The first murder in Barry happens offscreen. Barry Bill Hader walks robotically out of a hotel bathroom toward a bed whereβthe camera pans to revealβa man has been shot in the head.
Barry removes the silencer from a revolver and grimaces, slightly, as if he has indigestion. And that, in a nutshell, is Barry , which takes the tired trope of hit-man-with-a-heart and turns it into something darker, rawer, and intermittently heartbreaking. It does this while remaining a comedy, or at least more structurally a comedy than many of the half-hour dramas that awkwardly bulk up the category. But he follows Ryan to his acting class and is unexpectedly drawn to the group of people he finds there.
He watches, rapt, as Sally Sarah Goldberg tries to tap into genuine feelings of rage and pain to perform a scene. His jaw relaxes. The question the show asks is, Can you move on from murder? The field of comedies about killing people is surprisingly rich right now. It could have leaned fully in to the zombie-comedy template, bringing an apocalypse of the undead upon Los Angeles County. It was always a comedy with a single punchline, as Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in Vulture last year: Sheila, a sweet, goofy suburban mom, suddenly enjoys killing people and eating them.
But in its sophomore season, the cracks in such a narrow premise are starting to show. Santa Clarita Diet has accomplished actors and great one-liners but its stakes are stuck at sea level. Any tenuous objections to murdering people for food that Sheila and her husband, Joel Timothy Olyphant , might have are swiftly dispelled when the pair discover a Nazi softball team in Santa Clarita. Nailing the tone of jokes about murder can be troublesome even for shows with a less overtly comedic structure.
The crux of the show is that a man accustomed to nothing but violence is thrown off course by other emotions. He begins the series as a dead-eyed oddball and occasional animal torturer.
