HBO has a habit of taking the trashiest shows from other networks and elevating them to prestige television with cinematic visuals, rich themes and characters, and challenging subject matter. AMC aired The Walking Dead, a zombie-infested soap opera, and HBO responded with the nuanced tragedies of The Last of Us. Showtime aired Billions, a dark comedy about the excesses of the obscenely wealthy, and HBO responded with the searing satire of Succession.
Deadwood is the anti-Bonanza. The Wire is a much darker, grittier Hill Street Blues. True Detective imbued a typical cop show with a novelistic narrative complexity and a Southern Gothic visual style. What is Game of Thrones, if not an elevated version of old fantasy shows like Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys?
After Bill Hader left the cast of Saturday Night Live, he hopped over to HBO to make what turned out to be a prestige version of Dexter. When HBO first announced a half-hour comedy series about a hitman who dreams of becoming an actor, it sounded like a bad idea. Hitman stories were a dime a dozen in that post-John Wick era, and the story of a hitman-turned-actor sounded like a gimmicky one-joke premise that would barely sustain one of Hader’s SNL sketches, let alone a full TV show. But Hader and his co-creator Alec Berg had a clear vision; they took that simple, gimmicky elevator pitch and turned it into a Breaking Bad-style psychological character study.
Barry started off as a pitch-black comedy about a contract killer who stumbles into an acting class, catches the acting bug, and struggles to balance his newfound purpose as an actor with his existing responsibilities as a hitman. But, over the course of four seasons, Barry became a lot more dramatic, and even horrific, and it had a much more satisfying ending than Dexter (which wasn’t very difficult).
Barry’s Double-Life Drama Goes Much Deeper Than Dexter’s
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From Breaking Bad to Hannah Montana, any TV show about a double life is bound to be compelling. A character with one foot in two worlds, trying to keep their secrets safe and their dual identities separate, is always interesting to follow, whether they’re a meth-cooking chemistry teacher like Walter White or a money-laundering accountant like Ozark‘s Marty Byrde or a pair of undercover Soviet spies like Philip and Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans.
Within the double-life subgenre, Barry and Dexter are birds of a feather. In both cases, the antihero’s secret double life involves killing lots and lots of people, and there’s a degree of psychopathy in their mental makeup. But Barry is much, much subtler than Dexter, and it tells a much more complete story from beginning to end. Where Dexter Morgan’s murderous urges are literalized through a “Dark Passenger” that ham-fistedly takes the form of his late father, Barry Berkman’s grimmer impulses are symbolized through gonzo, almost David Lynchian visions.
Dexter revolves around a forensic blood spatter analyst who moonlights as a serial killer targeting other serial killers. He’s a mass-murdering vigilante who hides in plain sight at a police station and knows how to effectively clean a crime scene because he spends every day analyzing poorly cleansed crime scenes. It’s a fun setup for a procedural, and the writers had a lot of fun introducing a new killer-of-the-year each season (with John Lithgow’s Trinity Killer being a clear highlight), but it never went as deep into the psyche of a murderer as Barry did.
After years of playing Stefan and impersonating Alan Alda and breaking during sketches on SNL, Hader proved what an incredible dramatic actor he is with his turn in Barry. Every time Barry has an outburst or a meltdown, it’s genuinely terrifying. But at the same time, Barry always comes off like a naive, frightened little boy. It’s chilling, and it made Michael C. Hall’s iconic portrayal of Dexter look like small potatoes.
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