A few thoughts on the premiere of HBO’s Barry — which I reviewed overall last week — coming up just as soon as I mention Meryl Streep and Kaley Cuoco in the same sentence…
Premise pilots are hard, particularly for comedies, because so much time has to be spent getting people from Point A to Point B that there’s not often much time left for jokes or deep characterization. With a high-concept premise like this one, it can be even harder. Yet “Make Your Mark,” written by Bill Hader and Alec Berg and directed by Hader, slides us into the hitman-turned-actor idea as easily as Barry manages to find himself performing the “white boy day” scene from True Romance opposite Ryan, the man he’s been hired to kill. A lot happens over the course of this half hour, which brings Barry from Cleveland to LA, has to set up his relationship with Fuches, establish both the Chechens and the acting class as fully fleshed-out worlds, give Barry an opportunity to impress Gene Cousineau with a speech about his life (which Gene naturally takes as a novice actor’s improvised monologue), and even feature an action sequence where Barry gets into a shootout with the Chechens when they grow impatient for him to murder Ryan. Yet like the kind of seasoned veteran performer Gene sells himself as to his awestruck students, it never seems to sweat.
A lot of this is in the small detail work, like the way that the students hold a special parking spot for Gene like he’s a visiting head of state, or the fact that Barry’s car for the job is a stolen station wagon filled with baby papaphernalia, or the choice of that completely ridiculous True Romance scene — which only works because of the commitment of future Oscar winner Gary Oldman — as the kind of thing people would perform in this class. And it helps that the show takes Barry’s skills as a hitman seriously, and also that it lets Gene prove himself a useful teacher when he motivates Sally to do better in her own scene. There’s absurdity in the crime and acting portions of the show, but on the whole, they’re treated as real things, which elevates both the danger Barry places everyone in and the comedy of his attempt to transition from one world to the other. He’s sincerely envious of how at peace with herself Sally seems at the bar, even though we know from Gene’s lesson to her earlier (and our general understanding of how aspiring actors are portrayed on screen) that she comes with her own bundle of neuroses, and you can see how Gene would be taken with the monologue, because it’s a real thing to Barry and not just a silly cartoon.
The series evolves quite a bit from here, but I found this one heck of a starting point.
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com. He discusses television weekly on the TV Avalanche podcast. His new book, Breaking Bad 101, is on sale now.