SERIES PREMIERE: Many critics are comparing this new drama series to AMC’s
Breaking Bad – an unfair comparison, and not only because it sets an almost impossible standard to equal. But comparisons to that and other prestige crime series are unavoidable, as well as unfortunate. In
Ozark, Jason Bateman stars as Marty Byrde, a white-collar Chicago criminal, a money launderer whose connected partner is deeply embroiled with a Mexican drug cartel. Laura Linney plays Marty’s wife, Wendy, and they and their kids seem like a typical middle-class family, like the Walter White clan of
Breaking Bad – except that he’s already broken bad, and so has she, having betrayed her husband with an affair that, like Marty’s money-laundering enterprise, quickly leads to murder. The Byrdes pack up and relocate to the Ozark lake in Missouri – part of Marty’s desperate scheme to spare the lives of his family and himself. Marty is portrayed as a guy who can talk himself out of almost any situation, like Saul Goodman on
Breaking Bad and
Better Call Saul, and is surrounded by unpredictable and unreliable backwoods types, like the transplanted hero of
Justified. I really like Bateman as an actor, and Linney too – but their characters, in
Ozark, are required to do too many things which stretch or snap credulity to the point where you just don’t care, about them or the show they’re in. And supporting characters are even less believable, as is any sense of overall logic. Linney and Bateman deserve better, and since the entire Season 1 of
Ozark already is completed and is dropping today, they can start hunting for something better immediately.
For a full review, see Ed Bark’s Uncle Barky’s Bytes.