The first-half of the Fourth Season, I think, of the hit Netflix series Ozark is now (February 2022) streaming. This show is one of the best crime programs on TV, brilliantly acted with ingenious plotting and punchy, ferocious dialogue. As everyone knows, the show's premise is that a financial planner, Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) and his wife, Wendy, have fun afoul of American TV's all purpose boogey-man, a Mexican drug cartel. As we come to learn, the Byrde's have been complicit with drug cartel from the outset, although the show cleverly portrays Marty Byrde as an American Everyman trapped in the web of an insidious fate, until we learn that he and his wife have been criminals all along. Forced to flee to Lake of the Ozarks, Marty and Wendy are coerced into laundering cartel money on an industrial scale -- to this end, they begin to invest in various cash-enterprises, including ultimately a strip club (Lickety Splits) various taverns and motels, an undertaking business that proves to be highly convenient, and, finally, a river-boat casino. In the fourth series, of which seven episodes (about half of the projected series) can be streamed, the Byrdes have become more ambitious. They scheme to set up a non-profit for redevelopment of poor parts of Chicago and forge a partnership with big Pharma to further the opium epidemic in the rural hinterland, particularly the Ozarks where they live. The show is casually brutal and very cynical. In the Fourth Series, we are privy to the maleficent schemes of a corrupt FBI, corrupt Senators, and, of course, the vicious family-operated American cartels that we know as Big Pharma, authorized to legally manufacture narcotics in vast and socially devastating quantities. As the scope of the show has broadened, its convoluted plots seem increasingly implausible. The Byrde's now have such vast power as a result of their alliances with the omnipotent and evil FBI (shown to be engaged in money-laundering itself on a colossal scale) that the Mexican drug cartel seems now a rather minor villain, guilty of mere violent misdemeanors in contrast to the cosmic scheme of criminality committed by the American drug industry, the FBI and its minions, and the American senate. One wonders, increasingly, why Marty Byrde and Wendy put up with being bullied by the suave, soft-spoken, and rather courtly Mexican gangsters -- as we see, a single phone call is sufficient to unleash armies of FBI agents and, even, the American military on these hapless penny-ante thugs. The big money is in legal opioids and Senatorial corruption.
The show is consistently thrilling and, like much malarkey produced by Hollywood, seems fantastically realistic in all its details. If you want to know how Mexican mobsters live and what their manors are like, this is the show for you. All the locations and set decoration is pitch-perfect -- the show has a particularly keen eye for the hillbilly squalor of the American south and the trailers and farmhouses in hilss and hollers are wonderfully realized. But the show, which I greatly admire, has, in effect "jumped the shark" to use a term from TV sit-coms and it has become increasingly difficult to maintain one's suspension of disbelief with respect to the twists and turns in the exceedingly complex plot. (I will say, however, that in contrast with the often incoherent Succession, another excellent cable TV show, everything in Ozark is clearly presented -- the viewer always knows who is killing or threatening whom and why.) This is part of the fun of the show: Marty Byrde gets trapped in ever-increasing peril, but always figures out a way to wheedle himself and his family out of trouble -- it some cases, he's beaten to a pulp and lying half-dead on the floor with a 45 aimed at his head, trigger cocked, but the audience understands the contract that Ozark has made with its viewers: Marty has to survive and he will always figure out some way to avert doom at the very last instant. Unlike the violent thugs that surround him, Marty is mild-mannered, doesn't swear, eschews all violence, and reasons his way out of scrapes. It's a wee bit tedious, but this is the way the show is constructed -- everyone else solves problems by murder and mayhem; the rather smarmy Marty who has the morals of a crooked used car dealer, always talks his way out of trouble. The show is notable for the spectacular performances of its three female principals: Laura Linney is profoundly disturbing as the steely Wendy Byrde -- she is Marty's equal in cunning and far more explosively prone to violence: she has her own brother murdered with later dire consequences for her family. Wendy Byrde makes Lady Macbeth look like Martha Stewart. Even more terrifying is Darlene Schnell, a ferocious hillbilly poppy farmer's wife -- at least, until she murders her husband. Darlene goes about with a shotgun and periodically blasts people off-screen, demanding that her teenage boyfriend (she's about 60) bury the corpses in one of her many pastures. At the center of the show is twenty-something Ruth Langmore (the very pale and rabbit-faced Julia Garner), who embodies the purest form of American White Trash -- but she's fantastically clever and the show delights in implying that somewhere under her hardened carapace there's a heart of gold. Wendy's murder of her own brother has also deprived Ruth of her boyfriend -- Ruth now totes his ashes about in a cookie jar shaped like an impassive, sinister goat --and, of course, she is on a collision course with Wendy. Marty tries to umpire all of these conflicts albeit with increasingly unsuccessful results.
