It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when former Saturday Night Live cast members just could not get any traction at all in TV or movies after they left the iconic late-night show. There was the occasional exception, but for the most part, former SNL cast members’ careers ended up dying a slow death, despite many, many attempts at finding Eddie Murphy-like glory. In the nineties, it became somewhat of a sad joke that if you were on SNL, that meant your career had peaked.
Well, things have certainly changed.
Not only is SNL now considered a proving ground for some of the best talent around, it has demonstrated, time and time again, to be a place for some of the most immensely talented artists to test their boundaries, make connections and, most important of all, gain the confidence and fame they need to be able to make challenging and brilliant work once they’ve left the show. We saw it with Kristen Wiig and Bridesmaids. We saw it with Adam Samberg and Palm Springs. We saw it with Jason 
and Ted Lasso. And we saw it with Bill Hader and a show called Barry, one of the best television shows produced in the last twenty years.
Barry, which ran for four seasons on HBO from 2018 to 2023 (and is available to stream on HBO MAX) was co-created by Hader and Alec Berg. Berg himself knows a thing or two about brilliant HBO shows, as he was the showrunner for HBO’s Silicon Valley (2014-2019) and also worked on Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. And of course, Bill Hader is one of SNL’s most legendary performers, a master impressionist, a comedic actor who was one of the most popular cast members during his eight seasons on the show. But, despite Hader’s success on SNL, he never really found great success in projects he did away from the show, seemingly continuing what had been the curse of SNL cast members. Hader did voiceover work and the occasional indie film, but, for the most part, he was only known for SNL. So, when it was announced that he was a co-creator of this show called Barry, and he was also starring in it, it seemed like a big bite for an actor who hadn’t yet proven himself.
Barry was a big bite indeed. And it was unlike anything anyone had ever tasted before.
In Barry, Hader plays Barry Berkman, a hitman from the Midwest who comes to Los Angeles for a job and gets bitten by the acting bug. Barry enrolls in an acting class, run by Gene Cousineau, played by Henry Winkler, and falls in love with a fellow acting student, Sally, played by Sarah Goldberg, and decides he wants to leave his old life behind. But the problem is, his old life, led by his handler, played by Stephen Root, won’t leave HIM alone. Barry keeps getting sucked back into his criminal life, no matter how much he wants to escape it.
There’s so much about that show description that sounds and feels familiar. But here’s the thing about this show: it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It’s so, so funny. But it’s also so, so dark. And, sometimes, it’s so funny and so dark even in the SAME SCENE. There’s really no way to describe the brilliance of this show, it’s a thick stew of contradictions, of mixed genres, of juxtapositioned moods and atmospheres, of characters that make no sense and a world all at once mundane yet explosive. It’s philosophical, emotional, moody and violent, but it’s also silly, goofy and self-aware. It’s lead character is existential, anxious, nervous, oblivious and awkward. Watching him merely exist in the world is sometimes painful, but always amusing. In Hader’s gifted hands, Barry, both the character and the show, is a one-of-a-kind experience.
But, mostly, Barry is all about the writing. It feels as if Berg and Hader put no guardrails in the writers room, they told them that they could go anywhere, take these characters to any place, as long as they got them to the destination for the story. So the audience is taken on a journey that is unexpected–there are soliloquies for no reason or a random motorcycle chase on a freeway just because it looks so cool—and always rewarded with the most random, brilliant moments that you’ve never seen before.
I made a comment on social media that I believed Season 4 of Barry was the best season of television that I had ever seen. And I am still sticking to it. It is simply perfect. It is a culmination of a series and a story perfectly told. This show could have gone on so much longer, but they ended it just right. I was sad to see it go, but it made it one of the most perfect packages ever created on television.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the elements of Barry that makes it so special: Anthony Carrigan. Carrigan plays a character named NoHo Hank, Barry’s criminal frenemy, a member of the local Chechen mob who Barry runs up against. Carrigan’s performance is one of my all-time favorites, a characterization that makes the screen literally brighter every time he’s on it. I had the good fortune to interview Carrigan, and you can read our conversation here.
If you didn’t catch Barry when it first came out, I highly recommend you take the opportunity to go back and catch up on this gem of a show, which was nominated for 54 Emmys over the course of its four seasons, winning 10, including Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for Winkler in 2018 and Best Leading Actor in a Comedy Series for Hader in both 2018 and 2019.
Little-known fact: those two Emmy acting wins puts Hader in rarefied air for SNL alums. He is one of only three former cast members with two or more Emmys for acting. While you may think Tina Fey is one of them because she has won 6 Emmys, only one of them is for acting (the rest are for writing and/or directing). The other two SNL alums who have won 2 or more acting Emmys are Jane Curtin (who won two for Kate & Allie) and, of course, the queen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has won EIGHT Emmys as of this writing. I bet nobody expected the dorky, first-to-break-in-a-sketch Bill Hader to be the one to be cementing his post-SNL legacy this hard and this fast. But Barry is a show that took courage to make, courage to star in, and courage to green light. Bravo to everyone involved who took this kind of risk to gamble on a show this different, this weird—this level of genius.
Read my review of Season 3 of Barry here.
All four seasons of Barry are available to stream on HBO MAX.