There has never been a portrait of trauma quite like Barry‘s Sally Reed
The HBO show's fourth and final season is fantastic for a lot of reasons, not least of which is Sarah Goldberg's devastating turn as Sally
TV Features Barry
Gene Cousineau: “Little Sally Reed from Joplin, Missouri. What do you want?”
Sally Reed: “To be an actress … it’s all I ever wanted in the whole world.”
This quick exchange introduces Barry’s audience to Sally (Sarah Goldberg) in the series premiere. Her passionate, teary plea rings normally at first glance; she’s a small-town girl with wide-eyed Hollywood dreams. Aw, shucks. Over four seasons, HBO’s grim comedy ingeniously peels back layers to unveil Sally’s discombobulating, deeply human personality. Her unlikable traits—selfish, gravely insecure, a knack for walking over people (including seemingly naive aspiring actor Barry Block)—remain intact as the show nears its end.
By now, though, we know these qualities stem from a marred past: a rotten home life, previous spousal abuse, and a gnawing lack of confidence she desperately wants to cover up. Barry rarely excuses her entitled behavior but slowly sheds light on how her illusory front is a coping mechanism. No wonder she makes the short-lived Joplin as an outlet to process her tragedies. What’s worse? She barely gets time to exist in the world she creates after working hard to achieve it. As it turns out, Sally is the ultimate portrait of trauma in Bill Hader and Alec Berg’s stellar series, which wraps on May 28.
Sally Reed was probably never going to have a happy ending. It’s not because she prioritizes her lofty career ambitions, pushing away anything that gets in the way. Goldberg plays Sally’s goals with such enthusiasm it usually borders on mania, even when she’s sympathetic. It’s a shame she hasn’t won an Emmy for her wrenching yet funny performance. Remember her season two monologue when Barry (Hader) auditions for Jay Roach? Or her season three “entitled fucking cunt” breakdown in the elevator that Natalie (D’Arcy Carden) shares with the world, leading to her downfall? But the professional blinders Sally’s had on for most of Barry’s run is what limits her in the end.
As if her traumatic history wasn’t enough, her entanglement with Barry Berkman worsens everything. He breezes into her life one fine day, drawn into her safe space, when he catches her rehearsing outside Gene’s (Henry Winkler) studio while on a mission. Barry finds solace in it, attracted to the idea of shedding his skin to inhabit somebody who doesn’t have PTSD or a laundry list of crimes. It’s enough to get him hoping for a fresh start. That’s also what Sally hoped for when she moved to Los Angeles after finally leaving her abusive husband, Sam (Joe Massingill).
Season four delves into why Sally deserved to leave her Joplin jail. Sam isn’t the only reason. Her mother is dismissive, flat-out refusing to believe her ex abused Sally, nor does she care that her daughter’s boyfriend is arrested for murder in L.A. “Big whoop” isn’t exactly the expected maternal reaction, and her nice-guy father doesn’t have anything valuable to add, either. It’s clear from the final season’s early episodes that Sally doesn’t have anyone—anyone except for an imprisoned Barry. Her admittance to him in this season’s “bestest place on earth,” that she feels safest with him, is a devastating reality check.
Hader and Goldberg, sitting feet away, separated by a glass barrier, deliver a potent performance in a scene that sells their toxic attachment. She can write all the one-act plays and TV shows she wants, but Barry’s grievously absorbed her identity just when you (and everyone around her) thought she was free of it. Their confrontation in jail is a turning point for the show’s final installments. Her shaky confession sets Barry’s brain aflame. He teams up with the FBI, makes an enemy out of NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), and escapes prison during a shootout. Ultimately, it launches a new life for the duo in the middle of a barren landscape where they don new identities and shed their skins. Just like the dream, huh?
Barry’s final season jumps eight years ahead with a full picture in episode five, “tricky legacies.” It glimpses into the dreary monotony of Barry and Sally, who go by Clark and Emily now. They shield their child from the real world. It doesn’t mean Sally’s not seething under Emily’s mask. Her pain follows her because she chose to give up the one thing that mattered: her acting dream. Having experienced a shitty upbringing, she passes along the intergenerational trauma to John by parenting similarly to her mom—indifferent, indignant, and inebriated. She doesn’t know where to start nurturing.
