Barry is one HBO’s best new shows, but the pandemic has delayed the third season. Bill Hader reveals they’ve at least been very productive in quarantine.
Barry is one of the best show to come out of HBO in the past few years. The half-hour series stars Saturday Night Live veteran Bill Hader as Barry Berkman, a hitman who struggles to leave the life behind when he discovers what he really wants to do is act. The cast is terrific from top to bottom, with standout performances from Stephen Root and Henry Winkler as Barry’s two mentors (one for killing people, one for acting) and Anthony Carrigan as the irrepressibly cheerful Chechen gangster NoHo Hank. (Both Hader and Winkler have won Emmys for their work.) It’s got the pitch black humor you’d expect from a show with that description, but also a tight plot, real stakes and some genuinely exciting action scenes. It’s been well over a year since the season 2 finale and I miss it.
Of course, the pandemic is the reason we haven’t seen anything new from the show in a while. And as Hader heartbreakingly revealed on Late Night With Seth Meyers, they were this close to starting production on the third season. “Right when the lockdown happened in March, we were a week away from shooting,” he said.
At least this downtime means there will hopefully be less of a break between seasons 3 and 4. “Season 3 is completely written, ready to go,” Hader continued. “And then during this time, we actually went and wrote season 4. So we have both of those done, so we’re just waiting until we can start shooting again.”
That means the show has been on a shooting hiatus for coming up on 10 months. That’s infuriating, but with shows like The Witcher managing to muddle through a shoot during the pandemic, hopefully HBO can get moving on something soon.
As for how the show will resolve the big cliffhanger at the end of the last season, with Barry having massacred a monastery full of gang members and Gene (Henry Winkler) possibly figuring out that Barry killed his girlfriend back in season 1 (but in a funny way, remember it’s technically a comedy), Hader isn’t saying. “That’s kind of what we do at the end of every season,” he said of the cliffhanger. “Really screwed ourselves here.”
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