Barry Review

The premise sounds like a sketch, a contract killer takes an acting class, and the first season plays it that way while quietly assembling the mechanism it will use later. What makes the series remarkable is the withdrawal. Each season removes another layer of permission, until by the fourth the audience is watching a man they have laughed alongside for years and being handed nothing to hold onto. Hader directs most of the later run himself and is a genuinely gifted action director, with the third season motorcycle chase and the dirt bike sequence shot with a clarity that shames most feature work.

Henry Winkler plays vanity as a survival mechanism, Stephen Root is delightful and terrifying in equal measure, and Sarah Goldberg gets the most thankless job in the cast and is superb in it. The final season is divisive, jumping forward in time and abandoning much of the comic register entirely. That was the correct decision. A show with the nerve to stop being funny on purpose.