty wrote this great review about season 3 of HBO’s Barry. In it, he goes over all the major characters and story beats of the season as a good review should. This piece that I’m writing here isn’t a review so much as my attempt to process the feelings I have after now watching Barry season 3. It should also serve as a refresher before season 4 starts airing on Sunday (it has its series finale on Sunday, May 28th, the same day as Succession’s finale; I’m going to a be wreck on Monday).
I always had a suspicion that I would like Barry, so it wasn’t until recently that I finally got around to watching it. It was right on time for me as it came at a time when I was thinking a lot about another show—BoJack Horseman. Next month I’m going to finish my dissertation. It’s about a lot of things, but it’s especially about 2010s television and the way they reflect aspects of cultural capital. I have a chapter on BoJack Horseman and the capital of reputation (public reputation, name recognition, #MeToo, that sort of thing). In substantially revising this chapter from how I drafted it in the spring of last year, I was confronted with a difficult but now unavoidable fact: BoJack is a really problematic character.
I promise this is going to relate to Barry, but it’s important context for what I was thinking about when I watched season 3 of Barry. BoJack Horseman ran for 6 seasons and 77 episodes. A solid half to two-thirds of these episodes fall squarely in the category of comedy, featuring hilarious stories about spaghetti strainers or J.D. Salinger’s career as a game show producer. Many other episodes experiment with form, pushing the boundaries of what is expected of television, and certainly animated television. A handful of episodes are emotionally brutal, dealing with cancer or dementia. And a handful of episodes are incredibly dark, dealing with abuse coverups and all manner of sketchy behavior.
But, because my focus was on BoJack Horseman as it related to the #MeToo narrative, I spent two weeks fully immersed in that small group of episodes, episodes that show BoJack at his absolute worst. And in doing this, I couldn’t see the show the same way. And I don’t think we’re supposed to, as the show shifts to identity with other characters, like Diane, by the end.
Television critic Emily Nussbaum has an essay in which she thinks about Bad Fan responses. Her example is the viewers who glory in the violence of The Sopranos, potentially even fast-forwarding through the therapy scenes. But there are numerous other examples, such as viewers that idolize Rick from Rick and Morty or those who miss the critique of Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1975).
When thinking about instances of Bad Fan response, I always try to determine the degree to which the blame falls on fans for missing the critique, or the responsibility falls on the show/film for not making it sufficiently clear. And, after extensive study of BoJack at his worst, I had to admit that the show, especially in the early years, deserves some of the blame for how viewers perceive BoJack. It left a gray area around his most heinous acts, obscuring aspects of his character with humor making it possible to root for him throughout almost the entire show.
I think this is a problem, but it’s a problem that plagues the vast majority of modern shows built around antihero personalities. Tony Soprano. Walter White. BoJack. All are antiheroes, and all are the focal points of their shows. And all had a not insignificant number of their fans wildly miss the point of what the show was attempting to do with the antihero.
From the beginning, Barry has been a clever critique of the antihero. Played by Bill Hader, who viewers are likely to associate with many wonderful comedy characters from Hot Rod (Schaffer 2007) or Saturday Night Live, it’s impossible not to like Barry. We, like Sally (Sarah Goldberg), are instantly swept up by his charms. Even as we know the darker secrets, even as we see him commit violent acts, we also see how hard he is trying to change. And we see how much he’s been screwed over by the system, in this case, the US military. He has been fashioned into a killing machine through overt and covert tactics. This makes the line of personal responsibility a murky one and makes for compelling TV.
The Barry that we saw for two seasons fit solidly in the antihero mold: likable, prone to murder, and garnering our sympathy.
And then season 3 flips the script entirely and, in the process, completely changed how I think about antihero television. I give Hader, Alec Berg (also known for his work on the brilliant Silicon Valley), and the team behind Barry a lot of credit for doing this halfway through the show’s 4-season run. BoJack had a change of heart toward its titular character too late. Breaking Bad arguably never tried to account for the Bad Fan response.
But Barry pulled no punches. In season 3 they gave us a cold, calculated, killing machine while still making him a logical extension of the character we already knew. Much of his actions and responses can still be blamed on his military training and his conditioning toward violence, but it’s getting harder to believe he actually does want to change when we see, over and over again, how quickly he slips back into his acts of vengeance and violence.
Barry season 3 reveals that we, the viewers, are in an abusive relationship with Barry. And it does this through the character of Sally.
For the first few episodes of season 3, I was disappointed with how the show seemed to be using Sally. At long last, she had found success shepherding and staring in a show called Joplin. It’s an extension of her previous projects in seasons 1 and 2, showing her attempts to channel her past trauma—the abusive boyfriend—into a meaningful artistic representation. This tension—of trauma, art, and performance—is central to the first two seasons. Now, with Joplin, Sally seems to have made it. But she’s not wearing her success very well. She’s become curt, abrasive, and somewhat unlikeable. The industry is doing a number on her, or so it would seem.
