Created by: Alec Berg and Bill Hader
Available on Hotstar.
This show is about Barry, who kills people for a living, who discovers the joy of acting that he wants to leave his old life behind. This is a bit similar to Karthik Subbaraj's Jigarthanda, and this is one of my favorite genres where you get to merge art and crime together. Art is a very grounded reality whereas crime is usually larger than life, to at least people who write and create shows and movies and that strikes a good balance. I was excited to watch this show, just when I read that logline. It has 8 episodes, each around 30 mins.
I have mixed feelings about how they treated it, I extremely enjoyed the parts where it was about his transition from his old life to him meeting new people and he finding acting interesting. But I didn't enjoy the parts were he has to go and do a few more murders because they won't let you go so easily from that. The black comedy was working for me in the parts were Barry is out of place from the rest of the people in the theatre, but it wasn't much working with the funny gangsters. I wished they explored more of he discovering the craft and his dynamics with other people in the theatre, the crime part probably would've worked better had they treated it as drama more than comedy is what I felt. The detective track was interesting too and it was used well to give a closure to the season.
I can see that there's a lot of influence of Coen Brothers on this show, whether it's dealing with artists or with people into crime. The idea of he realising the consequences of his actions in his violent life through art, was so good and I thought that acting would be kind of a rehabilitation for him. I kept feeling that if they had conceived this show as a drama instead of a comedy, they could've explored more angles to the characters. I'm not as excited to see the next season now, but will watch it later sometime probably.
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