Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
No, really: The vultures are literally circling.
And eating.
“My Dripping Sleep,” the third episode of Netflix’s buzzy crime drama Ozark, is ostensibly about how quickly the walls are closing in on Marty Byrde, his family, and the half-baked money-laundering scheme that will keep them all alive. Before they can even finish moving into their new home — hell, before the opening scene is over! — that home is under surveillance by FBI Agent Petty, the dogged, dickheaded investigator who makes Twin Peaks‘ Albert Rosenfield look like a charm-school graduate. Petty’s partner and very estranged ex-boyfriend Agent Evans is also on the case despite being pushed to the margins, coming right out and telling Marty that his late partner Bruce was a federal informant.
This comes mere hours after Marty’s wife Wendy told their kids that their dad works for a Mexican drug cartel, further splintering the family bonds with what daughter Charlotte feels was a transparent attempt to alienate them from Marty, rather than trust them with the truth. And the cartel may be stalking them too, as a parking-lot staredown between Wendy and two grim-looking dudes in a black SUV implies.
And there’s no shortage of local trouble to worry about either. Even as Marty pushes himself deep into sleep deprivation in a desperate attempt to launder the cartel’s money as fast as possible, the low-life Langhornes — led by their sole female member, the insightful, intelligent, and ruthless Ruth — play low-level mindgames and plot Marty’s eventual murder. It’s enough to make you wonder how they can possibly make it.
Or it would make you wonder that, if it weren’t so obvious that the game is rigged so that they will. About a third of the way through Ozark‘s debut season, the pitfalls of its premiere, which rushed Marty through an entire antihero-drama series story arc before the closing credits rolled, have yet to be surmounted. All the threats he and his family face in this episode simply remind you that the show painted itself into a corner in its pilot, and is going to have to either scale the wall or get its shoes awfully messy to get out again.
Think of all the convenient plot holes the Byrdes fly through in this episode alone. When Agent Petty is taking surveillance photos of Marty, Wendy, and the kids, they are literally in the middle of a family conversation about his work for the cartel; a good lip-reader or a long-range mic would have ended the series right then and there. When Agent Tyson confronts them with the truth about Bruce becoming a snitch, he asks them to just drop the exhausting act of playing innocent and come clean — but if Bruce was an informant, there’s no conceivable reason he’d have neglected to provide them with anecdotal reports, if not hard evidence, of Marty’s involvement, so why bother with the “look, we know that you know that we know” business at all?
When it’s not taking shortcuts, the story too often resorts to cliche. Wendy’s grocery-store metldown over her inability to find the right kind of organic pistachio ice cream for Charlotte is straight out of a million desperate-housewife lost-in-the-supermarket dramedies.
Meanwhile, virtually everything about the Ozark region itself — “titty bars,” trailer-park dumbasses, point-and-laugh evangelical stuff (on a boat instead of a revival tent or megachurch soundstage, at least) — feels torn from one of True Blood‘s lamentable later seasons. And Agent Petty’s Al Swearingen-style blowjob-monologue scene proves that even when it’s stealing from a good HBO drama, it doesn’t have the goods.
While I hate to evaluate a show by comparing it to the show I want it to be, I can’t help but think how much more interesting Ozark would get if Ruth Langmore and her opposite number in the Byrde family, Charlotte, were the main characters rather than Marty and Wendy. Julia Garner obviously has the breakout role of her career in the Langmore leader, who’s ferocious despite her youth and size, yet also shrewd and even tender despite her ferocity when the circumstances require it. And as Charlotte, Sofia Hublitz gets the Byrde family’s best material: Her attempts to fit into her new life by applying for a job or taking a smiling selfie for the ‘Gram in front of the Lake dissolve convincingly quickly, and her ability to suss out her mom’s real motive for spilling the beans about Marty’s criminality is as impressive in its way as Ruth’s own killer instincts. And hey, at the rate this series moves? Maybe Marty’s headed for Ned Stark territory, and it’ll be Charlotte and Ruth’s show to run before long anyway.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
