The problem is, just like Barry, it’s all based on a lie, and a derivative one at that: Sally’s finally fulfilling her creative dreams, but she’s too riddled with guilt to enjoy them. It’s affected her relationship with Barry, too, who lashes out at her one day in front of the writers and sends Fisher’s character’s abuser-sense tingling. The other women, though, find all manner of excuses to handwave Barry’s behavior; he’s really a sweetheart, he was just having a bad day, etc. “They’re adults, and I like my job,” one confesses.
That’s the narrative thrust of “Barry” season three, as Berg and Hader wrap each character in a cocoon of self-delusion that both comforts and suffocates. Everyone in the show, Barry included, is running from one transgression or another, scrambling desperately to prove themselves good people after all. Characters can point a gun at someone one minute, then beg for forgiveness from them the next; some get once-in-a-lifetime avenues to escape their conditions, only for greed or self-regard to pull them back in. Take Fuches, who finds two separate occasions this season to escape his desire to take vengeance against Barry and live a quiet life of peace and solitude, only for his ego to drag him back into the fold.
In fact, the most stable and happy of the bunch might just be NoHo Hank (Andrew Carrigan, as delightfully clueless and exuberant as ever), now top dog with the Chechens, and who’s found happiness in an unexpectedly sweet (and embargoed, so as not to spoil the surprise) place. It’s such an interesting choice to make the show’s most anarchic, unpredictable character the happiest and most stable person on screen, and it changes his dynamic with everyone in fascinating ways. Without, of course, losing Carrigan’s unstoppable delivery of overconfident bon mots: “It’s like that line in ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’” he tells Barry in one episode: “Get rich or die tryin’.”