Early in the season, Barry visits her on set, they get into a bit of an argument, and he shouts at her quite aggressively. I can’t speak to the experience of all viewers, but when this happened, I was somewhat surprised by the outburst, but it didn’t seem to me like that big of a deal. This, I argue, is because the show has done an expert job aligning us with Sally. Right now, she’s in an abusive relationship with Barry while we’re also in a different abusive relationship with Barry/Barry. Sally’s first moment of clarity comes after the Joplin premiere (coincidentally, or perhaps not at all, it’s similar to the character shift that happens on BoJack after the premiere of a gritty nihilistic antihero show called Philbert). Sally’s young costar, played by Eighth Grade’s Elsie Fisher, tells Sally that Barry scares her, and Sally starts to put the pieces together.
The next episode features one of the scenes that hit me the hardest when Joplin is scrapped of the streaming service BanShe because it isn’t performing for the algorithm. It’s a devastating blow for Sally. While it does reflect the deeply analytical and cynical landscape of modern streaming TV, I think this moment hits so hard because of how much we now align with Sally. We feel her loss deeply. More than that, Joplin represents the perfection of the themes that drove the first two seasons. Through Joplin, Sally has turned her trauma to meaningful performance AND found a place in the LA workplace in the process. It’s quite the triumph, torn down in a brutal and nonsensical fashion.
It’s not the only two-season-long edifice of performance to crack in this episode (“crazytimeshitshow”) as the closing moments see Barry trying to comfort Sally by talking about the mental torment he can inflict on the people at BanShe who canceled Joplin. It’s a brutal scene. We see Barry attempting to be a caring boyfriend while saying horrendous things. We see Sally realize the depths of Barry’s trauma and internal anguish. And we see the breakup of the show’s central character dynamic happen in real-time. In a few crushing minutes, the show forces viewers to viscerally confront the reality of this “antihero” that we rooted for two seasons, revealing our toxic relationship in the process.
But Barry is always about the effects of trauma more than it is about the trauma itself, and those effects on Sally are seen in the finale.
In what might turn out to be their last interaction, Sally is speaking to Barry at this apartment when they’re ambushed by a guy connected to the group that chased Barry a couple of episodes earlier. This season, everyone is out for revenge as the show wrestles with the tension between vengeance and forgiveness. This goon is no exception, knocking Barry out and choking Sally. It’s the same scene from her play in previous seasons. The goon is about to kill her when she stabs him through the back of the head and into his eye. He stumbles into a makeshift soundproof recording booth, then Sally follows after to finish the job, beating him repeatedly.
This brutal scene plays out silently, the effects of trauma in stark relief against the silence. Sally has Barry’s rage. We saw it in the episode earlier when she screamed at her former assistant Natalie (D’Arcy Carden) in the elevator. Just as Barry’s murders lead to loved ones seeking revenge, Barry’s rage toward Sally has had a multiplying effect, reverberating in her own reactions to others. At the end of the season, Sally boards a plane for Joplin, Missouri. She’s leaving Barry behind, and we are, too. He’s being arrested, as he should be, and we’re left wondering what the hell happens now. It sets up season 4 in a fascinating position.
But season 3 wasn’t about setting up a last season. It was about completely upending our sense of character and shifting attention away from processing the effects of the trauma of the past—Barry’s time at war, Sally’s ex-boyfriend—to noticing the effects of trauma happening in the present. As it is said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and this season is pretty clear about the limits of revenge. Such efforts backfire (sometimes literally), and they never do anything to actually change the course of violence.
The last 15 years of American television have been dominated by antiheroes, many of which are so iconic that their names transcend their shows. It’s been a lucrative niche that helped make the era of “Peak TV” what it was. But it came with baggage, in the form of Bad Fans or with many other fans for whom such shows just aren’t sitting quite as well as they used to. Barry suggests that these feelings aren’t our fault, that we fell into a toxic relationship with these shows and now struggle to recognize that and escape. And that’s okay. It’s not a character failing on the part of many viewers. But, still, Barry season 3, more than anything else, tries to provide a way out.
Barry is still a show about trauma, art, and performance. Season 3 just acknowledges that, at times, the performance art of Barry was so good that viewers didn’t recognize the trauma that was happening around them. But as Sally highlights, escape is possible, even if it’s really hard. Even as we have left the so-called golden age of antihero dramas, shows still struggle with perpetuating violence. I’m guilty of growing numb to the bodies that grow lifeless on the screen. It’s easy to do. This season Barry challenged us not to. It challenged us to look for the cycles of trauma, and the reactions of violence and rage that perpetuate those cycles, and chart a new course.
As Barry is potentially dying he sees a beach filled with the people he’s killed. They stand, alert, gazing at the ocean. It’s a visual reminder that, yes, we’ve seen Barry kill a lot of people. We’ve seen other antiheroes kill even more. And Barry, the show, seems to be trying to do what Barry, the character, never can accomplish: take responsibility for its part in the cycles of violence.
While I watched the late part of season 3 I thought, “I think I like Breaking Bad and BoJack less now.” This thought encapsulates the incredible feat Hader and Berg pulled off with season 3 of Barry.
