Bateman and Linney’s laundering saga is gripping for two seasons and merely efficient for two more, shot in a blue murk that becomes a joke and held together by Julia Garner, who is the best reason to keep watching.
Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is a Chicago financial adviser who launders money for a Mexican drug cartel, and when his partner is caught stealing from it, he saves his own life by talking. His pitch is the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri: a resort region full of cash businesses and short of anyone looking. Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams built four seasons and 44 episodes on that one desperate improvisation, and for about half of them the improvisation holds. Ozark is a good crime drama that runs longer than its ideas, and it is worth your evening if the genre is yours.
Bateman plays Marty as a man who never raises his voice because he is always adding something up. He negotiates with killers in the tone of someone querying an invoice, and the series is at its best when that tone is the only weapon he has. Laura Linney’s Wendy starts as the unhappy wife who has been having an affair and ends up somewhere we will not describe, but Linney lets us watch the appetite arrive by degrees, and it is the most interesting thing the show does across its full length. Bateman also directs, and his episodes are the most controlled: long, still shots of people deciding whether to lie.
Then there is Julia Garner. Ruth Langmore comes from a family of petty thieves living in trailers by the water, and she meets the Byrdes by robbing them. Garner plays her with a jaw set against the world and a voice that sounds dragged over gravel, and every fourth word is unrepeatable. We did not expect to care about anyone in this series and we cared about Ruth almost at once, because Garner gives her a want the writers barely need to spell out: to be taken seriously by the one man in town who does sums for a living. Whenever the show flags, it puts Ruth in a room with Marty and comes back to life.
The look is the thing everyone remembers, and not always kindly. Armando Salas, Ben Kutchins, Pepe Avila del Pino and Manuel Billeter shoot the lake in a blue so deep that a summer afternoon looks like the inside of a fridge, and the interiors are lit as if the electricity were on a meter. For a season it works: this is a holiday town with the holiday drained out of it. By the fourth we were squinting, and the murk had stopped being a mood and become a habit. Derek R. Hill, David J. Bomba and Roshelle Berliner do better, with Buddy Dieker’s (Harris Yulin) wood-panelled house on the shore and the Blue Cat Lodge that Rachel Garrison (Jordana Spiro) is running into the ground, both built to look like money somebody else spent. Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans keep the score low and stringy, a hum under the floorboards; it does the job and is never once noticed doing it, which for this kind of series is the right call.
The trouble is the machine. Each season introduces a new threat, tightens it, and clears it in the finale so that the next can begin, and by the third time round we could feel the gears turning. Jason Butler Harner’s FBI agent Roy Petty, Janet McTeer’s cartel lawyer Helen Pierce and Jessica Frances Dukes’s forensic accountant Maya Miller are each sharply played and each arrive as, in effect, the season’s problem. McTeer is superb, dry and unhurried, a woman who bills by the hour for other people’s terror. Tom Pelphrey’s Ben Davis, Wendy’s brother, gives the third season its one stretch of real unpredictability, and it is the best run of episodes the show has. The fourth season is 14 episodes and needs about ten.
Set against Breaking Bad, which it resembles and knows it does, Ozark is missing the argument. Walter White’s fall was about pride, and that series had a view of him. Marty and Wendy are doing what the plot requires to survive, and the show’s ideas about money, family and America are delivered in speeches rather than shown in choices. Nobody here is much fun, either, which over 44 hours matters.
We would still send you to the first two seasons without hesitation, and to the third with a nod. After that you will know whether you are staying, and the show will not make it easy to leave. It carries an 18 for good reason.
