#10) Barry, by Bill Hader and Alec Berg (2018- )

Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) is a skilled marksman, an in demand hitman managed by the dimwitted master manipulator, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root). Barry seems to be growing restless with the criminal life, but cannot get himself out from the grip of Fuches’ lucrative underground business. On his latest job in Los Angeles, he gets assigned a hit that thrusts him into the acting school of Gene Cosineau (Henry Winkler), discovering an underlying passion he never knew he had for theatre, or at least a possible ticket out of his violent past. The question all throughout: is he in it too deep to ever get out? Will his past haunt him forever?

I stumbled into Barry blindly during a screenwriting competition as I frantically searched for a show I could write a spec for. I liked the simplicity of the title and gave it a shot, knowing nothing about it. I couldn’t believe how gripped I was. Furthermore, the latitude of the show’s range between comedy and drama, fantastical and practical, was so open that I felt it was a show complementary of my writing style. You could let your imagination go completely wild, as long as you never lost sight of developing the key relationships.

Hader and co-creator Alec Berg manage to get Home Alone humor amidst a sincere drama. It’s a show that never stops being dangerously consequential while maintaining relentless, outlandish humor. It’s more than a dark comedy or a dramedy; they’ve almost invented a new genre. Hader writes, directs, and stars in several episodes, establishing his own unique filmmaking voice.

The show not only explores the extremes of comedy and drama, but also the conflict of art and war. We are inherently violent and sexual beings, they are the extreme ends on opposing sides of the spectrum. We make both art and war from these violent or sexual impulses. In war, violence and death follows us, Barry’s inescapable fate. Art is the opposite, harmonizing, though not without the same conflict and battle plans as war. Art enlightens, war destroys. Barry is war, but he wants art, even if he sucks at it.

The show challenges the notion that one is born as either an artist or a soldier. As we get deeper into the show, we see for Barry that it’s all a matter of tapping the source – in this case, his appetite for destruction. He’s always thrust into the harshest circumstances, which give his performances emotional depth. Whether being ordered to kill his first scene partner, or killing his mentor’s beloved to protect himself, Barry continually gets deeper into hell as he tries to climb out of it’s slippery depths. He has to go to the worst, most tormenting places to find his inner artistic core. The show unites art and violence, revealing the similarities of their impulses. Barry is surrounded by flighty, coreless actors who have the vain desire for stardom; he only seems good himself when, by chance, he is coming from evil deeds. To challenge this even further, Barry’s love interest, Sally (Sarah Goldberg) - an ambitious, driven actress - declares that making it in the big time is not so much about talent as it is wanting it the most.

Some might say Barry Berkman (stage name Barry Block) is sheer evil, or at least plain psychotic, but he’s a protagonist painted with gut-wrenching sympathy, desperately trying to escape one world to be in another. We should all know what this is like, how the world we come from holds onto us, branding us with the identity they know us by while we relentlessly struggle to transform. Fuches defines who Barry is: “you closed the door on being able to do anything else. This is what you do, this is all you do.”

An HBO Presentation. Starring Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, Henry Winkler, Stephen Root, and Anthony Carrigan. Created by Bill Hader and Alec Berg. Rated TV-MA

Available through HBO