Ozark was doomed. Back in the summer of 2017, we saw the first trailer for a new Netflix crime drama—cryptically named Ozark—that showed a white suburban family getting caught up in guns and drugs and money-laundering and other domestic bullshit. And...it felt a little familiar! At the time, just three years removed from a culture-piercing finale, and three seasons into its spin-off, Better Call Saul, we were still suffering from Breaking Bad mania. Much of the way the show is still addressed and covered suggests we still are. Which, heading into the final run of episodes, feels like a bummer.
Back then, seemingly as heated as Gus Fring himself, Breaking Bad heads wasted no time in calling out what they thought was a blatant rip-off—a chorus that would ring out for the next three seasons of the show. Among them? Even Steve McQueen. “[It must be] like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to watch this?'” McQueen said last year. “When you get Breaking Bad, it’s amazing, but then you get Ozark, which is a rip-off of that … It’s unfortunate, right now, there’s so much money, and so little ideas. The problem is when you have no money, you’ve got to think.”
This week marks the beginning of the end for Jason Bateman's Ozark. Show-runner Chris Mundy decided to split Ozark's final season into two parts, with Part One debuting on January 21st, and Part Two likely coming later this spring. While there are hoards of fans waiting to vicariously money-launder through Marty Byrd later this week, you still get the feeling that—like Byrd himself, paying dues for a sin he committed years ago—Ozark might never outrun those initial comparisons.
Yes, Ozark pulls high streaming numbers. It's also been nominated for 32 Emmys. But it will likely never be remembered with even half the reverence that Breaking Bad receives today. In part, this is because it simply isn't Breaking Bad. Sure. But if you think Ozark is merely another predictable crime romp from the annals of the Netflix algorithm, or wrote it off before it even debuted, you've been missing out on one of the best TV shows in recent memory.
If you're unfamiliar with Ozark, the series starts in Chicago, with the (seemingly!) happy family: husband and wife Marty (Bateman) and Wendy (Laura Linney), plus their kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner). To cut to the chase of a superb pilot episode that includes a man getting thrown from a Chicago high-rise, Marty unwittingly crosses a cartel while doing business at his accounting firm. He worms his way out of trouble when he hatches a scheme—with a gun pointed at his head, mind you—to launder money out of the Ozarks for the underworld organisation. While we were living in the boom times for capital-P Prestige crime shows, it was clear that Ozark was different. This was no slow-burning character study of Walter White, instead Ozark immediately threw an already-enflamed family into the shit. They had a new home, new life, and a permanent death threat by the time you queued up Episode Two.
All of this is, you know, ripe for a prime time network TV slot. But it was Ozark's cast that made it more than that. Known as the dry-humoured dad in Arrested Development, Jason Bateman made Marty Byrd a nuanced mess of wit, warmth, and darkness—plus a hint of that Bluthian humour. As for Linney, it'd be hard to find a more convincing transformation over Ozark's three seasons, doing [spoiler] to her [spoiler] and having you believe it. Of course, Julia Garner won two consecutive Emmys as Ruth Langmore for good reason, flipping your knee-jerk perception of the character to show the beating heart underneath every rage stroke. Remember when she called Wendy a bitch wolf?
Perhaps most remarkable is that the series has never been afraid to give us terrifying, bloody, and definitive deaths. In an era where every death instantly feels reversible (looking at you, Marvel), the heightened stakes of Ozark, wouldn't you know it, make for a heightened viewing experience. So sure, Ozark brilliantly paints moral corruption and the sheer allure of power, like Breaking Bad before it. But Ozark's central truth is different. It's not about the lies we tell others, but those we tell ourselves—in marriage, in parenthood, in friendships—and who we become at the end of the thousandth fib.
Heading into the final season, we'd all be better served if we stopped furiously comparing the two shows as if one day Marty Byrd is going to fist-fight Walter White. (My money's on Walter, by the way.) Bateman, Garner, and the whole Ozark crew deserve more than cheap 1:1s, because they've created something that deserves to live in a league of its own. Let's appreciate our last bottle of wine with Marty and Wendy while we still can.
