Welcome to the twilight of the antihero. It’s fitting that a show seemingly set at perpetual twilight will send it on its way. Hopefully. Ozark, bathed in gray-blue and mid-century modern lamplight and neon bar signs, is back for its second season, released in a lump sum on August 31 by Netflix. It comes at the end of the summer of Camille and Kendall—the two damaged adult children at the heart of Sharp Objects and Succession, respectively. They continued the legacy of complicated protagonists whose self-destructive impulses collided with their best intentions, if they ever had any of those to begin with.
For about 15 years, some of our best dramas and comedies have been centered on bad good people or good bad people, depending on how you look at it. They were almost always white men, though sometimes their wives were involved. More often than not these characters were aware of their decaying moral foundations. They were in therapy, or seeking enlightenment through spiritualism or capitalism. They were getting high or selling drugs, taking their square lives to the underworld. As the years went on, and Tony Soprano turned into Rust Cohle and John Rayburn, the characters became more and more articulate about what was happening to them.
They weren’t bad people, they were just on bad TV shows (first season of Bloodline still goes, though). Ozark feels like a punctuation mark for this era. Either a terse period on Difficult Men dramas, or an ellipsis into something else. Or both. It feels populated by characters who were seemingly raised on antihero TV. Even the kids don’t seem that surprised at the depths their parents will sink to. They probably have HBO.
Family either explains or tempers the “anti” part of antihero. The protection of family is supposed to be a universal impulse that anyone can identify with. A family will humanize almost any character—Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White. We will allow a protagonist to stray from grace, so long as they have their family in mind. Sharp Objects and Succession were interesting and entertaining in entirely different ways, but they posited similar ideas: What if the family was the problem? The trauma experienced by Kendall Roy and Camille Preaker earlier in their lives explains their acts of self-sabotage.
Ozark makes all the right gestures about family. The main character’s stated motivation for doing all the reckless and dangerous things he does is to ensure his family’s safety. But if you’ve watched more than 20 minutes of this show, you know that’s complete bullshit. And it’s that subtle abdication of familial responsibility that makes Ozark so interesting.
The second season of Ozark picks up a very short time after Season 1, throwing the Byrde family—parents Marty and Wendy, and children Jonah and Charlotte—back into a multifront war against a Mexican drug cartel, a Missouri crime family, law enforcement, and small-time crooks looking for a big-time score.
Ozark is often compared to Breaking Bad, and for good reason. Jason Bateman (who doubles as Ozark’s executive producer and has directed several episodes) is the show’s Walter White—an everyman, stripped of his lust for life until he finds his true calling as a criminal mastermind. Laura Linney plays Wendy, a Skyler White stand-in, who alternates between standing by her man and backing away slowly. For Jesse Pinkman, Ozark has Ruth Langmore (pugnaciously played by Julia Garner), the local talent guiding the family through this new hell they’ve found themselves in. Both shows tell the story of characters finding themselves through morally transgressive acts. Breaking Bad is considered one of the greatest shows of all time. Ozark, by my anecdotal research, is not.
The uncharitable view of Ozark is that it is a trashy version of a prestige show. But in truth it is a series that’s been optimized for the Peak TV era. It tells a Breaking Bad story at a 24 pace. In Breaking Bad, it took Walter White until the third season to reveal his true occupation to his wife. It takes Wendy Byrde all of two episodes to tell her daughter that her father is laundering money for a drug cartel.
The hardest thing about having all these shows in our lives is starting all of them. The sheer volume of television means that the average TV watcher is more sensitive than ever to the sound of the slow-moving wheels of the great narrative steam engine. Ozark’s brilliance isn’t in how it speeds past what would be significant revelations in the lifespan of another show in a matter of moments. It’s how the characters operate within that accelerated environment. So much of television is waiting for someone to tell someone else something that we, the viewer, already know. Skyler White spent the entire run of Breaking Bad shuffling between a car wash and a suburban New Mexico kitchen before she got to hear the truth from her husband. Breaking Bad’s superficial mystery was the “how”; how will Skyler or her DEA agent brother, Hank, find out Walt’s true identity as an Albuquerque meth cook? The real mystery was the “why.” Was it because he wanted to set his family up for long after cancer had finally cashed in its marker on him? That may have been the reason at first. But in the end, it was because breaking bad felt good.
Ozark essentially starts at this moment. The series begins with Marty—a Chicago accountant who, along with business partner Bruce, is laundering money for a cartel—as his lifeless eyes watch surveillance footage of his wife sleeping with another man. In short order, Marty’s business partner is executed (guys named Bruce never make it), his wife’s paramour is tossed off a balcony, and the Byrdes book it for a Missouri lake, where a plan comes together on the fly: They will buy back their lives by washing drug money through the business establishments of a dilapidated resort town.
At first Marty seems unsocialized, calculating, and emotionally remote. This … is still the case in Season 2. It just so happens that all those qualities fit quite nicely with being a burgeoning crime kingpin in rural Missouri. When the Byrdes settle into their new surroundings in the first season, their ostensible goal is to live another day. But Marty takes to the Ozarks like Walter White to a meth lab. Only instead of tinkering with different chemical elements, Byrde moves around money and manipulates the books of several businesses that he invests his drug money in. He lords his urbanity and assumed intellectual superiority over the townsfolk, with Bateman playing his Glib Asshole In Khakis routine to perfection. Marty unwittingly creates a surrogate family out of his business associates—the aforementioned Ruth and a restaurateur named Rachel, played by Jordana Spiro. By contrast, he treats his own family more and more like a business. In fact, he explicitly tells his wife in the beginning of the second episode that they are no longer husband and wife, they are business partners, and their job is to raise their kids. He also says the only thing that helps him sleep at night is thinking about the sound Wendy’s lover’s body made when it hit the pavement. She punches him in the face for saying that. It doesn’t seem to make much of an impression.
At various points throughout the first season, the Byrdes grow closer and seem more sincerely invested in one another’s safety, if not happiness, but there is always a caustic, low-level loathing that you can feel among them. The circumstances (i.e. the possibility that, at any given moment, someone could be skinned alive or dumped in a lake with a bullet in the back of their head) create an atmosphere of emotional candor. There is no time for signals or suggestions, but amid all that confrontation, one thing never gets said: Marty is on death’s doorstep, but he’s obviously never felt more alive.
In the second season, his wife has what he’s having. Wendy Byrde’s past as a Chicago political operator comes in handy as the family tries to expand their empire beyond strip clubs and funeral parlors, into the world of casinos. In this new and dangerous land, they feel something they never had in their old lives: importance. They talk about working just enough to leave it all behind, but like any good self-aware crime-show characters, they must know there’s no such thing as one last job.
What’s remarkable is how little all of it seems to trouble the Byrdes. There’s no time to stare out the window; there’s barely any time to sleep. The show compresses experience, moving at such a fast pace that characters are forced to be radically confrontational. And as Ozark winds on, it positions itself as a critique of what individuals will do to sustain the illusion of normalcy in a nuclear family. It’s about what happens when survival bleeds into ambition. Those two impulses can start to feel the same. And that creates a fluid definition of what is morally palatable.
