Barry review: One of TV's best comedies is also thrilling... and terrifying

I've never seen violence like the violence on Barry. HBO's hitman comedy is a legitimate thrillfest, and the new season (debuting Sunday) has three of the best action scenes I've ever seen. But part of the show's busted-nerve tension is that you never know where the next shot is coming from — and whether you'll laugh or gasp. Surprising blood keeps erupting from seemingly healthy foreheads, another brain full of bullets. A middle-of-the-day showdown turns ultraviolent, then scary, then hilarious, then scary again, and still funny, in a sad way. Several human lives depend on the functionality of an iPhone app.

The premiere picks up some time after the massacre that wrapped season 2. Barry (co-creator Bill Hader) is in a bad place, taking quickie hit jobs from an online murder marketplace as a (terrible) emotional coping mechanism. 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. Acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) plots vengeance against a clueless Barry, who doesn't realize that Gene finally knows who killed his one true love.

Things are looking up for other characters. Barry's girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) writes, directs, and stars in a streaming series based on her own life story. She's a washout made good, suddenly surrounded by an entourage of dependents. Barry's Hollywood overworld always reflects the drug-running underworld, so Barry's sorta-friend NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) finds himself on a parallel upswing. 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. Season 2 seemed a bit torn between countervailing mission statements — are we a funny mob dramedy or a goofy wannabe-actor sitcom or a prestigious bloody-mayhem drama? — 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. I worried NoHo Hank was becoming the wrong kind of too much, but the ever-charming Carrigan has a lot more to play this season, as Hank juggles various swirling forces with his own newfound dream to buy a house in Santa Fe.

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. If they keep just barely not dying, though, the tension fades to cheap shocks. Barry risks everything early in the new season, when Main Character A points a gun at Main Character B for a long scary moment — and does not fire. I hate, hate, hate that kind of scene, and I admire how Barry justifies that expected twist with some unexpected turns.

Winkler finds new notes of desperation in his aging narcissist, especially when an unexpected career opportunity forces Gene to confront some old mistakes. Goldberg has the toughest job of any performer on the show. She's playing showbiz ambition on a show that crosscuts between multiple vengeful mafias and various closing-in law enforcement agencies. It's a testament to Goldberg's repressed-mania performance and Barry's tonal dexterity that the making of Joplin, Sally's TV show, is just as compelling as the hitman stuff. Mostly. Some of the inside-Hollywood gags around Sally's subplot are a bit on the nose. (There's also a much-discussed legal drama, Laws of Humanity, which seems like a show broadcast networks stopped making 15 years ago.)

I worry this review is getting a bit vague. HBO sent critics a long list of spoilers, and for once I genuinely don't want to reveal any of them. Suffice it to say that the six episodes I've seen pick up momentum quickly. Lots of people are trying to kill lots of other people, and the walls keep closing in on all the main characters. Supporting cast members get shining moments, especially Michael Irby as Bolivian boss Cristobal and D'Arcy Carden as Sally's friend-turned-assistant Natalie. Hader and his co-creator Alec Berg have layered some genuine shocks into this season, and that extends to their unconventional approaches to filming action. 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. He keeps drawing the viewer back onto his reformed-killer's self-improvement journey, which makes his inevitable next act of violence even more shocking. 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 like Barry. The laughter is loud, but that makes the terrified silence more deafening. A-

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