Sally Reed Is ‘Unraveling’ In Barry Season 3. But Sarah Goldberg's In Control.

 t’s fitting, in the sick tragicomedy of Barry, that Sally Reed’s triumph should look so much like a meltdown. 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. 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.

At Joplin’s premiere, Sally learns the show has earned a 98 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Turns out, the critics like the pretty package in which she's boxed her tragedy. Although Barry is a comedy, there’s a reason why so many of its laughs feel more like winces. “This is where [Sally’s] trauma and her art are being married with commerce,” Goldberg says. “She’s suddenly thrown into a very business-oriented world, and she’s become completely detached from the original experience.”

 

By 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. Not only does she recognize he’s dangerous, but Sally no longer needs Barry; she knows now, finally, that she’s a star. Episode 4 ends with her leaving Barry behind with his head hunched forward, like someone just socked in the stomach.

Still, episode 5, which aired last night, refuses to let the high last. 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. At the BanShe headquarters, Sally and her team learn Joplin has been canceled without warning, less than 12 hours after its debut. 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. Another laugh. Another wince.

 

The rest of the episode proceeds like a train-wreck. Sally yells at the network head; she returns home, in tears, to her apartment, where Barry is waiting with (literally) open arms. 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. Not cool what you did to Sally, you know?’ I would just do little things, like replace her dog with a slightly different dog or, you know, change the furniture in her house so she thinks she’s shrinking.”

Soaked in tears, Sally’s face warps into something both perplexed and disgusted. It’s as if she’s seeing Barry for the first time, and she can’t comprehend why it took so long to see him this way. “Barry? I need you to get away from me,” she says. Finally chastened, he leaves.

After he’s gone, she once again begins to sob. It looks a lot like a disaster—and, in some senses it is—but it’s also a sign Sally Reed isn’t quite who she once was. This version of Sally might actually become a star, if she doesn’t lose herself in the struggle to get there. Below, Goldberg discusses the making of Sally’s season 3 arc—and why the character is on the precipice of a dangerous choice.