Barry

"Barry", Bill Hader and Alec Berg’s dark HBO comedy, concerns a hitman (Hader) who is hired to kill a member of an acting workshop, but then joins the group and takes up amateur dramatics himself.

This is the show that might just be the the new Breaking Bad.

Tempted to give up killing for theatrical performance, Barry ends up leading a dangerous double life, implicating his new pals in an organised-crime turf war and attendant police investigation. Surely he’ll soon be rumbled?

Barry operates as a comedy rather than a thriller, but it replicates a lot of what made Breaking Bad irresistible: here is an irredeemable, but never quite despicable, protagonist who is deceiving everyone around him about his true nature, and about the fact that the monster whose identity is a regular topic of conversation is, in fact, him.

Being discovered is a permanent threat, leading Barry, like Walter White before him, deeper and deeper into the abyss, committing increasingly heinous acts to stay alive. Down we go with him, propelled by an addictive sense of gnawing dread as the situation spirals ever further out of control and the potential fallout intensifies.

In "Barry", people’s failures are less to do with the brutal unfairness of society and more a result of them being hopeless berks. That’s a far lighter theme, but much of the “perennially imperilled antihero” format lends itself to comedy.

The show constantly slaps us with cathartic bathos, switching from bloody violence to the light relief of Henry Winkler’s majestically overripe drama teacher, Gene M Cousineau, telling his students to take “a tight five”, or one of the talentless thespians forgetting his line halfway between “Alas” and “poor Yorick”. That release of tension is a shortcut to laughs that never stops working.

You get the same strong suspicion you had during Breaking Bad – and which was subsequently more or less confirmed by showrunner Vince Gilligan – that the writers haven’t the first idea how they’ll get out of each narrative corner they back themselves into.

This matters less in a comedy; it’s not as aggravating if the scripts pull something silly to stop the story flying off the rails.

Like Dexter or Walter, one day Barry will edge into a scrape he can’t shoot his way out of and, when he does, he’ll probably be guilty of so many awful transgressions that we’ll be relieved to let him go. For now, though, he’s fascinating and funny enough to deserve several more years on the run.