It’s not like Barry’s childhood was a prize, so neither of them is good at this, but Sally is on a whole other level. She drops alcohol in his juice to put him to sleep, serves up burnt lunches, and generally wrestles with how to love this human being she gave birth to. In Sally’s expressions, Goldberg displays a tangible aversion to motherhood, a full-bodied disdain for the life they’re responsible for creating. So yes, in a twisted way, she’s a copy of her parent now. It’s a full circle.
Everyone on Barry is haunted by their actions, especially with the time jump, so Sally isn’t an exception, of course. Barry wreaked absolute havoc. Gene lost Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), ruined his legacy, and now reappears to chase fame again. As seen in episode six, “the wizard,” Hank has grown a successful business, but had to kill the love of his life to do it. Fuches’ (Stephen Root) friendship with Barry turns sour as he morphs into the Raven. Yet, Sally’s regression is agonizing because she was a lick away from gaining everything she wanted. Instead, she ponders torturing her network boss, kills a man in self-defense, and runs back home, only for everything to crumble again. All this while witnessing Oscar winner Sian Heder work with her mentee, Kristen (Ellyn Jameson), and watching Natalie soar.
Now, she’s drunk and being tortured (note Hader’s prolific direction in “the wizard”) as a man in a ski mask figure shakes up their trailer home. She’s permanently haunted. Janice’s father has captured her partner, and all she can do is call him repeatedly, begging him to come back. With two episodes of Barry remaining, Sally is left alone in her cage to care for John. Does she head back to her hometown to complete the cycle? Or will she return to the city of dreams to find Barry and maybe accomplish the only thing she wants to be in this world? Either way, Sally might not realize it, but she’s already played the role of a lifetime now. It’s wish fulfillment in the worst and most tragic possible way.
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“Gene lost Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), ruined his legacy, and now reappears to chase fame again.” [emphasis added]Gene reappears to shut down the movie, allegedly. YMMV, but I took that as genuine.
Yeah, as of yet, nothing indicates that Gene is chasing fame.
Oooh trauma…yummy yum yum
Her admittance to him in this season’s “bestest place on earth,” that she feels safest with him, is a devastating reality check.
Admission is the word you want
“It’s a full circle.”
No, it’s not full circle unless it started out with Sally being an abusive parent. THAT is what full circle means.
Gene Cousineou: “Little Sally Reed from Joplin, Missouri. What do you want?”
*Cousineau
Now, she’s drunk and being tortured (note Hader’s prolific direction in “the wizard”)“prolific”?
as a man in a ski mask scepter shakes up their trailer home“scepter”?
I am guessing the intent was “spectre,’ but the lack of proofreading is embarrassing
I had assumed that by “prolific” they just meant “there’s a lot of directing in this episode”. Which doesn’t make too much sense, but makes more sense than anything else I could think of.
It was a wicked scepter.
Oddly, it’s been amended to “a man in a ski mask figure,” which… nope, that doesn’t work either.
I also wondered what prolific direction meant. It didn’t seem over-directed to me, if that’s what the author was going for. But I can’t think of what word was intended to be there to complete the thought. Prodigious, maybe?
‘Prodigious’ is almost certainly what she meant. The author’s an Indian from India, like me, and our imperfect English education often causes us to use words we vaguely remember from books, without bothering to look them up in a dictionary first. The aim is to come across as smart and well-read, but more often than not, the result is a malapropism.
That’s an interesting perspective. I hadn’t known Ms. Gajjar’s background, and for what it’s worth, as a native English speaker I don’t see much evidence of her Indian-English education in her writing. If the worst she’s got going on is the odd malapropism, then that’s not too bad. It’s really the sort of thing that, if this site employed editors anymore, would get caught and smoothed out in the editing process. Heck, I’m a native English speaker with a PhD and sometimes I read my drafts and wonder WTF I thought I was doing using a particular word. Happens to the best of us.
I’m glad it doesn’t bother you. It does me, but my occupation as a copyeditor probably has a great deal to do with it. I found multiple instances in this article that seemed ‘off’:‘rings normally’‘Her unlikable traits’ instead of ‘Traits that make her unlikable’‘a marred past’‘makes the short-lived Joplin as an outlet’‘the professional blinders Sally’s had on for most of Barry’s run is’‘Her admittance’‘She drops alcohol in his juice’‘a man in a ski mask figure’I agree with you that a professional editor would’ve spotted and immediately fixed these problems, but I still wouldn’t excuse the author. Even while chasing a deadline, I was trained to go through a paper I was editing three times. Surely one thorough self-proofread wouldn’t have gone amiss here.
