Barry (Season Two)

Season One of Barry was one of the best TV debuts of 2018, and for their work, Henry Winkler and Bill Hader cleaned up at the Emmy awards. Its eight-episode second act was often just as strong, despite a significant hiccup close to the midpoint. Barry Berkman's (Hader) story continues to get darker, as we learn more about the demons he's been fighting as he tries (often fruitlessly) to put his past behind him. He no longer wants anything to do with his life as a hired killer, including his inconsiderate handler, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root) and his former Chechen mob connection NoHo Hank (a brilliant Anthony Carrigan). Both men inevitably re-insert themselves into Barry's life and he's once again forced to try to push forward in his acting class with Gene Cousineau (Winkler) and his romantic life with Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg).

Sally's been a strange character since her introduction, and while her behavior would be extremely bothersome to be around, the show does a good job of drawing her as a self-centered mess. Her behavior can be absurd, but she feels real enough for her to come off as sympathetic when she needs to. The show digs into her past relationship with an abusive boyfriend, Sam, and we learn where a great deal of her insecurities come from.

In fact, Sally's so focused on herself that she remains completely oblivious to who her boyfriend Barry really is. Nearly all the time that Barry's around her, he's trying to deal with his recent awful deeds he commits, and she only notices that something's wrong when he needs to rehearse a scene or otherwise do something for her. Given Barry's journey in Season Two, the dissonance between their focus grows increasingly stronger.

That's because NoHo Hank approaches Barry early in the season and despite his usually-polite demeanor, he blackmails Barry into getting re-involved with the Chechen mob. Carrigan only has a scene or two when he has to get serious and isn't bubbly and upbeat, but he sells those critical ones enough to remind us that the Chechens are, in fact, dangerous. As a result of the events of the Season One finale, the local police push further into their investigation and when the cop leading the investigation eventually confronts Barry, it results in the most effective (and thanks to Hader's delivery) twists in the series to-date.

Unfortunately, that excellent episode is followed up by easily the weakest installment of Barry to-date. I hate it when highly realistic shows take a dive into the surreal (exception: The Sopranos), unbelievable, or supernatural when they've been making their bones on gritty drama. There's a particularly strange sequence in episode 5, "ronny/lily" in which Barry encounters the titular father who has what feels like nine lives and the titular daughter who, in addition to seeming unrealistically feral, seems to have the ability to climb trees, fall from great distances unharmed, and hover a little bit in the air. The whole thing was weird and didn't work at all for me. I've got no problem with a show trying to flex its creative muscle, but it felt like it would have worked better as a dream sequence or something.

The other storyline that didn't do much for me this season was Gene's attempts to reconnect with his estranged son. It just seemed like something that the writers forced in there, and it seemed pretty inconsequential. I'm guessing that they're laying the groundwork for something in the third season, but I wasn't invested in this story at all, and the payoff is uncertain for now.

Fortunately, Barry picked up right where it left off right after "ronny/lily" and this turned out to be just a one-off blip. The remainder of the episodes packed plenty of the tense drama that the show's becoming known for, along with a good dose of hilarity from NoHo Hank (the conversation he has over the phone with a furniture store regarding buying a table on which to put a cocaine shipment is comedic gold). I had read mixed reviews on Barry prior to watching this season, and my opinion is that it's certainly held up to its Season One strength.

Episode Grades

1. "The Show Must Go On, Probably?": B+
2. "The Power of No" A-
3. "Past Equals Present x Future Over Yesterday: B-
4. "What?!": A
5. "ronny/lily": D
6. "The Truth Has a Ring to It": A-
7. "The Audition": A
8. "berkman/block": B+

Season Grade: B+

Television Review - 2018

Because I made an effort to review every show that I watched in 2018, I'm going to be able to structure this year's TV review post a little differently and cram it all into one. In the past, I've broken out reviews of my five favorite viewing experiences of the year into separate installments, but since I don't have all that much new to say, I'll simply rank them and link those reviews here.

Here are all the shows that I've watched during 2018. I completed the most recently concluded season of the show (and only the most recent season of the show) unless otherwise indicated. The crop is a little thinner this year because Cheers and The Americans both took a very long time.

• Everything Sucks! 
• Cheers (Seasons 5-11)
• The Good Place (Seasons 1-2)
• Atypical (Seasons 1-2)
• Barry 
• Ozark (Season One)
• The Americans (Full series, Seasons 1-6)
• The Big Bang Theory
• Jersey Shore Family Vacation (Seasons 1-2)
• BoJack Horseman
• Better Call Saul
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• South Park
• Top Chef (Okay, I forgot to review this)

Here are the shows I watched last year that have dropped off the list due to no new episodes:

• You're the Worst (returns in January)
• The Sopranos
• Master of None
• High Maintenance
• Rick and Morty

Here are the shows that fell out of the rotation since last year, or that I am 100% sure I will not be continuing, with an explanation:

1. Silicon Valley - We watched an episode or two of this, but rumors of its decline in quality along with the departure of T.J. Miller's Erlich Bachman character from the show stunted our enthusiasm, and we've just sort of stopped watching it.

