What keeps TV writers coming back to the white-collar, white-guy antihero, when that ground would seem to be so well-trodden?
Yes, many of the best shows of the 21st century — The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc., etc., etc. — have fit into that basic storytelling trope. But if you were to describe any of those series, I doubt you’d start with, “Well, it’s about a guy who does bad things.” And even if you did, you’d quickly be on to, say, Tony Soprano’s stint in therapy or Don Draper’s hidden past. Those shows might have used a seemingly upstanding man doing very bad things as a loose hook, but they also had so much more than that.
Yet we are, in 2017, in a strange glut of bad antihero shows, largely from streaming networks. Some of them, like Netflix’s Gypsy, try to change the basic template around the edges (the antihero is a lady this time!) but don’t find anything new or interesting to say. And then some of them, like Netflix’s new Ozark, just plod forward with the most basic and predictable version of the story imaginable.
If you really, really, really like crime dramas, Ozark, a show about a money launderer for a drug cartel moving to a rural area to try to set up a new money laundering operation, might give you a quick fix. But even then, you might find yourself guessing everything that happens before it does, and the ultra-glum, humorless tone would probably be a turn-off.
Ozark’s stubborn blandness raises the question of just why the antihero trope continues to be so appealing to creators and networks. With that question in mind, here are three reasons Ozark probably got made — and ended up being so boring.
1) Ozark gives Jason Bateman a chance to pull a Bryan Cranston
If you’re an actor, especially an actor best known for a funny role, there are few better shining beacons out there for you than Bryan Cranston, who went from playing a very funny father on Malcolm in the Middle to completely redefining his career by playing the drug-cooking science teacher Walter White on Breaking Bad in the space of a few years. He won multiple Emmys, and then won a Tony and received an Oscar nomination after the show ended. Breaking Bad completely changed how everybody thought about Cranston, to the degree that when he plays funny now, it almost feels like he’s going against type.
Ozark hopes to do the same for Jason Bateman, the Arrested Development star who’s never quite found his niche after that show ended, despite worthy work in a number of film comedies. Bateman is also branching out into directing, which means that he can not only play the lead of Ozark — perpetually swamped money launderer Marty Byrde — but also direct four of its 10 episodes, just as Cranston directed a handful of Breaking Bad episodes. It’s a double redefinition for the actor.
And to be sure, Bateman is quite good in Ozark. At times, he was the main thing keeping me invested in the show, because he clearly saw something in the material I just didn’t. He’s willing to go to some dark and desperate places to make Marty’s journey from confident Chicagoan to rural resort town resident feel all the more visceral. He’s pouring himself into the role, even if I wish he would bring even an ounce of humor to it. (This was Cranston’s secret Breaking Bad weapon, especially late in the run, when his character had effectively gone full monster.)
What’s more, Ozark has attracted not just Bateman but also Laura Linney — who plays Marty’s wife, Wendy — to its ranks. Linney is asked to play the most basic, trope-y version of “dark antihero’s wife” you could possibly imagine, right down to the parts where she takes her own dark turns and the show invites you to judge her for them.
Linney, too, is good, and Ozark is on its strongest footing when it’s a show about the tests that define any marriage. You can sort of see a version of this story being about a middle-aged married couple rediscovering their spark (or coming to loathe each other) when forced to work together on a criminal operation, except...
2) This was probably a good movie script
I don’t know this for sure, but the way that Ozark season one plays out almost exactly like the first act of a conventional Hollywood movie — right down to the twists that happen in the finale — suggests to me that co-creator Bill Dubuque, best known for his script for the movie thriller The Accountant, took a solid movie idea and tried to stretch it into a TV show. (His other co-creator, Mark Williams, is a longtime film and TV producer. This is his first writing credit.)
