The Rundown: Welcome To NoHo Hank Season

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

It got a little lost in the Succession-related hoopla this week, but Barry is back for its final season, too. Two episodes premiered on Sunday night, right after Succession, which helps to explain how it got a little lost. There’s really just a lot happening on Sunday nights on HBO right now. It’s a good problem to have. But it’s still a problem. I wanted to talk about Barry a lot this week but the discussion was dominated by the Roy family and their various issues. Luckily, I have this column and place to talk about NoHo Hank, who remains one of the best characters on television. So here we go.

Quick backstory, for those unaware: NoHo Hank is a Chechen mobster in California who is buddies with Bill Hader’s character, Barry, who is a hitman that tried to go clean by becoming an actor but is now in prison for one of the many murders he committed. Hank also just recently started living as a proud and out gay man and began dating a high-ranking member of the Bolivian mob named Cristobal. It’s really a delight on a number of levels. He’s a wonderful man who sometimes shows up on screen looking like this.

I do not have a single note to add to anything here, other than to thank Bill Hader and Anthony Carrigan (the actor who plays Hank) for making it all possible.

The best part is that Carrigan is starting to really get recognized for it all. He did a big fancy sit-down interview with the New York Times before the season started where he compared the character to a friendly scorpion, which I have not been able to unsee since I read it. You probably won’t be able to unsee it either. Because I’m going to paste that section riiiiiight now.

NoHo Hank, intended as a minor antagonist, is a member of a Chechen mob. Carrigan had little interest in playing another villain. But the script’s violent comedy delighted him. He went back to the formal exercises of his college days. How should Hank move What animal would he be A scorpion, he decided, which explains the puffed-out chest, the hands on hips, the scuttling walk.

“He’s a lovable scorpion,” Carrigan explained at the oyster counter. “He doesn’t want to sting anyone, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But that’s just his nature.”

Two things are worth noting here:

Carrigan did another big profile over at Inverse, too, which was also a hoot to read in many ways — I interviewed him a few years ago and it always makes me happy when people I identified as being cool and fun blow up a little like that — but also very troubling. I am on the record as saying that I will hunt down Bill Hader and yell at him if anything happens to Hank this season. I know he’s a mobster and a killer and bad things usually happen to those kinds of people at some point. But… I adore him. I am not conflicted about this at all. I feel fine about it, actually.

Which is why this part is… yeah, troubling.

Organized crime aside (and with the finale in sight), does NoHo Hank deserve a happy ending Carrigan seems unsure.

“I love Hank so much and I want everything for him. I have such a soft spot for this character,” he says. “But there’s something interesting about the progression over the seasons. Hank has slowly started to realize that his naivete and his foolishness have gotten him into major trouble. You can’t go into a life of crime lightly, and some of the consequences do show up for him.”

No.

NO.

LEAVE HIM ALONE.

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone all-caps on you there. I just get a little excited. It’s hard not to, especially given the stuff that happened in the second episode of the season. I’ll dance around spoilers but the short version goes like this: Hank and Cristobal are making a big presentation to other mobsters in a private room in a Dave & Buster’s. (Already perfect.) And they’re doing this thing in a long single shot where they circle the table in opposite directions and pick up each other’s part of the speech as they cross paths. But Hank gets out of place as Cristobal is talking and needs to rush to be ready and then, well, this happens.

A perfect bit. A legitimate out-loud laugh in an episode that was otherwise pretty dark. NoHo Hank is a damn oasis. I am going to miss him — the show, too, but definitely him — when this all ends for good in a few months. But I am going to appreciate the hell out of it all while it’s happening.

Welcome to NoHo Hank season.

I love you all very much but you are out of your mind if you think I am going to discuss Twitter on this or any other website, including Twitter. I use the stupid site every day, too much, but even I have enough shame to not go running around tweeting about Twitter whenever something silly happens. I do not have time for that. That’s a lie. I have plenty of time for that. I am barely doing anything most of the time. The other day I realized that I had just been, like, staring at one of my houseplants for a solid 90 seconds. If that does not sound like a long time to you, set a 90-second timer and go stare at one of your houseplants until the timer dings. You’ll see my point around the 44-second mark.

Anyway, ugggggghhhh, I do have to talk about it briefly to set up something cool. So… here we go: Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been claiming he was going to take away the little blue check marks from verified users unless they signed up for the paid service. You probably heard about this. He finally did it — or figured out how to do it — this Thursday, on 4/20 (weed day, epic, etc.). It’s all very stupid. But something fun did come out of it. On Wednesday, the day before it happened, Halle Berry tweeted this.