I noted most of those things, too (former editor turned lit/writing prof here). They didn’t stand out to me, however, as errors resulting from an ESL writer. They just seemed like clunky writing, and with the way that these recaps roll out, some of that is to be expected. If I recall correctly, I read somewhere that HBO hasn’t been giving reviewers early access to episodes of Barry and Succession. I could be wrong on that. If that’s the case, however, then these reviewers are scrambling to watch the show, compose the recap late at night, then push it out for readers. I assume the deadlines for these is always “five minutes ago,” as it was when I was turning around copy on the wire desk late at night. That leads to a lot of instances where expediency trumps artistry. Sure, if you take another 15 minutes, you might get a few more polished sentences, but you might also catch hell from your admins about why your recap got posted so late. That’s at least one reason I can see for this recap having some sloppiness. I was probably as stringent as you are back when I was editing. Teaching has softened me because the endgame is different. What I was editing, the correctness of the copy was all that mattered. As a teacher, I have to be much more focused on higher-order concerns, like logic and argument and organization, with my student writers. Now, if the meaning is clear and the argument is solid, I care much, much less about grammatical and stylistic issues. I have to take the “big picture” approach out of necessity. There are only so many weeks in a semester!
Don’t bother. I’ve read other articles by this author. She’s an Indian from India like me, and her writing style is obviously Indian (filled with malapropisms and awkward syntax) with just enough of a US English patina to hopefully avoid weirding out American readers to much. It clearly doesn’t work. I couldn’t get through this article without cringing.
I noticed on ep 4 of season 4, Sally is using an Apple laptop and Barry is using something else. Apple has it written in their product licensing bylaws that only good guys can use Apple products. Sally will be redeemed.
and her nice-guy father doesn’t have anything valuable to add, either.
Fuck nice guy dads, amirite?
I don’t get why this is an example of Sally’s upbringing being so terrible. The whole contention with her parents has been one of the things I haven’t fully understood. So her mom is judgemental. That’s a lot of moms. So her dad doesn’t have a clue. That’s a lot of dads. They more or less seem normal to me. So statements like “she passes along the intergenerational trauma to John by parenting similarly to her mom—indifferent, indignant, and inebriated,” are strange, because what we saw of her mom, and how Sally is parenting now (spiking a child’s drink) don’t seem at all the same.
I think her mom goes past that though when she calls Sally to say she shouldn’t have told the abuse story because now she has to see them Sally’s abuser and his family at church and it’s weird. She pretty much diminishes some pretty horrific sounding abuse and seems to deny it even happened. She also kinda blames Sally for all the shit going wrong in her life in that episode when Sally returns home. I would definitely put her past judgmental into almost spiteful/hateful territory. And I think the assumption here is that she probably has always been like that.And while the dad isn’t bad by his own merits, he is apathetic and doesn’t do anything to support Sally or counter the Mom being real shitty. He just kinda throws his hands up and says oh well thats your mom
This. Seeing just 5 minutes of her home life explained so much about Sally.
would definitely put her past judgmental into almost spiteful/hateful territoryHoly cr*p, yes. IIRC Mom teeters between “Revealing your abuse has been tragically socially-inconvenient for me’ and ‘Shut up about that, already; even if it did happen, nobody cares.’, a negation of Sally’s humanity and worth in one fell swoop. It’s a devastating betrayal by the LAST person who should abandon Sally.
Anyone confused should reconsider her mom’s behaviour in the context of
“Sally revealed her experience trying to survive stage 4 cancer” instead of
“Sally shared what she’d been surviving within an abusive relationship’. Sally’s fear and pain doesn’t matter to her mom who would not lift a finger to support nor protect her (did her father even register the horror when she told what little she could, or did he just vapidly nod and look to his harpy wife for guidance as to how-blank-to-be in response?).And Mom seems devoid of any normal visceral reaction to the sounds of a human being in extremis (when Sally panics in the car).
One wonders how she responded to a fussy baby.
It’s possible she has emotionally-abused the husband into submissive pleasantness over decades.
Her mom may be stunted by issues in her own past, but doesn’t appear to be the way this one is written/directed.
But one could reasonably wonder if the shorthand shock of experiencing a sudden, bruising manhandling, or staggering to catch her balance and breath amidst swift, serial collisions with furniture or the floor or a few walls, or one stunning slap that stings for hours after momentarily numbing her whole face, would crack the composure of such a stone-faced, casual witholder of love/concern for her own child.