“Married couple turns to life of crime when their marriage starts to grow stale” isn’t the world’s most original premise, but with the right stars and a great director, it could make for a fun dark dramedy. But Hollywood almost never makes these sorts of movies anymore, which means they’ve shifted over to TV. Yet where a movie can get by with only one or two conflicts, TV needs many small conflicts that fit under the umbrella of its larger ones, which is where so many movie screenwriters get tripped up, including Dubuque.
That said, Dubuque is not the showrunner of the series. That title falls to Chris Mundy, who created and ran the short-lived AMC dark cop drama Low Winter Sun and was evidently brought in to take an already dark series and cover it in an additional layer of artisanal grit and grime.
This leaves Ozark stuck in two of the most harmful regions a TV drama can find itself: slow-moving and glum. It takes this thing two whole episodes to set up a pretty simple premise: Money launderer for a big cartel ends up working from a rural area. And it’s never met a scene it couldn’t make even more turgid and portentous. Worse, because it wants to keep going into future seasons, it loses its nerve all over the place. (It threatens to drown two separate, major characters in two separate scenes, then has both of them saved at the last second, in ways that made me roll my eyes.)
Then again, maybe that’s the point, because...
3) Ozark is set in rural America but has no idea what to do with that information
The most interesting character in Ozark is, for lack of a better comparison point, its Jesse Pinkman. Named Ruth and played by Julia Garner (Kimmy from The Americans!), she’s a 19-year-old would-be crime lord trapped in a family of poor, blue-collar backwoods drug-runners, who are derisively referred to, from time to time, as hillbillies or rednecks or what-have-you. (This ends up being an important plot point.) Marty needs to make peace with them — or maybe cut a deal with them — and Ruth ends up being the closest thing he has to an ally, though her true allegiances are uncertain throughout.
Ruth is a fascinating character precisely because she has something to lose. She’s smart and undervalued and ready to learn. Yet any choice she makes will wipe out dozens of possible futures. Sign up with Marty and she risks raising the ire of her family. Hew closer to them and she risks losing whatever connection to the larger world of crime Marty offers. The same dilemma regarding Marty applies to any number of characters living in the series’ rural setting, including a pastor who preaches from a boat to local boaters and the owner of a lodge Marty ends up taking over.
This means that, for all intents and purposes, Ozark is a white savior narrative, along the lines of Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai. In the white savior narrative, a character of European descent arrives in a nonwhite community and helps them realize how to move forward in life, while also learning lessons from them (usually about how their way of life is more “pure” somehow). There are good white savior stories and bad ones, but all of them have to guard constantly against tumbling over into stereotypes.
Ozark is not literally a white savior narrative, simply because all of the major characters are white. But it follows the same basic story arc of that trope, where an outsider who underestimates the new community he lands in arrives to both lead that community’s citizens toward a bold new future and learn from their homespun ways. The series is trying to put a dark gloss on this by setting it in the world of crime, but the beats are basically the same. And because Ozark doesn’t seem to realize this is the pool it’s playing in, it can’t avoid having almost every rural, lower-class character in its story become the most stereotypical version of themselves. Only Ruth escapes this fate, and that’s more due to Garner’s performance than anything else.
Ozark has given little to no thought about what would make people want to live within its world, beyond thinking that they’re trapped there. What makes these people want to attend a boat church? What world would they want to build if they had all the resources they needed? What do they know and understand that Marty never could? Ozark takes halfhearted stabs at answering all of these questions, but never with any conviction. It sees Marty, ultimately, as a tourist, no matter how much he insists that he’s moved to rural America forever.
If the rest of the show were better, this wouldn’t be a fatal flaw. Shows have overcome worse. But Ozark’s insistence on presenting the grimiest version of its story possible stands in the way of explaining why anything within its universe is happening. The presentation and the characters and the smug tone eventually coalesce into something deeply irritating, the TV series equivalent of one of those “Can you believe there are people who voted for Donald Trump?!” articles in a big-city newspaper. Ozark is offensive and doesn’t understand why it’s offensive — and that, in the end, is its greatest sin.
Ozark is streaming on Netflix. You could watch it, I guess.