Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is many things. He's a financial advisor, but he's also a money launderer for a prolific drug cartel and he's also an accountant that worked alongside Mr. Magorium and his Wonder Emporium. Anywho, Marty has gotten in over his head with his ruthless gangster boss, Camino Del Rio (Esai Morales), a guy who just murdered Marty's long-time business partner and is about to put a bullet in Marty's skull when Marty suggests a bold new plan to help get some money Del Rio has recently lost; Marty will launder $8 million in the Missouri Ozarks. So Marty, his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and his two kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skyler Gaertner), pack up their things and move to the Ozarks.
Over the course of the ten episodes, plenty of tension arises from a lot of different scenarios, with the show adopting a narrative that ends up feeling oh so scattered in the process of trying to give everyone in the family a plotline, many of which don't end up adding up to all that much nor do they end up being entertaining while they transpire. The most crucial two subplots involve Marty picking up a number of local businesses to launder his money through with the help of local redneck crook Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner). The Langmore family, consisting of Ruth, her two cousins, and two uncles, have their own difficulties to deal with in various subplots while the other major plotline involves crazed FBI agent Ron Petty (Jason Butler Harner), a guy who's hell bent on bringing Marty Byrde to justice.
The sage of the Byrde family really is a plodding one as each overlong episode (the episodes run from 52-59 minutes in length with an 80-minute long season finale) piling on more and more plot points that don't end up having much consequence to anything. Charlotte has all kinds of interactions with Ruth's cousins as well as a tourist boy that serve up two storytelling flaws at once as that don't add up to much in either the overarching plot or her character while also just being outright tedious in their own right. A similar level of monotony and pointlessness pervades a long-term plotline involving Jonah's growing obsessions with dead animals and violence.
These are such aggravatingly boring storylines to watch unfold and the fact that they don't help shape these characters in a notable way just makes it all the more egregious that the show lingers on these story details for so long. Marty's two kids start out as nebulously defined cliche kid characters and they end in the exact same point. A lack of creativity in the writing of these two characters is blatantly apparent and a similar lack of inventiveness can be found in the vast majority of the supporting cast. An elderly redneck couple that sells heroin end up becoming the big baddies of the season and the male member of that duo has a penchant for rambling off long stories to his potential victims that make him seem like a boring knock-off of a villain from Fargo. Oh how I wish any of these characters had dialogue a tenth as clever as something Noah Hawley wrote for one of the many antagonists in that show!
But the real problem comes in the form of our two leads, which end up wasting talented actors like Jason Bateman and Laura Linney on humdrum marital affairs plotlines. There's really nothing going on with either of these two on a deeper level in terms of character arcs or anything like that, Marty basically comes out the other side of this season the same as he came into it except for the loss of two toenails. His character and Wendy go round and round in arguments all season only for their plotlines to get resolved in a sappy ending (which I will be talking about in greater detail soon, don't worry). For a show that's all about dragging out its storylines to the point of pervasive tedium, the various plotlines don't really have much of an effect on the characters. Bodies washing up on their shore end up having the same effect on Marty and his family as not having pistachio ice cream.
Imagine if Breaking Bad just had Walter White stay stagnant for the entire first season of Breaking Bad despite going through even greater changes than he did in his actual first season. Keeping that fantasy scenario in mind, you have an idea for how frustrating on a character level this season of Ozark is. Even worse, it makes Marty and Wendy overtly criminal characters, one who take advantage of the poor and the struggling so they can help launder their money, yet it doesn't try to make this a Nightcrawler/Goodfellas/Wolf Of Wall Street scenario where the entire point is basking in the awfulness human beings can get away with. No, the ending of the season finale makes it pointedly clear we're supposed to...sympatheize with these people?
You heard me right. Right after Marty sent them away (complete with newly formed identities) from the Ozarks so they wouldn't be in danger of those heroin farmers Marty now has to work for, the kids are suddenly eager to get back to the Ozarks and "be a family" even though they've previously shown no inclination for either their Missouri-based home or, in the case of Charlotte, their family. Wendy brings the kids back to Marty though and they all reunite in a treacly reunion scene straight out of a Kodak commercial, complete with slow-motion and some inspirational orchestral music that makes it clear we're supposed to be emotionally joyful about Marty getting his family back, even though this means his kids are now in the vicinity of omnipresent danger. It's such an odd scene that basically clinches that this show has no idea what it's doing. This isn't a story of gradual corruption like Breaking Bad, it's not a tale of the awfulness human beings are capable of, it instead comes off as solely a narrative about cruel and thinly sketched human beings we're supposed to be rooting for.
