Surprisingly and without major announcements, it arrives in Italy Barry (the first season on Sky Atlantic from 12 April, the second will follow in May), a small serial jewel released three years ago on HBO, highly awarded and much appreciated but still unpublished by us. A dark comedy which starts from a premise as absurd as it is well executed: a former marine turned paid killer flies to Los Angeles for an assignment, stumbles upon an acting class and decides to change his life.
Bill Hader
Creator, screenwriter and main performer is Bill Hader, a comedian known in the United States above all as a permanent presence at Saturday Night Live. His long career in the longest running variety on US TV may have given him the inspiration for Barry: a man who has a lot of talent for a job he hates, which forces him to a dull and unhappy life, a bit like – according to what he himself said – the frenzied pace necessary to create and act live every week sketch of the SNL was driving Hader to exhaustion. His interpretation of the character of Barry Berkman is very convincing: at the beginning he is an automaton, inexpressive; then he sees on a small stage an actress who finds the right emotion to give life to a monologue and is struck: on the other hand, as the teacher Gene Cousineau says, played by a magnificent Henry Winkler (yes, just the ex Fonzie), the purpose of acting lessons is to create life.
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Grotesque
The grotesque and the bizarre of the first episodes of Barry would already be worth the vision in themselves, but the series really takes off in the second half, as the tragic component of the story emerges: the more the protagonist awakens his emotions, the more his suffering comes to the surface. What really strikes you is the delicate balance between a comedy bordering on madness and the emotional involvement that the main characters manage to arouse. In the second season the mechanism works perhaps even better: even more apparently grotesque characters find the right deepening.
Barry, Bill Hader and Alec Berg, On Sky Atlantic from 12 April