“Barry”, season 3, on OCS: in California, everyone is looking for their karma

The return of the hitman who wants to be an actor in Hollywood allows the fiction of Bill Hader to reach new comic peaks.

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Three years ago, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), the egotist dramatic art teacher, learned that Barry Berkman/Block (Bill Hader), his best student, was also the assassin of Janice Moss (Paula Newsome ), the investigator of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) which Cousineau had fallen in love. This revelation came out of the mouth of Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root), the mentor of Barry, the man who had made the ex-Marine a hit man of the most requested. We were at the end of the second season of a series started in a casual tone and which had continued to darken, without losing anything from his caustic spirit.

Bill Hader and Alec Berg, creators of the character of Barry, the spadassin who would like to erase his bloody past by slipping into the skin of other characters, took advantage of the long hiatus caused by the pandemic to explore the slightest corner From the ethical and dramatic space delimited by the first two seasons. Since we are in Hollywood, let’s use a term that was in vogue in California half a century ago: here, everyone is looking for their karma. Contrition or revenge, the characters try to restore the balance that their actions have once broken.

started with Barry. Bill Hader, former student of the school “Saturday Night Live”, is a prodigious actor, capable of the most violent effects like the most fleeting nuances. The trajectory he imposes on his character leads him from the pure comedy – the one who cares only to make people laugh, without worrying about coherence or likelihood – with the study of character.

hell Burlesque

The Barry of this season 3, of which six episodes out of eight have been shown, is more often afraid that it will make people laugh. It is because he is in the grip of an incurable evil, the lucidity, which spreads to his partner, Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), also an actress, whose career finally begins to take off. At the same time as Barry takes the measure of the evil he has spread around him, Sally finally sees the violence and the absence of empathy that made his boyfriend one of the best representatives of his profession.

If the series remains one of the funniest of the moment, it is because its creators have taken care to leave other characters under the influence of comedy, starting with Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan), The Chechen gangster who would see himself as a florist. Love tribulations – he was entitled with a Bolivian gang leader – and professional – he must account for his hierarchy in the country – de Noho Hank are like the bloody reflection of the avanies that Sally meets in his Hollywood ascent.

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/Media reports.