Created by Alec Berg & Bill Hader
Written by Alec Berg & Bill Hader
Directed by Bill Hader
Starring Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, Stephen Root, Anthony Carrigan and Henry Winkler
New episodes airing Sundays on HBO

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The first new episode of Barry in three years is here and it goes hard on underlining that Bill Hader's title character is the worst person on the show. From the cold open, where Barry murders two men when one joyfully tries to cancel a hit on the other, the tone is as dark as it's ever been. And that's weird, because at least two characters have ostensibly earned everything they wanted.

While Barry runs freelance hits on the dark web and binges video games (I think we can assume piquing Jay Roach's interest at the end of season two didn't lead to anything), Sally (Sarah Goldberg) prepares for the third episode of a TV show called Joplin. She's a lead on a series about abuse in a family, a "realistic" take on the kind of story Sally lied about experiencing last season. She's given notes from an exec (Mary Elizabeth Perkins) who has to clarify whether a mother and daughter character live together before taking the room's temperature ("Did you live with your mother when you were in high school?" she asks a vacantly nodding coworker) and who smiles at her own intelligence when remarking, "Ah, so we're touching on a thing but we aren't commenting on it. Nice. Well done."

Plenty of TV shows about TV shows include dumb studio notes, and it's usually fun. What makes Barry better than most is that Sally later tells her screen daughter that "the key to stage acting is doing, but on screen, it's about being. You just want to be."

Based on interviews I've heard and read with Hader, he seems like a person who loves movies and TV and has a distrust of big parts of the industry. And it's one thing to give Sally the TV show she's been dreaming of and then get pseudo-meaningful notes, but it's another, more interesting decision to have her internalize all of the bullshit until repeating that kind of thing to other people. She's unhappy with where her work has gotten her, but she's still in the machine and she's still a person who learned everything she knows from Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). She's self-aware enough to see the limits of her world but she can't escape allowing some of it to absorb her. Maybe nobody can.

NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) is doing much better. He's now dating Cristobal (Michael Irby) and they've settled into a nice domestic life. Here's where I'll remind you that the last time we saw Hank, Barry was in the middle of killing almost everybody he knew. But Hank's bounced back even if he's now one of only four Chechen mobsters in his territory.

Hank's personal fulfillment is at least partially because he, like the show, has acknowledged how bad Barry is. Where Hank used to approach Barry with a puppy's enthusiasm, he now tells him to fuck off. He also lends his ex-friend a lesson: "Forgiveness has to be earned."

That's already been so much of this series - Barry thinking he can just say "I'm done killing starting now," and have that be enough. Even if he really did stop killing, it wouldn't be. And it's also just a very wise thing for Hank to say. A couple scenes before his meeting with Barry, Hank was talking up Seal Team Six again. On some level, I think he idolizes and continues to bring them up because he thinks they were all buddies, not because they killed bin Laden. Hank loves teams and Anthony Carrigan does a beautiful job playing the character with sincere enthusiasm. He wants everybody to feel good and internalize some positive affirmations.

Barry, haunted by waking nightmares of the people he cares about getting shot in the head, puts the "forgiveness must be earned" truism into practice with Gene. Since the end of the last season, after Fuches (Stephen Root) showed him the long-dead body of the woman he loved, Gene's lost his acting school and become halfway catatonic. He tries to kill Barry with a gun once presented to him by his old roommate Rip Torn, but fails. For a moment, it seems like Barry is going to kill Gene. Hader, always a remarkably expressive actor, looks like his soul has been knocked out when he realizes his mentor had attempted to shoot him. But forgiveness is earned, and Barry seems to be taking that to heart. He offers to work for Gene. He's going to earn his redemption. The episode is as somber as Barry's been. It's mostly served to catch us up on a bunch of characters we haven't seen in three years, but it's also given everybody clear goals and I'm excited to see how close everybody is allowed to get to actually fulfilling them.