The drug dealer from "Outer Banks" is the most North Carolina character on TV right now
Plus, other over-the-top thoughts about the third season of the greatest show in Netflix.
Outer Banks Season 3 came out on Netflix in February. My wife and I, adults with full-time jobs and children, finally got around to finishing it over the weekend. We had a long drive back from Wilmington, and that gave us some some time to stew over the latest episodes. I still consider Outer Banks to be the greatest comfort food-style of show on television, even if it did try to make us believe you could get to Chapel Hill by ferry. A note here: There are a lot of spoilers below, so come back to this one if you haven’t seen it yet.
The Realest North Carolinian in Outer Banks is Barry the Drug Dealer
Here’s a fun thing I’ve observed about Outer Banks: Over three seasons, nobody actually grows as a human being. Sarah Cameron does, a little, but she was already spiritually more Pogue than Kook and hadn’t really had the chance to display it. Ward tried to turn from heel to babyface in Season 3, but gets back on his Ward Cameron Bullshit, which involves threatening violence against teenagers and stealing their gold. He barely redeems himself at the end by becoming Swiss cheese to save his daughter from a nameless Australian assassin guy. J.J. is a terrible planner. Always has been. Kiara (who’s from Kernersville in real life!) and Pope continue to struggle with the expectations of their parents. John B. is still a slightly flawed good guy, which makes him Pretty Boring (a term I just invented for a character who is very pretty and also is not as interesting as the supporting cast). Everything Rafe says is a version of “I killed this person to make you like me, dad!” Topper (excellent name to go with an actor who was cast with a perfectly punchable face. This is an asset, not a liability) provides comic relief for a bit during the whole train robbery thing, and seems to have turned a corner. And yet later in the season, he reverts back to an Kook thing, which is BURNING JOHN B’S HOUSE DOWN WITHOUT FACING ANY SORT OF CONSEQUENCE. In the final scene, he’s sitting in the audience, looking on like a petulant child.
This belies the most realistic thing about the entire show, which is that the universe is fairly static in the short term and that people only change gradually, if at all. Plus, the regular townspeople of Kildare Island are way too chill. I mean, John B’s dad COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD and everybody’s like, ah, good to see you Big John, keep on keepin’ on. The Pogues quickly go from being stranded on an island to being harassed by the local Kildare County sheriff. Major news events barely cause a ripple! In real life, those kids would be on the damn Today Show and one of them would have ended up on Dancing With The Stars and the rest of them would probably have received new cars from the local dealership or something. And yet, no, they end up doing things like crashing parties and running drugs to Elizabeth City in a U-Haul. It’s amazing how the most well-known people in the Outer Banks are able to fade into obscurity. Not one person in the entire show yells out “Hey John B., I saw you on the news!” Not one.
All that being said, the best and most authentically North Carolina character in Outer Banks by a mile is Barry, the drug dealer. I mean, get a load of how this dude shows up to a party at Rafe’s plantation estate.
Everybody at this party is drinking Pappy Van Winkle and my dude rolls in wearing a DAMN TYLER HANSBROUGH JERSEY. Do you know how many people there are like this? A lot. You, at some point in your time here in this wonderful state, have seen this person. You may have taken an indirect route back to your car when seeing this person, but you have seen this person.
Barry is not dumb. Barry’s above-board job is at a pawn shop, let’s not forget. This dude has heard every single excuse that it’s possible for people to make, and he does not believe a single word of your bullshit. He addresses Rafe, a comically rich and stupid character, almost exclusively as “Country Club,” and makes golf-y jokes at him (“Was you late to a tee time?” he says at one point). Rafe should hate this, and yet he puts up with it, because Barry has cocaine.
Barry exists only to do crimes, and he is very good at it. Rafe gives him a bunch of money to murder his father, and Barry is smart enough to subcontract that shit out. This man would set up an LLC if it allowed him to do more crimes. I swear to you, I have met old school moonshiners who fit this profile. They show up wearing comically out-of-place overalls at places like, say, a state trooper’s retirement party.
