Barry

Barry Berkman is a lonely Marine turned contract killer, adrift and depressed, who trails a mark to a Los Angeles acting class and walks out convinced he's found a reason to keep breathing. That's the setup Bill Hader and Alec Berg drop on the table in the pilot, and it stays the engine for four seasons on HBO. Hader plays Barry with a permanent flinch. Henry Winkler is Gene Cousineau, the vain acting teacher who mistakes Barry's dissociation for range. Sarah Goldberg is Sally, the class's most talented and most exhausting student. Stephen Root handles Barry's handler, Fuches, and Anthony Carrigan plays NoHo Hank, a Chechen mobster with the enthusiasm of a summer-camp counselor.

Hader is doing something almost nobody on TV was doing at the time, which is playing a genuinely blank man without making blankness cute. When he tries to act inside the acting class, the show mines a specific, awful kind of comedy: a person who has never felt anything performing the memory of feelings he doesn't have. Winkler wins two Emmys for Cousineau because he refuses to soften him into a mentor cliche. Carrigan turns NoHo Hank into the funniest character on prestige TV for a full decade, and it isn't a bit, it's construction: every line is written for warmth and then delivered by a man who kills people for money. Hader also directs, and by the back half of the run he's staging chases, shootouts, and long silent stretches with real formal ambition. There's a motorcycle sequence in season three that television doesn't normally attempt.

It gets bleak. What starts as a half-hour comedy about a sad man in a beginners' acting class becomes something colder and stranger, and if you signed up for a workplace hangout with jokes, you'll feel the floor tilt. Sally, in particular, is written to be difficult, and some viewers read "difficult" as "unlikable" and check out. The tonal swings from farce to horror aren't gentle. Berg and Hader don't hold your hand across them; they cut, and you're supposed to keep up.

If you liked Breaking Bad's willingness to punish its lead, the Coen brothers' idea of consequence, or the deadpan of Fargo, you're in. If your comfort watch is Ted Lasso, this'll feel like a jump scare. It rewards viewers who are okay with a protagonist getting harder to root for by design, and it frustrates anyone waiting for the show to reassure them that Barry is secretly a good guy underneath.

WORTH IT because the craft keeps outrunning the concept. The premise sounds like a sketch. What Hader and Berg build on top of it is a real four-season argument about whether a violent person can rewrite himself, and they answer it through story instead of monologue. Nobody stops the plot to tell you the theme. The politics of the show, insofar as it has any, live in what Barry does and what it costs, not in speeches. The direction gets more confident every year, Winkler is the best he's ever been on screen, and Carrigan alone is worth the subscription. Watch it.