She seems almost ready to welcome him back into her life and home, until he asks, “Do you know where she lives?” He then proceeds to offer to psychologically torture the network head as a means of revenge: “Like, for instance, I could send her a picture of herself sleeping, just as a way of being, like, ‘Hey. Sally yells at the network head she returns home, in tears, to her apartment, where Barry is waiting with (literally) open arms. The rest of the episode proceeds like a train-wreck. Why? “The algorithm felt it wasn’t hitting the right taste clusters.” Like so many showrunners before her, the great Sally Reed has fallen victim to the computer overlords. At the BanShe headquarters, Sally and her team learn Joplin has been canceled without warning, less than 12 hours after its debut.
After Sally and Natalie go out to a coffee shop the morning after Joplin’s premiere, Natalie’s mystified: “Why the fuck is nobody noticing you?” Sally tries to brush it off-“If anything, I should be enjoying my anonymity while it lasts”-but Natalie’s already on the homepage of BanShe, Barry’s Netflix-adjacent streaming service, where Joplin is nowhere to be found. Still, episode 5, which aired last night, refuses to let the high last. Episode 4 ends with her leaving Barry behind with his head hunched forward, like someone just socked in the stomach. Not only does she recognize he’s dangerous, but Sally no longer needs Barry she knows now, finally, that she’s a star. “She’s suddenly thrown into a very business-oriented world, and she’s become completely detached from the original experience.”īy the end of episode 4, it seems Sally has finally begun to eclipse her worst qualities: She might still be forcing her friend and assistant, Natalie (D’Arcy Carden), to ride in a separate vehicle to their premiere, but at least she’s self-aware enough to break up with Barry, whose PTSD and anger have increasingly materialized as violent outbursts in their relationship.
“This is where trauma and her art are being married with commerce,” Goldberg says. Although Barry is a comedy, there’s a reason why so many of its laughs feel more like winces. Turns out, the critics like the pretty package in which she's boxed her tragedy. In the long-anticipated third season, Sally is finally churning her trauma as a domestic abuse survivor into a Hollywood cash cow she’s producing, writing, and starring in a show named after her hometown of Joplin, Missouri, all about a mother who coaches her young daughter out of a violent relationship.Īt Joplin’s premiere, Sally learns the show has earned a 98 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. As played by Canadian actress Sarah Goldberg, Sally is sweetly narcissistic, likable for an unlikable type, so self-involved that she never notices her cheerleader boyfriend-Bill Hader’s Barry-is a sociopathic hit-man addicted to his own trigger finger. It’s fitting, in the sick tragicomedy of Barry, that Sally Reed’s triumph should look so much like a meltdown.