Ozark (Season One)

Disastrous season finale undoes some built-up goodwill, bringing the show's flaws into focus

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I mentioned in my year-end TV review that we dropped Ozark after the first couple episodes, not necessarily because it was bad, but because we sort of ran out of TV time and the early installments of the show didn't build up enough momentum to get us racing to the remote during a busy period of our lives. Eventually, months later, I picked it back up again and finished off the season, leaving me with some mixed feelings on the show.

Ozark is the story of Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), a financial planner in Chicago (living in Naperville!) whose primary job is to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel. His primary contact with the cartel, Camino Del Rio ("Del", portrayed by Esai Morales) is a frightening man who seems to be highly intelligent, great at reading people, and also ruthlessly violent. In the first episode, a scheme goes wrong thanks to Marty's partner and Marty is forced to repay a debt to Del. He tries to do so by relocating his family to a small town in the Missouri Ozarks, where he must find a means within local businesses to clean a large sum of money for Del. Unfortunately, the locals don't prove to be quite as unassuming and manipulable as he expected, and the town has a dark underbelly of its own that becomes just as much of a threat to Marty and his family as the Mexican cartel.

Shortly after their arrival in town, the Byrdes become entangled with the Langmore family, trailer residents with varying degrees of greed and violent tendencies. Young adult Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) is probably the show's strongest character in performance and writing (though I could have done without her wearing out the impact of the word "fuck" and its variants by the third episode). She originally steals some of Marty's money, but eventually becomes an ally of Marty's in his laundering scheme, despite continuing to plan to murder him and take all of Del's unwashed cash.

Marty's relationship to his family is tenuous at best, as in the first episode it's revealed that his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) is anything but loyal. Both are somewhat distant from their children due to a lack of being forthright about their business and their reasons for uprooting their lives. A particularly good (and necessary) flashback episode shows how Marty wound up in illegal dealings in the first place, and it's both an argument for and against whether the pair truly deserve the scorn that they get from their children.

The tone of the show is constantly dark with almost no room for humor, and as the latest in the long line of anti-hero dramas that have sprung up since Tony Soprano graced the small screen, that would basically require Ozark to boast a combination of strong characters, great acting, and heart-pounding drama for it to stand out. It doesn't quite complete that trifecta. Generally, both Bateman and Linney leave a lot to be desired from an acting perspective, but fortunately Garner, Morales, and several others in minor roles effectively bring their characters to life. The show does a good job of world-building once you get beyond the first couple introductory episodes and largely keeps the plot riveting throughout (Marty almost constantly has three different entities out to get him, which makes breathing room hard to come by).

Unfortunately, the season finale undermines much of what comes before it, as the show makes three major mistakes in going for misery-porn shock value and having someone make a blunder that's so out-of-character that it not only destroys a season's worth of development, but calls into question whether the show is interested in any of these people beyond their ability to advance the plot. The horrid finale shone a greater light on some of the show's season-long issues, which were forgivable until it lost sight of the things that were working. Suddenly, the relentlessly gloomy mood, the predictability of most plot twists (nearly every ostensibly low-key scene in the show either leads into or blatantly foreshadows something significant that will happen next; Ozark isn't interested in just slowing down and casually hanging out with its characters), and the weakness of the performance from the two leads weren't things that the fast-paced action could allow me to forgive.

The remainder of this post will contain specific spoilers regarding my problems with the finale and is only for people who have seen the show. If you'd like to read it, highlight the text below.

In the sixth episode, Jacob Snell threatens to cut Pastor Young's baby out of his wife's womb if Marty doesn't halt construction of the church. That's a horrific threat, but with a target that doesn't make a great deal of sense when directed at Marty. It's easy to shrug off as something that will never actually come to pass. When Pastor Young falters in keeping up his sermons on the water, preventing Snell's drug distribution operation from continuing, Snell actually follows through on that, and we cut to Pastor Young finding his new baby, which one of Snell's underlings must have actually cut out of his wife's body during or after murdering her. Moving past the fact that Pastor Young's wife didn't actually wrong anyone good or evil during the plot, it's just a universally disgusting thing to do. We didn't need any further evidence that the Snells were dangerous people; we got that from the very first scene they were in and got more of it later in this very episode. Even though nothing graphic was shown, there was absolutely no upside to putting that image in peoples' heads.

That was the least of the episode's three grave sins. The second involved the conclusion of the huge business deal between Del and the Snells. The whole season, Del is portrayed as a careful, calculating man who has a sixth sense for judging character. He's ruthless, but also very smart and generally speaks respectfully to those with whom he is dealing, even if he's about to have them killed. That makes what he does next so infuriating from the perspective of anyone who had already spent almost ten hours watching the show to this point. He turns away with Marty and says -- within clear earshot of the Snells --

"Only Marty Byrde can move to Missouri and somehow convince me to partner with a bunch of rednecks."

Darlene Snell asks him to repeat himself, and he's actually stupid enough to say it again! Only this time, Darlene shoots him dead before he finishes the sentence. The one nice touch is that it ties back to the Snells' earlier strong insistence that they are "hillbillies", not "rednecks", but that doesn't redeem it. To take a character like Del who has been portrayed as cunning and intelligent for the whole season and have him die because of such a foolhardy and unnecessary comment (which contained a slur uncharacteristic of the way he spoke all season long) is simply ridiculous. It seems like they were set on having Del killed off in the finale, but couldn't think of a natural way to do it and landed on this.

Finally, Pastor Young is unhinged after discovering his wife has been murdered. When Marty comes to visit him, he makes the comment,

"Why would I want to keep a baby alive in this world?"

Marty tries to talk him down, but then later in the episode, we see the pastor driving to a lake with the baby that was very recently cut out of his mother's womb. He stands in the lake and sort of violently pushes his infant son under the water and holds him there while the camera focuses on his determined face. The baby is fully submerged in the water for THIRTY SECONDS (I timed it) while the audience is mostly convinced that the pastor is drowning his son. The only possible alternative, of course, is that it's a baptism, and sure enough, the pastor eventually pulls his air-deprived son out of the water and makes the sign of the cross on his forehead. 

This is completely absurd, and involves a character behaving in an unrealistic way to trick and shock the audience. Holding a newborn underwater for thirty seconds is not anyone's definition of baptism; it more closely matches the definitions of "child abuse" or "murder". There is not a branch of religion or a human person stupid enough to do this. It's a completely unbelievable stunt that serves no purpose but to horrify its audience for a half-minute. Mission accomplished, I guess.

Season One Grade: C+