Is Barry Season 2, Episode 5 (“Ronnie/Lily”) really the best episode of television since 2010? I don’t know. But it’s in the conversation. I resisted discussing the episode until now because I figured only a small percentage of you watched Barry and to best appreciate the episode, you needed to watch the first 8 episodes of Season 1, and the four preceding episodes of Season 2. Did I really expect all of you to do that? No. But then I realized Ronnie/Lily is basically a standalone episode. As long as you understand Barry’s character and past, you can enjoy it.
Barry is a former hitman who’s moved to LA and joined an acting class. The problem is, he keeps getting pulled back in to do jobs, despite the fact that he desperately hates killing people. Due to a string of circumstances, Barry is “hired” to kill a guy who’s sleeping with another man’s wife. But Barry’s got a plan. He’s going to show up at the man’s house, he’s going to explain the situation, and he’s going to help the guy disappear so that they both get what they want. As Barry is helping the man pack, they walk into a giant trophy room. It turns out this guy is a freaking Taekwondo master. Barry’s a little freaked out by this, but they continue to pack. Then, just when Barry lets his guard down, the guy attacks. A long drag-down fight ensues.
It’s best if you actually watch the episode. But if you don’t have time, here’s what happens. Barry somehow manages to defeat the guy, who dies. But as Barry’s leaving, the front door opens and an 11 year old girl in a karate outfit appears. The two freeze, both look at each other, and the girl darts past Barry. Barry heads to the door, opens it, is about to leave, stops, closes the door. Oh no! We know that Barry now has to kill the daughter as well! So Barry goes searching through the house to find the girl when… she appears out of nowhere and attacks him. The girl is like a feral Taekwondo monster. She’s relentless, diving and scraping and biting and growling as she attacks Barry from every angle. Barry does everything he can to stay alive before the girl darts out the window and disappears into the neighborhood.
Barry goes back to his handler, Fuches, who’s waiting in the car. Fuches asks if he took care of business. Barry tells him about the girl. Fuches says, “Well she’s seen you. We gotta kill her.” The two go driving through the neighborhood until they come across her again. But instead of attacking her, she attacks them! The girl’s moves are almost inhuman and the guys don’t understand what they’re dealing with. That’s the gist of the episode and I won’t ruin the ending. But let’s just say it continues to unfold in an unexpected entertaining way.
If that sounds too bizarre to be good, I promise you this. They make it work. You can complain all you want in the comments about, “WHAT??? A LITTLE GIRL ATTACKS A GROWN MAN AND SHE LIVES???” or whatever other complaint you have based on my synopsis. It’s pointless. The only way to understand the genius of this episode is to watch it. Cause they take a lot of things that shouldn’t have worked and they not only make them work, they combine the ingredients into an all-time classic meal. You gotta understand how hard that is. The show that precedes this one HAS DRAGONS in it. It has zombie monsters. It has production value that rivals most 1960s war epics. Barry has people. That’s it! It reminds me how powerful a single writer with a few characters and a room can be. With that in mind, here are 7 screenwriting lessons to learn from Barry, Season 2, Episode 5.
1) Chase down weird unexpected ideas – The only reason this episode exists is because the stunt coordinator on Barry told Bill Hader (the co-creator and actor who plays Barry) after a long day that he knew of this young girl who was a karate master and if Bill ever had a story idea that included a young karate girl, he thought this girl was talented and would kill it. Hader says he then wrote down the idea of Barry getting into a fight with this girl. Later, when they were writing Season 2, he decided to make that the centerpiece of an episode. What’s important to note here is that Bill didn’t just come up with this idea. A person suggested it to him, which got him wondering if a character like that would work on Barry. This makes me wonder how many great ideas I’ve missed over the years because a random person didn’t come up to me and drop a bizarre idea. So my tip here is, instead of waiting for this to happen to you, be the person who suggests weird ideas yourself. At the beginning of the day’s writing session, suggest five weird ides to yourself and chase those ideas down to see if anything interesting comes of them. They very well may yield nothing. But if there’s a chance that one of them will lead to a creative explosion and something even half as good as Ronnie/Lily, it’s worth a try.
