Charlie Barnett

Charlie Barnett's Alan Zaveri, in Russian Doll (2019), keeps his shoulders up round his ears and his flat ordered to the inch. He does not fidget. He holds still, like a man who has decided that if he does not move nothing can go wrong. It goes wrong anyway, and the series gets both its jokes and its sadness from watching him find that out. Barnett put it plainly himself: "These tics that Alan has, he doesn't want to show people his thing. He's been working his whole life to hide that part of himself."

He came to it by the network route. Three seasons as Peter Mills on Chicago Fire (2012–2015) put him on television, and a run of series regulars followed: Valor (2017), Tales of the City (2019) as Ben Marshall, You (2019), Ordinary Joe (2021–2022). We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to a view of them, but the parts share a shape. He is cast, again and again, as the orderly one in the ensemble, the man whose job is to keep the story from tipping over.

Russian Doll is where that habit became interesting, because Lyonne is anything but orderly and the writers made the collision the point. Alan arrives a third of the way in and a one-woman show becomes a double act. Lyonne is mess and noise; Barnett is the tidy man whose night is going as badly as hers, and their arguments about whose fault the universe is are the best scenes in the series. We had expected him to be the straight man, there to react. Instead we found we were watching him, because Barnett lets the panic reach only his eyes while everything else stays exactly where he put it, and there is something unsettling about a man that controlled being that frightened. Lyonne needs a wall to bounce off; he is a good wall, and a wall that occasionally cracks.

The reservation is not about the acting. It is that the series around him have a habit of being short-lived, Valor among them, so he has more often been the reliable part of something that did not last than the reliable part of something that did. Reliability is a quiet gift and television does not always reward it.

The Acolyte (2024), with Barnett as Yord Fandar, took him into franchise television, and Line of Fire (2026) follows. We hope somebody there has noticed what Lyonne noticed. He is best when the order is under pressure, and a franchise that only wants him steady will be wasting the interesting half of him.