Critical Condition: Barry

Barry | SoHo, 10.00 Friday

➢ “The key to enjoying Barry — and it is very enjoyable, in a variety of ways — is to go in with zero expectations. Though the half-hour series stars former Saturday Night Live favourite Bill Hader as a depressed hitman who decides to become an actor, the show delivers suprisingly more ‘dark’ than ‘comedy, and overall it elicits more heartbreak than hilarity.” — Entertainment Weekly.

➢ “Once you get the style – Hader as director achieves a delicate counterpoint between the ironic and the gruesome, no easy task for a first-timer – it is really very funny.” — The Australian.

➢ “Barry has an offbeat appeal … its mix of oddball comedy and suspense playing like Weeds made during a depressive cycle. There’s a hopelessness to Barry that should be off-putting; how much more hopelessness can we bear at the moment? Yet the show is so addictively paced and keenly acted that I was compelled to keep pressing play.” — Vanity Fair.

➢ “Barry scores as a wildly original and sensationally entertaining hybrid of dark comedy and delirious action … Barry kills–in every way imaginable.” — TV Guide.

➢ “Barry, a low-key but likable caper comedy, represents a collision of three genres: It’s a single-camera half-hour show set among aspiring creative types, it’s one of a new breed of generally restrained “comedies” about characters who live with depression, and it’s a crime saga in which unexpected consequences keep piling up on an increasingly stressed-out protagonist … Over the course of its eight episodes, this hybrid achieves a pleasing momentum, and it contains a number of dryly entertaining comedic performances.” — Variety.