2. Billions - I can't actually say we stopped watching it -- in fact, we watched the third episode of Season Three after a long hiatus last night. We might complete Season Three next year if that momentum sticks, but I think it's just decent, and the repeated power plays and backstabbing make it feel a little too much like House of Cards and Suits at times. The characters on Billions lie somewhere on the spectrum between the boring, 1-dimensional ones found on House of Cards and the highly entertaining but caricature-like ones on Suits, so it's walking a tight rope.

3. Ozark - I can't stress or repeat myself enough on this point, and it's actually cathartic to say it out loud every so often. The Season One finale episode of Ozark was so unbelievably terrible that I'm dropping the show out of principle, even if it definitely had its moments along the way. There's only a handful of TV episodes I've ever seen that I'd slap an "F" grade on, and adjusting for expectations (Ozark was otherwise decent-to-good), it might be the most disappointing (not to mention repulsive) single installment of a show I've ever seen. It's close between that and the How I Met Your Mother finale.

Finally, here were my Top Five Viewing Experiences of the Year:

5. Barry (Season One) - I'm giving this the slight edge over Season Four of Better Call Saul in a year in which I just happened to watch a lot of great TV. In the end, it's probably because Barry was a completely new experience and toed the line between comedy and drama perfectly.

4. Atypical (Seasons 1-2)- The second season wasn't quite as strong as the first, but overall, but Atypical is rife with strong characters and presents an interesting look at a family whose son (and series main character) is on the autism spectrum.

3. BoJack Horseman (Season Five) - BoJack Horseman might be the best actively-running series on TV and delivered another consistently stellar slate of episodes in 2018. It was something of a bounce-back from Season Four, in which there were a few amazing episodes scattered among weaker (for BoJack) installments.

2. Cheers (Seasons 5-11) - This is the best live-action sitcom I've ever seen and it delivered consistent laughs all the way up until the finale, which is one of the greatest episodes of television of all time.

1. The Americans (Full series, Seasons 1-6) - What a ride. FX's period drama is firmly in the "best of all-time" discussion. When I finished watching the show, my reaction was, "Well, I know The Wire is better, but what else?" As far as other completed dramas are concerned, I know there's Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Mad Men (which I don't love but is critically acclaimed) to reckon with. I'd certainly put The Americans somewhere in that group.

Barry (Season One)

For everyone who got here just after finishing this inaugural season of Barry....holy shit.

And for everyone else, um, welcome, I guess?

Unlike some of the other stuff I've been watching lately, Barry is a relatively easy show to explain. The main character, Barry Berkman (Bill Hader), is an ex-marine who became a hitman after his service, often applying a Boondocks Saints-like moral code to justify what he does; the people he kills are generally bad. His boss, Fuches, is friendly/chummy enough with Barry but there isn't a lot of regard for Barry's well-being there. One day, Barry's job leads him to an acting class led by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Attracted by the normalcy of it all, the camaraderie of the other people in the class, the chance to have a real hobby outside of his grim job, and to one of the other students, Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), Barry winds up taking the class. It becomes a bright spot for his otherwise bleak existence, but obviously, the difficulties of living a double life manifest themselves, and Barry spends most of the season staving off either getting caught or killed.

Despite the high stakes, Barry is a dark comedy, and most of the episodes pack plenty of laughs in addition to big dramatic moments. You'd typically think that the Chechen mob bosses that Barry becomes involved with would make for frightening individuals (and make no mistake about it, they mean business), but Goran (Glenn Fleshler) and Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) provide consistent comic relief. Noho Hank is small and polite to a fault, while Goran is built like your typical hulking thug. The show gets a lot of comedy out of Goran having a normal-ish family life outside of his mob dealings, sort of like a Chechen Tony Soprano (in a nice choice of props, there's a red Cozy Coupe with goofy eyes sitting in his garage, just lurking in the background while extreme violence and murder plots take place).

The show also plays plenty of attention to Gene's personal life, including his romantic pursuit of Detective Moss (Paula Newsome), who also happens to be investigating murders to which Barry is connected. Sally gets plenty of screen time too, as her efforts to land acting gigs are thwarted by both her mediocre (at times) ability, and more painfully, Weinstein-like characters that serve as gatekeepers to important roles. If there's one thing I have to pick on with this season, it's that there's a point in the Barry/Sally storyline where her personality and attitude toward Barry seem to shift without cause. Barry's left pretty confused by the sudden change, and as the audience, we feel that confusion as well. That'd be perfectly fine had we not spent so much time getting to know Sally independent of Barry. Because we're somewhat accustomed to seeing scenes from Sally's point of view, the abrupt character change without explanation leaves something to be desired.

Barry takes a bit to find its footing, and any minor sins from the somewhat uneven early episodes are compensated for by the action and hilarity in the last four. The season's falling action is a speed rap of plot developments, all of which are given the appropriate dramatic weight and some of which will leave you gaping open-mouthed. Anchoring all of this is the fantastic performance of Hader, who absolutely disappears into the role and captures a huge array of emotions from the vacant, dead countenance he often wears early in the season to the horror, anguish, and occasional happiness he shows later on.

I feel like I'm giving out very high grades for most things I've been checking out this year, but bear in mind that for me to actually watch a show to completion and feel compelled to write about it, there's probably a bias toward things I like a lot. I don't consider myself to be a 'soft' critic of TV, it's just that I'm on a big streak of watching pretty good stuff.

Season One Grade: A-