Maybe direct experience would only make it more about her.
Petty much yes to all this!
I dunno, not believing your kid when they tell you their ex-husband abused them and then getting upset with them for making art about it seems pretty shitty to me
Let’s get real. She was very talented but grasping— completely shit on opportunities people would kill for— while also sacrificing relationships and general decency to get those opportunities— then verbally abuses both people trying to help her and someone who (while oblivious) did somewhat understand how to play the game— she runs of with a murderer instead of trying to rebuild her career— and is now pretty much an all-around terrible mother and generally a terrible person, if that was not clear. Of course the character is played remarkably well and we can understand the pressures and tragedies that led her to this point. That doesn’t make her some kind of feminist icon. Maybe I’m not understanding the point of this article. A withholding mother and dumb dad don’t excuse her. Neither does her previous abusive relationship though it makes us empathize with her and why she tolerates Barry’s abusive. But… I don’t know. I’m not sure why I’m writing this. I’ve just soured on the whole series by the now.
She appeared to be extremely competent on writing/producing/starring in her own show, which was widely praised. It’s just that the show isn’t suited to the instant-feedback format of the streaming service it’s on. She’s also shown as competent as a writer on the other show she gets hired onto, before she blows it with the elevator meltdown. Even after that, as an acting coach for that one actress, the director remarks how good her “demonstration” on how to act out a scene was, with the agent correctly seeing it as Sally vying for the role herself, and suggesting he could get her roles after some refurbishment of her image. Also, the show isn’t putting her up as a “feminist icon,” i.e. someone to aspire to be. She clearly has severe issues, and nobody should want to be her. But the “feminist” aspect of it is that the show allows her character to be complicated, and unmitigatedly awful in parts. A lesser show, or shows from a different era, would’ve made her little more than an innocent for Barry to strive for and woo and protect, a prize for Barry to win.
She wanted to be an actress so badly and now she has to act 24/7 or suffer dire consequences. It’s like an episode of Twilight Zone.
I don’t think an AI would ever use “admittance” where the correct word is “admission”, so we’re good here for now.
Ha, another mistake only an Indian writer from India would make. This author’s writing is awful, but the AV Club’s refusal to proofread her work is unforgivable.
She’s been a vapid narcissist for the run of the series and now you’re framing her as a victim?
I feel like the abusive ex-husband and the being nearly murdered by a crazed biker do put her firmly in the “victim” category, but hey, maybe that’s just me.
Not to mention the ways Barry has manipulated and exploited her. He may not have set out to destroy her life, but regardless that’s been the outcome. He’s destroyed her.
I originally thought Sally was just annoying, but it turns out that she’s probably the most relatable character on a show with fewer and fewer relatable characters. I’m obsessed with her transformation into “Emily,” her pain and rage and depression. She’s everything Barry can’t be because, as awful as she sometimes is, she actually has glimmers of self-awareness. Not a lot, just enough to drive her to drink.And Sarah Goldberg definitely deserves awards for her performance. She seems so nice in interviews, but on screen she can go from gratingly sweet to annoyingly manipulative to absolutely deranged. That can’t be easy.
It’s a real shame that she’s likely going to be up against Sarah Snook from Succession for so many awards this year. Both women have been fantastic in their roles. I’m not sure there are two actresses working right now who are better at changing their performance without seeming to move a muscle. They’re both astounding.
No way shes gonna beat Snook.
I don’t think you can pin Sally’s atrocious parenting on her kind-of-crappy mom. We didn’t get any signs that she was an alcoholic during her brief visit home, even if her mom is pretty shitty in never having believed her daughter about her domestic abuse. I don’t even think the kid is hers. She seems absolutely disgusted by him, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch. She recoils from his touch, barely feeds him (I worked really fucking hard on that, she drunkenly mutters under her breath in a kitchen filled with smoke) and he sleeps cold at night. At least Barry’s trying for a simulacrum of love, fucking up the kid in a myriad of ways in doing so, but Sally just cannot be bothered, and I’m genuinely worried something worse might happen to John by her hand than spiking his juice, which is already pretty horrific. I guess we’ll have to wait till next week to see the aftermath of the mesmerizing, terrifying home invasion sequence. Was the man in black actually there? Does the house actually get rammed by a truck? All of that seemed very flighty to me, but as John woke up in a house thrown apart, something must have actually happened.