The problem with the show is that the conflicts that it sets up are overly complicated and, of course, given the program's ultra-violent premises all too readily soluble. Instead of scheming and conniving to wiggle out of trouble, one wonders why Marty doesn't just hire one of his army of henchmen to resolve the issue by a bullet to the brain. And this is doubly true of the difficulties with Marty's perpetually fractious and threatening Mexican bosses -- why doesn't he just lure them to somewhere on the Lake of the Ozarks and have the lot of them either murdered or captured by his allies in the corrupt FBI? And some of the plot details, although amusing are a little too much for anyone willing to think for a moment about the narrative. Marty's fourteen-year old son is involved in money-laundering for Darlene Snell -- the acorn doesn't fall too far from the tree. Is it plausible that a 14 year old can arrange for 16 off-shore shell companies and have receipts deposited with them according to a completely random wire-transfer algorithm? Wendy schemes to put her son in jail to "save him". Wouldn't the son, Jonah, simply rat out everyone in the family, including Wendy? Is this believable? And if the mechanism for money laundering is wholly computerized why did the hero spend the first two seasons hiding money in walls and, indeed, in the tomb of a deceased Mafia mobster who was once allied with Wendy and Marty (and murdered for his loyalty)? The difficulty with shows of this sort is also a systemic problem that afflicts TV sit coms and, for better or worse, even a high-budget series like Ozark has its roots in The Mary Tyler Moore Show or I love Lucy. A series works on the basis of strong and appealing characters who are involved in a situation that is sufficiently interesting to involve the audience, while sufficiently flexible to allow for profuse variations on the same general theme. The reason we watch a Sit-com is because we like the characters and are intrigued by the situation -- if the situation varies too much or becomes a caricature of its original premise, we say that the show has "jumped the shark". This term, referring to notorious episode in the long-lasting TV sitcom Happy Days, suggests that a program's writers have become desperate for new variations on the program's basic themes -- therefore, some sort of extreme and, highly implausible, event is scripted in the hope that this innovation in the plot will attract fresh interest to the show. (Henry Winkler as the Fonz is water-skiing and jumps over a shark in Happy Days Season 5, Episode 91 -- that is after about 45 hours of programming, the writers who had run out of ideas had to come up with something outrageous to keep the show going.) The problem with all television series can be readily stated: the show has to constantly change while fundamentally remaining the same. If the program deviates too far from the formula that makes it successful, the audience will tune-out. But if the show simply repeats itself, cloning one episode from another, tedium will result and again the audience will watch something else. Marty and Wendy Byrde must be threatened with murder and torture in every episode; but they must wiggle out of every tight spot and live to launder money another day. Inevitably, the screenwriters are confronted with the difficulty of maintaining the same premise (which was never particularly plausible) while varying the individual shows sufficiently to keep the viewer engaged. This has become an increasingly tall order for Ozark and I suspect that this fourth series will be the last, although. if the show retains popularity, which it will I think, perhaps, more episodes will be purchased. Several times in the Fourth Season, Marty Byrde is trapped in a bad situation and it looks dire for him -- but he calls a side-bar conference to talk his way out of this newest emergency. I almost imagine that he is asking for a conclave with the writers to work out with them what new direction the show will take -- it's as if he's saying to the camera and other characters, "let's take a little break here to discuss plot points with our writers."
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