The third season of Ozark showed up on Netflix last week.
I noted the fact on my Facebook page, and on Twitter. Someone, obviously not a fan of the show, snarked, "Oh, is it good now?"
"I sure hope not," I volleyed.
My reply surprised me because though I meant it as a wisecrack, it felt like the truth. And I had never considered whether Ozark was a "good" show or not. I received it the way most people who do not regularly offer their opinions about whether TV shows and movies are good or not receive those sorts of things. I heard about it, it was available on a streaming service to which I am subscribed, so I tuned in. I am fond of Laura Linney and not opposed to Jason Bateman, and there was nothing in the first episode that made me tune it out, so I kept watching.
Just like they want you to do.
I like to think that I am selective in the ways I use television. Our television is rarely on before 7 p.m. or after 9:45 p.m. We don't binge, which is why I've only seen two episodes of the new season of Ozark thus far; a lot of you have already run through this season and there are spoiler-heavy recaps available on the internet. That's fine, whatever gets you through pandemic house arrest is all right. But we try not to give the electronic hearth too much attention.
At any given time, we're watching a handful of shows, leaning heavily into HBO (we watched all of The Outsider, which I am pretty sure was not a good show), but don't slavishly attend to its prestige series. We gave up Westworld after 45 minutes and only watched Game of Thrones until the first torture scene. (So, like 15 minutes?) We couldn't sustain interest in Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale either.
Our diet is limited, but not especially nutritious. We watch Bob's Burgers (good) and occasionally an episode of South Park (sometimes good) on Hulu, and usually have a foreign series or two that we're kind of hate-watching.
We finished the first season of ridiculous French series The Red Shadows on Sundance Now, and have moved on to Swedish series The Restaurant, which is like a sexy Downton Abbey about a horrible family that own a fancy Stockholm joint trying to recover after betting big on the Nazis to win World War II. It's not good, but Hedda Stiernstedt's face is fun to watch. Somehow we've made it through two episodes of Hulu's Little Fires Everywhere: certainly not good.
I'm not sure Ozark is either, though research indicates it is being fairly well-reviewed. On Metacritic, the overall score for the series is 66, which Metacritic describes as "generally favorable," with 30 positive, 22 mixed and one negative review tabulated.
Mark A. Perigard of the Boston Herald apparently loved the first two seasons, Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times liked the third season. But then Little Fires Everywhere scores a 71 on Metacritic, so the score really doesn't tell us much.
Ozark's pacing doles out a major plot twist every 15 minutes or so. None of the major characters behave like decent people, which isn't exactly the same thing as having no likable characters. Breaking Bad's Walter White is likable, even though he is a monster. Bateman's Marty Byrde is calculating, ruthless and probably dead inside, but he can be dryly funny and is highly competent. I like his character, as well as Linney's Wendy Byrde, Marty's cheating, reckless and even more ruthless wife.
To bring you up to speed, let's stipulate that Ozark is derivative of Breaking Bad, although Marty was a Chicago-based financial services weasel whose main job was laundering money for a murderous Mexican drug cartel when we first met him. (This is somewhat mitigated by intimations that Marty's ill-starred business partner was more enthusiastic about the criminal arrangement than Marty was. But that partner got a bullet in his head in season one, episode one, while Marty used his superpower -- preternatural cool under pressure -- to talk himself out of his own execution.)
While Wendy was innocent of money laundering, when we first met her she was a faithless hussy who Marty would probably have left had she not been necessary to his plan to launder $8 million of the cartel's money through a small town on the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, which would presumably be off the FBI's radar.
Marty told his Mexican overlords he could "clean" this money quickly, and that he'd be able to handle many more millions in subsequent years. How? Well, he'd figure that out later.
We understand that Ozark is not The Wire, which former cop reporter David Simon spent years researching before ever starting to write. Ozark is a violent soap opera filled with colorful characters like extant crime families, the white-trash Langmores and the vulgarian Snells, who ran that part of Missouri before the carpetbagging Byrdes arrived.
Marty has to deal with these folks, which leads to him making an ally of whip-smart Ruth Langmore (a terrific Julia Garner), who ends up murdering her uncles when her plot to assassinate Marty goes wrong.
In season three, Marty seems to have put full faith and credit in Ruth, even after she throws the son of the boss of the Kansas City mob off the riverboat they have converted into a casino. Ruth is his foul-mouthed second-in-command, Marty's surrogate and -- since the murder of her father last year -- the presumptive matriarch of the surviving Langmore clan, though her almost-as-brilliant cousin Wyatt (a very good Charlie Tahan) has taken up with Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery), which you could say is a disturbing trajectory but won't because "disturbing trajectories" are what every single character in Ozark is on.
Ruth also functions as the Byrdes' Virgil, guiding them through the miasmatic jungles of Missouri, which turns out to be a considerably wilder and darker place than Winter's Bone author Daniel Woodrell ever imagined. (Disappointing fact: Ozark is filmed mostly in Georgia, at Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier near Atlanta. Only a couple of scenes in the first season were filmed in Missouri.)
As the third season begins, Marty's bosses, the Navarro cartel, are engaged in a bloody war with a rival cartel, one they can't be sure of surviving. Ambitious Wendy seems not to have acclimated herself to serving the murderous cartel; she seems to think Marty's caution is holding back growth. She's starting to wonder if he's really necessary after all.
Wendy has cooked up a scheme to provide cartel head Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) with some security by diversifying into legitimate assets. Marty disagrees, preferring to lay low rather than risk drawing the FBI's attention. (This despite the fact that the FBI agent who was on his trail also met an untimely demise last season.)
Wendy seems to have become frenemies with dangerous Helen (Janet McTeer), the corporate lawyer who represents the Navarros' interests in the U.S.; Helen is in the middle of a vicious divorce from a husband who apparently has no idea who her clients are, and she has moved to Lake Ozark in order to oversee Marty and Wendy's operations. While the excellent McTeer is getting more screen time this season, Helen, like most of the secondary characters on Ozark, is little more than a trope.
That said, Ozark occasionally brushes up against interesting issues, as in season two when Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz), the Byrdes' daughter, seeks to have herself emancipated from her sociopathic parents. Meanwhile, her introverted brother Jonah (an enjoyable Skylar Gaertner) shows all the signs of being a budding Jeffrey Dahmer. (The name "Jonah" is a bit of a groaner; the kid's growing up in the belly of the beast.)
This season, Wendy's troubled bipolar brother Ben Davis (Tom Pelphrey), alluded to way back in the very first episode, has shown up to crash with the Byrdes, his own version of lying low.
While the focus of the series might be Marty, the theme of the show might be how women (Wendy, Ruth, Helen, Darlene, even Charlotte) are the real engines of the world. Marty, for all his evasiveness, is a static character, superficially unflappable while constantly recalculating the odds in his head. While the women grow, Marty treads water.
Is it good? It's not high art, but for what it is -- episodic prestige television in the age of plague -- yeah, maybe it is: Pretty, pretty good.
At least good enough to keep watching.
Until I can go out.
MovieStyle on 04/03/2020