Barry is good with his money. He is a businessman. He’s better than Ward, because Ward is only able to be deviously evil because he can just throw a bunch of money at people to solve his problems. Let’s not forget that a man who walks with a cane because he was very recently stabbed in the leg is able to make it deep into the South American jungle. John B. and Sarah could barely make this hike, and yet Ward just shows up at the end! With no warning! This man 100% hired locals to give him a piggyback ride to El Dorado, and paid them a little more to hide behind trees to create the illusion that he limped his way down miles worth of trail.
Barry? Barry would never in a million years go into the damn jungle. He’d wait until you got off the plane stateside, and then get some 1099 contractors to steal the gold on the trip from the tarmac to the vault.
In real life, Barry is played by an actor named Nick Cirillo, who was born in Wilkesboro. He gave a podcast interview where me mentioned that his mom approved of his performance. “Good job, even though you play a low-end dirtbag,” she told him. His method? “I did what any good actor does,” he said, jokingly. “I spent four months on the Outer Banks selling crack.” Actually, Barry is a mashup of people he’s met in North Carolina, along with other dramatic and fictional bad guys. He’d auditioned for other parts in Outer Banks, but none of them fit, so the producers cast him as Barry instead. That’s right. You don’t choose the Barry life. The Barry life chooses you.
And look, I know that actors aren’t the people they play, and you shouldn’t try to anthropomorphize their roles into their real lives. And yet, I would just like you to know that this video exists on Nick Cirillo’s Instagram:
The show is actually more spiritually Wilmington than Outer Banks
I’m sort of over the whole “That doesn’t even look like the real Outer Banks!” aspect of the show. It’s shot in Charleston, and it’s always going to have Lowcountry vibes to it. However! This season really proved that Outer Banks is actually a Wilmington show. May I point you toward J.J.’s choices in clothing:
Wilmington Marine Construction is a real company, and yes, they’re selling merch now. So is the South End Surf Shop in Wrightsville Beach.
In another scene, J.J. is wearing a Salter Speed Shop t-shirt, a motorcycle repair business that I just passed last week on the way to Carolina Beach.
J.J. is maybe the most lived-in character in the show, because of course he’d wear a free t-shirt that he got that time when he worked construction for a week before calling his boss an asshole.
John B? Perfectly Boring John B. shows up in Season 3 wearing a Kildare Island Surfboard Co. trucker hat. It’s a fake surf shop. Again, I am rooting for John B. He is very obviously the good guy. The hat fits him perfectly. His character is too good to be true.
I get it. The show’s creators, Jonas and Josh Pate, are from Wilmington, which is this state’s film and television production hub. They make reference to Figure Eight and Masonboro islands. In one scene, the gang even goes into Wilmington to try and steal the Cross of Santo Domingo! The entire scene takes place in a rail yard and includes no beauty shots of actual Wilmington. To correct this egregious oversight, I’m going to include this photo from the Wilmington Railroad Museum, free of charge.
Other notes from Season 3
-I don’t feel old, but I found out that the actor who plays John B’s father is my age, and my back has been sore ever since.
-Also! I haven’t met up with the Pates to know, but if I had to make a bet, I’d wager that Big John Routledge (who’s 6’6”!) may be loosely based on Billy Ray Morris, the state underwater archaeologist that I interviewed for an Our State story and podcast years ago. He investigates and catalogues North Carolina’s shipwrecks, talks with a heavy Down East accent, swears a lot, and is smart as hell. Billy Ray once gave me a really clarifying quote about the reasons why the Scottish built blockade runners for the Confederacy: “The Scots were vehemently anti-slavery, but they were really pro-money.”
-In episode 8, The Avett Brothers “Murder in the City” plays. It’s the best song.
-There are not one but two scenes this season in which someone hold a gun on someone else, and the person who’s going to be shot says something like: “I know you won’t shoot me.” And the person with the gun (first Rafe, later Ward) just contorts the living shit out of his face and then drops the gun. It is the heaviest cliche in a show that thrives on cliches. If I ever get cast in a TV show or movie, this is the only part I want to play. It’s great! You can’t possibly overact it.
-So the Pogues are gonna go find Blackbeard’s treasure, eh? Hope y’all have some good lawyers on retainer.