Jamie on the Box – Barry, Game of Thrones

TV Review: Game of Thrones, Barry

Westeros gears up for death, while Barry tries to stall it

HBO used to dominate the prestige TV market, and it very much knew it, even going so far as to rub the networks faces in it with their slogan, ‘It’s not TV: it’s HBO’.

HBO was entitled to crow. After all, it gave the world Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show, and many more ground-breaking smash hits besides.

Unhampered by network focus groups or the vested interests of advertisers, HBO could afford to take greater risks with its output. Once show-runners, writers and producers had been freed from the burden of having to please most of the people most of the time, or of having to play to the lowest (or most conservative) common denominator, creativity became king.

The televisual landscape is different since HBO’s heyday, seismically so. Network television has upped its game, and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are taking the sorts of bold risks that used to be HBO’s exclusive calling card. It’s a testament to HBO’s enduring creative clout that even among this dizzying proliferation of content two of the best shows currently on TV – Game of Thrones and Barry come from the HBO stable.

As Game of Thrones enters its endgame, it’s gifted us the most hotly anticipated team-up this side of Infinity War. Every hero, villain, vagabond, brother, bastard, king, queen, drinker, thinker, miscreant, meanderer and murderer that ever lifted a banner or a broadsword is assembled in Winterfell for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which basically serves as an hour-long breather (and an opportunity for us to hold our breaths) before a wave of wights and walkers descends from the north to reduce all of Westeros’s problems to one: survival.

An episode of Game of Thrones never feels as long as its run-time. Whether it lasts 48, 58 or 90 minutes, the narrative always twists and clicks around as fast as a man having his neck broken by the Mountain. In the beginning I attributed the greater share of that feat of time-dilation to the show’s vast and sprawling geography – the action flitting from desert to forest to castle to cave over distances of thousands of miles, essentially telling six or more loosely interlocking or wholly separate stories within each episode; keeping the pace brisk to distract us from any mounting sense of boredom – but it quickly became clear that the thing keeping us hooked was purely and simply the sheer, breath-taking quality of every element of the production.

There’s no flitting between locations in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The whole hour (an hour for us, a day for the characters) unfolds in and around Winterfell, where the characters meet, talk, drink, lament, commiserate, drink, and drink some more. There are no battles or blood-shed, but the episode holds us utterly spellbound as it weaves together and pays off dozens of plot-lines, reunions and partnerships, sometimes calling back to feuds and fuck-ups way back in the first season.

There’s not a word or gesture out of place. Everything counts, everything builds, everything works. As always with the show, the rich dialogue springs from character, not circumstance. Some characters are clipped, some garrulous, some truthful, some false, some terse, but every word that comes out of a character’s mouth sounds and feels like it belongs there.

Emotional responses from the audience – whether they be joy, panic, relief, fear, tears or sadness – are worked for and earned. Shows like Star Trek Discovery and The Walking Dead might roll out some emotionally manipulative montage over-played by some puffed up, expository, wholly contrived speech in a bid to stir our souls, but Game of Thrones can provoke the same response with a word, a grunt, or even just a look.

If we became misty-eyed when Brienne of Tarth earned the respect and recognition of her friends and peers, felt touched yet again by Arya and the Hound’s rather gruff and grudging father-daughter act, laughed when Tormund told tales of suckling milk at a giant’s breast, and shouted ‘no’ at the screen as Arya’s final layer of innocence was stripped away, think how we’re going to feel next week when everyone starts dying. I trust you, Game of Thrones, but I’m not ready. Can’t it be summer again?

When you start to describe Barry to someone who’s never seen it, you become conscious of the molten gimmickery at the show’s core. Isn’t this just a Saturday Night Live sketch with too thin a premise to sustain a whole series? (apposite, as the show’s star and co-creator, Bill Hader, is a SNL alumnus). Barry seems like the kind of crazy idea two friends would cook up one night between bongs and back-to-back episodes of Rick and Morty.

So there’s this guy, right, and he’s called Barry, and he’s a cold-blooded killer, right? I mean he does it for a living. And this one time he wanders into an acting class when he’s stalking a target, and he decides he wants to become an actor, give up the killing business. But he has to kill someone in the class, that’s his target, right, but he falls in love with this acting chick who’s friends with the guy he has to kill, and he ends up betraying the Ukrainian mob, and his handler won’t let him quit, and the police are hunting him and every time he tries to walk away from killing and murder he gets pulled in ever harder and… em… [scratches head] are there any more Cheetos?’

Barry, though, is much more than just a quirky premise. It’s a smart, wicked, wickedly funny show that’s got just as much room for fatal and farcical shoot-outs and misunderstandings as it does meditations on mortality, culpability, life, love, death and fate. Grim reality goes toe to toe with macabre fantasy in a heightened world populated by characters both urgently real and grotesquely cartoonish. Instead of conflicting with each other, all of these elements coalesce into something beautiful and funny and horrifying and black. It’s a show that makes you feel. Really feel.

Season two is all about redemption, betrayal and root causes. Can Barry be redeemed after his multitude of murderous sins, the first of which – his first government-sanctioned kill – is coaxed out of him at acting class by his mentor, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Gene uses Barry’s pain as a way to explore and over-come his own; the grief he feels at the disappearance of his girlfriend who, unbeknownst to him, was dispatched by Barry at the close of the first season. Gene, too, is trying to redeem himself. He’s reaching out to his estranged son, who Gene abandoned long ago in pursuit of his own selfish wants, needs and aspirations. Meanwhile, Barry and Gene continue to develop a deep bond, more father-and-son in nature than mentor-and-student. Given that Barry is the root cause of Gene’s pain, he may be looking for love and absolution in a particularly ill-advised place.

Barry (the show) is good at making you feel complicit in the crimes of its eponymous lead. A few episodes ago, Barry decided against carrying out a hit, and we applauded his personal growth. Then, he declined to pull the trigger on Hank (the hilarious Anthony Harrigan), even after the metro-sexual mafioso had just tried and failed to assassinate him. Again, we admired his restraint. Good for you, Barry, we said. But, in episode four, What?!, when Sally’s abusive ex shows up, we found ourselves cheering ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’

It’s a delicious irony that Barry – an angry, empty, clinically-depressed man with PTSD who’s probably murdered far in excess of 100 people – has more scope for redemption and capacity for empathy than the wannabe actors with whom he shares a class, especially his girlfriend, Sally, who is so self-absorbed that she can walk into a room that’s been riddled with bullet-holes and not even notice.

The whole show is a joy to watch, and Henry Winkler and Bill Hader continue to turn in exceptional performances. Westeros may be preparing to draw the final curtain, but I hope there’s plenty of life – and death – in Barry’s future. If the rug-pulling ending of What?! is anything to go by, I’d say the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.