2) Look for components in a scene that you can play against type – When you imagine a scenario where a hitman comes into a guy’s house and tells him he’s here to kill him, you’re thinking the house owner is probably freaking out. He’s probably talking a mile a minute. He’s nervous and scared and jumpy. That’s how most writers would write this scene. The father character in this scene is the complete opposite. He has no reaction whatsoever. He’s as calm as calm can be. Playing this character against type creates a slow unnerving subtext to the scene. Because he’s being so non-reactive, we know something is up with him.
3) What’s the worst thing you can do your character in this moment? – This is the question Bill Hader asked when Barry showed up at this guy’s house. He thought, “What if, as they’re packing, they walk into a room, and it’s filled with Taekwondo trophies?” It’s a brilliant moment as it completely shifts the dynamics of the scene. A second ago this was just a guy. Now he’s a man capable of killing you with his hands. Always ask what the worst thing is you can do to your character in this moment. You won’t always use it. But it’s a quick way to find a great scene.
4) Once you open a line of suspense, let it ride – Remember that with suspense, you can add an insane amount of tension to a scene even during periods where little is going on. Too often I see writers create a suspenseful situation then ruin it by immediately jumping to the action. Here, when they walk in the Taekwondo room, Bill Hader has opened a captivating line of suspense. This is not an ordinary man. He’s a dangerous adversary. But Hader doesn’t jump the gun. He allows the man to slowly pack, to slowly walk back into the other room, and to continue packing. This is one of the most powerful sections of the episode even though, technically, nothing is happening. Let those lines of suspense ride!
5) Ground your episode with an emotional anchor – When co-creator Alec Berg read Bill Hader’s script for Ronnie/Lily, he had one note. Ground it in emotion so it’s not just this big wacky fight episode. In the show, Barry has a complicated relationship with his handler, Fuches. The man saved him when he was at his worst, but then turned him into a contract killer, a life Barry’s trying to leave. Hader decided to give us a little more on their relationship, so there are a series of flashbacks (never too long) of Fuches rescuing Barry from his tour in Iraq, and he ties those in with the present scenes of Fuches helping Barry find this girl. It’s a surprisingly emotional payoff, and a huge shift in their relationship going forward.
6) Don’t always start the scene on the obvious character – In Hader’s first draft of the episode, we follow Barry into the house all the way until he confronts the father. One of the writers suggested that this was boring. Instead, start by following the father instead. It was a game-changing choice because it resulted in us watching this random guy drive up to this random house, go inside, put his stuff away, and the whole time we’re thinking, “Who is this guy???” It totally changed the dynamic of the scene, where only later does Barry come in. Even then, we don’t see Barry. We only hear him off-screen. Nothing about this episode plays out the way traditional TV does. The DP even challenged Hader on this moment. “Why are we only hearing Barry? It doesn’t make sense.” “I don’t know, it just feels right,” Hader answered. And he was dead right. Way more interesting.
7) Add complications to fight scenes so they’re not like every other fight scene we’ve seen – One of the conscious choices Bill Hader and Alec Berg made early on about the Taekwondo dad fight was that it was going to be realistic. It wasn’t going to be perfectly choreographed. It was going to be messy to look at and the guys were going to be tired. They’d take breaks. More specifically, Barry gets an early hit on the guy’s windpipe, damaging it to the point where the guy is barely able to breathe. That wheezing breath becomes a centerpiece of the fight, helping to differentiate it from all the other onscreen fights we’ve seen. It was like the anti-John Wick and extremely refreshing.
Ronnie/Lili represents the power of “What if?” Pose that single question to yourself while you’re writing. It can be the dumbest “What if…” question in the world. But you’d be surprised at how often terrible ideas turn into great ones. “What if Barry was attacked by an 11 year old female Taekwondo master?” isn’t a scene you’d imagine in a show like Barry. Which is exactly why it’s become the most buzzed-about TV episode of the year. At least in a show without dragons. :)
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