It seems like it was just yesterday that I was watching Wendy’s extramarital lover, Gary, being thrown off a 50th floor balcony,shocking me when it body splattered in front of Marty Byrde as he is on the way to confort Gary. This would only be the first of many moments that would leave me shocked with the negligence of Ozark’s characters and how it affects their decisions within the show. 

Ozark debuted into the summer of 2017 and generated some hype due to the fact that it was helmed by Jason Bateman and the starred Laura Linney, but there is no way Netflix would be prepared for the tsunami of popularity, attention and credibility that it would give to the streaming platform.  It drew instant comparisons to Breaking Bad with the similar themes of dropping the perceived average middle class American guy (Marty Byrde and Walter White) in a high stress criminal enterprise and the effects it would have on their family and spouses reaction. While these two shows’ themes overlapped, it became clear by the second season that Ozark was something uniquely its own.  The writers of the show were able to use the Byrde family to create ripple effects and longstanding marks on the sleepy community that is the Ozarks.  

Another thing that was a stark change from Breaking Bad was the lighting and coloring of the show. You can make a case that the lighting is a bigger character then some of the Byrde family members given what it conveys and how it communicates the starkness and gravity of all the situations happening on the show. There are even reddit threads and youtube essays dedicated to it. The lighting immediately captures the viewer’s eye with dark grays, greens, and crisp blues standing out from f shows like Snowfall or  Narcos, which invite the viewer in with a warm tint and color.

The characters outside of the Byrdes are really the ones that extend the reality into this universe.  While the Byrdes are the foundation for the show, the auxiliary characters provide the house frame and hold the Byrdes accountable for their sometimes careless actions. There are the cartel players: Navarro and his lawyer and consigliere, Helen. They both have varying levels of do-not-fuck-with-me-or-I-will-run you-over-energy. Then we have the Snells, a group of farmers who are secretly one of the biggest heroin producers in the Midwest. You feel like Darlene Snell the wildest of the wild in a deck full of wild cards; she’s the more ruthless and aggressive spouse, committing random killings and threatening Wendy Byrde at a farmers market with an infant in a stroller in her care. Auxiliary characters in most TV shows are forgettable but in Ozark they shine with their oddities and fleshed out backgrounds. There is the old guy in the basement of the home, Buddy, that they buy who becomes a septuagenarian enforcer and liaison for the Byrde crime syndicate. Even the law enforcement in the show has layers. There’s the vindictive and psychotic FBI officer, Roy Petty, who is willing to do anything to get the Byrdes, even establishing a fake gay relationship. We also get to see glimpses into Roy’s real family life and how even he has to deal with things like an ungrateful and incompetent older mother who he has to take care of. Then there’s pregnant FBI agent Maya Miller, who strikes a kinship with Marty but realizes her duty to take him and the Navarro Cartel down. You also have lesser characters like Tuck (the engaging and endearing Down syndrome kid who works with Marty) who we are led to believe have no real contribution to the plot but end up causing ripple effects that have major implications that even lead up to the very last scene  in the show’s series finale. With a great TV show  you see the characters develop and grow into their current aspirations and how they’re molded from their past interactions and experiences from previous seasons. Ozark does this amazingly with an arguably more important family than the Byrdes, the Langmores.

Ruth Langmore, the de facto boss of the Langmores, had a great quote that shows the similarities to her and Marty and how they are explicitly tied. “Everything he touches turns to dogshit. I’m starting To think we might be related.” While all of the other characters extended the reality of the show, the Langmores gave history to that reality. The Langmores represent the other side of the same coin that the Byrdes are on. While both families are looking for the same core elements(wealth and social mobility), the Langmores are poor and the Byrdes are middle class. This social economic shield allows the Byrdes to succeed and capitalize on their criminal enterprise, turning it into real power, while the Langmores are perpetually destitute. The different sides of the same coin theory for the two families is illustrated best in the last episode of the series. The viewers are exposed to starkly different consequences of both families’ similar efforts of social mobility. Ironically Ruth Langmore is the one most affected by the poison that is known as the Byrde family.

In the first season of Ozark, the Byrde family is portrayed as a family thrust into the extraordinary circumstance of moving to the Ozarks from their normal lives in Chicago to work for the Navarro Cartel, something they are forced into and really struggle doing. But as we get further into the series we start to realize that they start to embrace and flourish under this situation and each family member  evolves in their own way because of it. Charlotte, the daughter, is probably the most vocally opposed to the precarious situation that the Byrde’s have gotten themselves into, even threatening to leave her family and take a bus back to Chicago. But like so many characters in the show she is eventually lured like a moth to the flame and becomes an active participant in the Byrde criminal enterprise. Then there is Jonah, the son, who is an introverted but smart pre-teen who is struggling with the fact of what his parents are apart of, even watching graphic clips of killings from the Navarro clan on his laptop. He struggles with the perils of adolescence and how he can contribute to the family regardless of how toxic it is. Just like any son he starts to pick up traits from both his mother and father,developing his own independence by replicating tactics seen from Wendy and then starting to go into the family business of criminal accounting like Marty.  This aspect of the kids replicating the behaviors that they see their parents do is one of the key themes in the show and shows how Marty and Wendy naively lead their kids into the same world that they had protected them from all these years.

At first glance and because of the poster, it is easy to think the main character of the show is Marty. But I think it shifts after the first season to both he and Wendy being the central protagonists and how the horrific situation they are thrown into ironically keeps their marriage

Together. It allows them to evolve into a prominent and powerful couple, which otherwise would not have not happeedn in Chicago. Both spouses use their skill set to expand their power. With Marty, it’s his accounting and operational expertise while with Wendy it’s her penchant for navigating and getting shit done within the political world. During both characters’ evolution throughout the show they run into other characters that eventually find out what the Byrdes are doing with their criminal syndicate and how they react to that individually and how it changes them. In Season 3 there is the saga of Andrew, Wendy’s bi-polar brother who we’re introduced to in the first scene when he throws a 6th graders phone in a wood chipper and get into a fight with a groundskeeper.  

This is just a small preview of how erratic Andrew is and a snapshot of how he would react throughout Season 3 as he finds out what the Byrdes actually do. Wendy, the control freak, reacts to his popping up with erratic behavior herself: lying to the cartel, lying to Andrew and eventually taking Andrew on the run after he pisses off the cartel. During this saga, 

Wendy realizes she has to make hard decisions regarding Andrews disobedience and how that paints a permanent stain on her in the eyes of her kids. But Marty has to deal with the choices made by Helen, the cartel’s lawyer in the Ozarks, and how her intuition that the Byrdes are lying lead to Marty being kidnapped by the Cartel. During this kidnapping Marty is confronted with not only this traumatic situation but his traumatic childhood memories as well (the Cartel blinding him with fluorescent light and playing metal music around the clock does not help either). But as with most things in life, when you are pushed to your limit physically or mentally and you do not die, it makes you stronger. After this event, Marty is less fearful and more stoic. There is a sense amongst the viewers that he has turned into the badass that he didn’t know he could be.

Ozark has entered the hall of TV classics such as The West Wing and The Sopranos that people will be talking about and mentioning it for the next 50 years (even the display name of my iPhone is the Byrde Foundation. It has drawn acclaim from celebrities such as Vince Staples, Jimmy Kimmel and Lebron James.  Ruth Langmore’s walk was recently mentioned in a meme that included a model from an Adidas Balenciaga fashion show in an S&M get up. If the fans can recognize one of the characters’ mannerisms out of  that, it’s safe to say that Ozark will be remembered as one of the staples of not just the streaming era but TV as a whole.