It's such a weird thematic backbone for the show that ends Ozark on a note of anticlimax. All of these meandering episodes and their poor pacing have resulted in a season finale that's just confused more than anything else. It's a bad note to end a really poor season of television on, one that has plenty of flaws to talk about before we get to that terrible conclusion. One such flaw is the ubiquitous presence of this nauseating blue color grading, I'm sure there was an intended thematic underpinning for its constant use in the show but it just looks so ugly and it should have been used more sparingly if there was an actual purpose for its existence. Jason Butler Harner delivers an astoundingly bad performance as an FBI agent who speaks only in terribly written exposition dialogue, the Langmore family ends up just fizzling out in their plotlines that are the only potentially interesting stories the show introduces and....I could prattle on and on, but I'll just leave it at this: Ozark is like a bad family vacation, just miserable and seemingly never ending.
But the real problem comes in the form of our two leads, which end up wasting talented actors like Jason Bateman and Laura Linney on humdrum marital affairs plotlines. There's really nothing going on with either of these two on a deeper level in terms of character arcs or anything like that, Marty basically comes out the other side of this season the same as he came into it except for the loss of two toenails. His character and Wendy go round and round in arguments all season only for their plotlines to get resolved in a sappy ending (which I will be talking about in greater detail soon, don't worry). For a show that's all about dragging out its storylines to the point of pervasive tedium, the various plotlines don't really have much of an effect on the characters. Bodies washing up on their shore end up having the same effect on Marty and his family as not having pistachio ice cream.
Imagine if Breaking Bad just had Walter White stay stagnant for the entire first season of Breaking Bad despite going through even greater changes than he did in his actual first season. Keeping that fantasy scenario in mind, you have an idea for how frustrating on a character level this season of Ozark is. Even worse, it makes Marty and Wendy overtly criminal characters, one who take advantage of the poor and the struggling so they can help launder their money, yet it doesn't try to make this a Nightcrawler/Goodfellas/Wolf Of Wall Street scenario where the entire point is basking in the awfulness human beings can get away with. No, the ending of the season finale makes it pointedly clear we're supposed to...sympatheize with these people?
You heard me right. Right after Marty sent them away (complete with newly formed identities) from the Ozarks so they wouldn't be in danger of those heroin farmers Marty now has to work for, the kids are suddenly eager to get back to the Ozarks and "be a family" even though they've previously shown no inclination for either their Missouri-based home or, in the case of Charlotte, their family. Wendy brings the kids back to Marty though and they all reunite in a treacly reunion scene straight out of a Kodak commercial, complete with slow-motion and some inspirational orchestral music that makes it clear we're supposed to be emotionally joyful about Marty getting his family back, even though this means his kids are now in the vicinity of omnipresent danger. It's such an odd scene that basically clinches that this show has no idea what it's doing. This isn't a story of gradual corruption like Breaking Bad, it's not a tale of the awfulness human beings are capable of, it instead comes off as solely a narrative about cruel and thinly sketched human beings we're supposed to be rooting for.
It's such a weird thematic backbone for the show that ends Ozark on a note of anticlimax. All of these meandering episodes and their poor pacing have resulted in a season finale that's just confused more than anything else. It's a bad note to end a really poor season of television on, one that has plenty of flaws to talk about before we get to that terrible conclusion. One such flaw is the ubiquitous presence of this nauseating blue color grading, I'm sure there was an intended thematic underpinning for its constant use in the show but it just looks so ugly and it should have been used more sparingly if there was an actual purpose for its existence. Jason Butler Harner delivers an astoundingly bad performance as an FBI agent who speaks only in terribly written exposition dialogue, the Langmore family ends up just fizzling out in their plotlines that are the only potentially interesting stories the show introduces and....I could prattle on and on, but I'll just leave it at this: Ozark is like a bad family vacation, just miserable and seemingly never ending.
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