‘Barry’ and The Sociopaths Next Door

The most interesting character on the show is Sally Reed, Destroyer of Worlds.

MURDERING people for MONEY makes me SAD.

The trope of the good-natured assassin, a killing machine who presents as an amiable doofus or who has a strange-but-consistent moral code they will not betray, isn’t new¹. It’s one of those very obvious subversions of expectations that writers latch onto very early in their careers, giggling as they think wait til they get a load of this contract killer who bursts into tears every time he kills because they really do think they’re going to blow some minds with that one².

Of course, just because an idea has been done (and done often) doesn’t mean it can’t be done again³. I have a writer friend who argues against this, believing that certain cliches should simply be retired because they’ve been handled by so many writers over the centuries. I disagree—anything can be done well. It just takes a thoughtful approach and loads of writing talent⁴.

Still, the central premise of Barry isn’t exactly brand-new. Barry (Bill Hader) is a former Marine who emerged from his service in Afghanistan a broken man. Manipulated by a family friend and mentor figure, Monroe Fuches⁵ (Stephen Root), Barry becomes a contract killer, believing he is killing bad people. When in Los Angeles for a job, Barry meets Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg) and joins her acting class, taught by terrible actor and person Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and begins training to be an actor. Hilarity ensues⁶!

Well, sometimes. Barry has never quite been a comedy, though it is frequently hilarious. Barry continues to murder people as a way of solving problems, often justifying his actions by his supposedly good intentions, and the body count on this show is pretty high⁷. Plus, Barry himself is dealing with several untreated mental conditions⁸. This is a dark show in many ways, and it has become steadily darker over the years until Season 3 arrived as a piece of pitch black tar.

Barry is an interesting protagonist despite being a terrible human being—gaslighted and manipulated, he’s a broken man and watching Season 3 of the show is like watching someone have a nervous breakdown in real time. But the most interesting character on the show isn’t Barry, who has been kind of a one-note figure since the beginning. It’s Sally. Because Sally demonstrates the fundamental theme of the show: We’re all bad people. We just need a push⁹.

You Work For Me And I Am F**King Drowning

Sally is doing well.

It’s impossible to like Sally. As written, Sally starts off on the show as a self-obsessed, fairly terrible actress—that she’s one of the better folks in Cousineau’s hack-a-thon acting class isn’t saying much¹⁰. Her evil is pretty minor, though; Sally is damaged, and she deals with her damage by seeking and incessantly measuring her own popularity and success, which naturally means she also has to undermine and shit on anyone else’s popularity and success.

Like most people, if left to her own devices Sally would very likely never really do much harm aside from betraying some friendships and other minor evils. She’s a miserable person in every way, both in terms of being difficult to like and being genuinely unhappy almost constantly, but she would never actively harm someone else¹¹. Of course, the same could be said about Barry—would he have murdered so many people if he’d been left alone? Possibly not. In the Barry universe, mass murderers aren’t born, they’re made. Without Fuches acting on him, Barry might have descended into depression and worse, but he probably wouldn’t have killed quite so many people. That required someone or something to act on Barry.

Sally’s purpose on the show, in some ways, is to be a shadow-Barry, someone who also has a host of undiagnosed and untreated mental issues and who slowly becomes a monster once acted upon. This way we get to see the process from its beginning while Barry, increasingly hollow-eyed and monstrous, plays out its bitter, awful end¹². Bit by bit, Sally is tortured in ways very different from what Barry went through: She is slowly, bit by bit, given what she wants. And yet, she remains the same miserable person.

She kicks her abusive ex to the curb. She is recognized for her performing talent. She gets a TV show and becomes a big deal. She can flex on people around her endlessly. And none of it—none of it—makes her feel any less miserable. And then it’s all taken away from her, bit by bit, first by mean chance and then through her own emotional incompetence, and Sally’s reaction to these losses is to rapidly evolve into a woman who wants to hire Barry to drive her former friend and assistant insane¹³, a woman who beats a man to death with a bat.

And all it took was a little push¹⁴.

It's Not My Wig But The Shirt Is Mine

Protect NoHo Hank at all costs.

Just about every character on Barry is revealed to be capable of terrible, terrifying things if they’re pushed. Gene Cousineau is slowly revealed to be an awful person in general, the sort of guy who has burned every bridge in Hollywood due to his asshole behavior—and when he’s pushed by Barry’s murder of his girlfriend, he easily becomes a would-be killer himself (the only reason he doesn’t kill anyone is simple incompetence). Cops go rogue, fellow actors snake your opportunities out from under you (and then upload your angry reactions to TMZ¹⁵), and grieving widows put poison in beignets to avenge their murdered loved ones. Everyone on the show is a potential Barry. The implication is, everyone in the world is a potential Barry.

And Sally shows us the way, because she’s the only character who comes close to going Full Barry. At the last moment, she’s pulled back from the brink, and she flees home in terror. But for a moment, while beating a man to death with a bat and an expression of feral rage on her face, she had one toe in the Sea of Sociopathy. As do we all¹⁶.

This is why it’s crucial that I never be allowed to develop superpowers. If that ever happens, man you are all so screwed.

Next week: ‘The Bear’ and How to Not Exposition

1. Neither is the concept of “middle-aged white dude who watches too much TV and then writes long essays about his incredible interior monologue” but … I’ve forgotten my point. Oh, look, Fritos!

2. My own writing trunk is absolutely festooned with stories I thought would blow people’s minds that literally no one wanted to read. There’s a lesson in there, but I refuse to learn it.

3. Ladies and gentlement, welcome to the blueprint for my entire career!

4. And, in my professional experience, three bottles of moderately-priced whiskey.

5. One of the great character names of all time.

6. Even if you ignore most of my recommendations, do yourself a favor and watch Bill Hader’s line reading of “Hey Ike you shitbird, you want a little pie?”

7. I do appreciate the fact that Barry leans into the idea that murder, at best, kicks your problem down the road and, at worst, creates sixteen new problems, some of which you can’t murder your way out of.

8. These days, who isn’t?

9. Personally, I’ve known I am a trash person since I was about 14, and the ensuing decades have just been getting used to the fact. No worries, I made it.

10. It’s also a terrific, subtle joke.

11. Although, to be fair, you can see Sally slapping some poor waitress or making the teenage manager of the local Starbucks cry.

12. Bill Hader should be worried about how easily he physically portrays “hollow-eyed time bomb.”

13. As one does.

14. To be fair, there was a time when I would have happily murdered someone for a parking spot in Hoboken, NJ. The world is safer now that I don’t own a car.

15. The fact that there are still people in this world who don’t walk around in disguise at all times because you are always on camera somewhere amazes me.

16. For example, years after lockdown I am still cutting my own hair like a crazy person.