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Ozark

Ozark is the summer’s most buzzworthy drama. If you don’t count Game of Thrones. Or Twin Peaks. Or count Insecure as a drama. Or think too hard about whether there are any other dramas currently on the air. Honestly, the fuss about Ozark, Netflix’s new antihero white-crime series, is a bit perplexing. In this, the narrative about the show mirrors the narrative within the show: This is happening. Deal with it.

Created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, the show stars Jason Bateman, whose multi-hyphenate role in the show’s making also includes executive producer, writer, and director. He plays Marty Byrde, a sullen but allegedly gifted financial advisor (we kind of have to take everyone’s word for it on the gifted part, but sullen’s clear enough). If you’ve heard anything about the show, you’ve heard comparisons to Breaking Bad, with Marty as a stand-in for Walter White’s white middle-aged middle-class everyman getting in over his head with the drug trade. That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but when we pick up with Marty’s story this transformation has already taken place, apparently long in the past.

The crisis Marty faces in “Sugarwood,” the show’s pilot episode, is not how to get into the criminal underworld, but how to survive within it. Marty is out late one night, masturbating in his car from frustration with his joyless, sexless marriage (he’s learned his wife Wendy, the great Laura Linney, is cheating on him) and after finding himself unable to go through with hiring a sex worker except in his alpha-male fantasies, when he is summoned by his business partner Bruce to an emergency meeting with a man named Del. This, it turns out, is a Mexican drug cartel boss straight out of the Gus Fring School for Speaking Softly and Carrying a Big Stick. In addition to their legit business, Marty and Bruce launder massive sums of money for the man, and someone on their side of the operation is skimming from the till.

A few summary executions and bodies dissolved in barrels later, Marty finds himself at Del’s mercy over his late partner’s thievery. Grasping at straws (Del even refers to it as such), Marty finds in his pocket the brochure for vacation homes on the Lake of the Ozarks that Bruce had given him before his murder. Thinking on his feet, Marty spins this into a grand plan to relocate the cartel’s money from the law-enforcement hotspot where he currently lives, Chicago, into this off-the-grid, cash-rich “Redneck Riviera.” After doing his due diligence by threatening Wendy and tossing the lawyer she’s secretly sleeping with off his 80th-floor balcony, Del agrees to let Marty and his family pick up stakes and set up shop down south for him, though the massive amount of money he’ll have to launder and exceedingly brief period of time he’ll have to do it in make it seem like he’s just postponing the inevitable. Of course, this is a Netflix show, so he’ll be postponing it for at least nine hours longer.

From the plot to the blue-green prestige-TV color palette to the Radiohead-enhanced soundtrack, Ozark does so little that you haven’t seen or heard before already that its unoriginality is almost admirable. Still, calling Ozark a mere rehash of what’s come before is an overstatement in several respects. Look hard enough and you will find innovations, however dubious.

First, and least, there’s the goofily ovewrought spelling of main character Marty’s surname, “Byrde”; imagine Breaking Bad if Walt’s last name had been Whyte or Weite or something like that, you know? So kudos, I guess, for a completely unnecessary stylistic filigree.

Next, there’s the decision to join the narrative in medias res, as it were — but only if you count your knowledge of other series of this sort as the start of Ozark’s story. Marty and his family aren’t a happy one, even if that happiness is based on lies or overlaid atop financial hardship: They’re already at each other’s throats all the time. Additionally, Wendy doesn’t need to discover Marty’s misdeeds, like Skyler White or Betty Draper did, since she’s already complicit; but nor does she need to undergo a long personal journey of reckoning with that complicity, like Carmela Soprano did, because she’s already basically checked out of the marriage with an affair and is ready to run entirely until Marty’s criminal bosses catch up with her.

And there’s no need to ratchet up the calamity stakes to illustrate the consequences of Marty’s crimes, with an escalating gang war or a cat-and-mouse game or the threat of a life-altering secret coming to the surface: Marty witnesses the execution of his best friend and business partner, the friend’s girlfriend, two of their other business partners, and the man his wife’s having an affair with right in the pilot. Del even offers to kill Wendy on Marty’s behalf, though he demurs. Meanwhile, the whole liquidation and relocation scheme that lands Marty and his millions in the Ozarks is so hastily conceived and executed that the cops and feds are crawling all over it, even before we learn they were already on the verge of shutting down the whole operation because the late Bruce was snitching. I guess there’s Marty’s kids left to go after, but other than, that the worst has already happened. I have to admit a certain morbid curiosity in seeing where the show can go after exhausting pretty much the entire antihero-drama playbook in its first sixty minutes.

The final and most perplexing deviation from the norm involves Marty himself — his personality this time, not just his last name. Basically, Ozark takes the idea of the compellingly immoral protagonist and takes the “compellingly” out of the equation. Marty’s handsome and successful, but he has no charisma. His equivalent of a beguiling “Draper pitch” speech is a dreary opening soliloquy about how money isn’t everything, it’s the only thing or some shit to that effect, delivered to a young couple who don’t understand what he’s talking about any more than we do. He’s surrounded by violence, but he’s neither its perpetrator nor its primary victim. He’s not much of a family man, so you can’t really say “hmm, maybe he’s got a heart of gold despite it all.”

And while he seems as stressed out as first-season Walter White, he’s actually quite rich, so there’s no financial plight to sympathize with; moreover, he’s an asshole instead of a basically alright dude who slowly lets his inner asshole take over, so you don’t really empathize with him, or even like him, either. He barely manages five seconds of quasi-crying in an unguarded moment before he’s back on track. (Wendy and their daughter Charlotte, by contrast, share a hug over the unspoken trauma hanging over the family during an uncharacteristically moving moment.) It’s like if the main character of Game of Thrones were Stannis Baratheon, but without even the benefit of actor Stephen Dillane’s smoldering gritted-teeth resentment, since Bateman plays the part like he didn’t get enough sleep the night before. (Hell, he co-wrote and directed the episode, so maybe he didn’t!) The end result is that Marty is all anti, no hero.

In its own perverse way, this makes Ozark unusual. Does it make it interesting, or enjoyable? Like Marty, we’ll just have to hope that the whole thing is so crazy that it works.