Whether you’re in the middle of a heat wave or feeling the first cool warmth of early autumn blow in, the ass-end of summer is the perfect time to return to Ozark. The blue water and gray skies, green trees and leafy ground, the misty morning docks and streets — there’s an end-of-season vibe to pretty much everything you see in the Ozark Season Two premiere. That’s the storyline, after all: Cartel accountant Marty Byrde and his wheeler-dealer wife Wendy have successfully bargained for their lives by spending the summer laundering millions of dollars in drug money by turning a sleepy lakeside tourist town into a cradle of enterprise for less-than-legal businesses. Unfortunately for them — and this is a paraphrase of the tagline for the second season itself — heroin has no off season.
Directed by star Jason Bateman, who’s turned the show into something of an auteur project, the premiere (“Reparations”) revisits many of the strengths displayed in the series’ first go-round last year. First and foremost, it delivers the kind of stoic savagery by chilly killers that people pretend not to enjoy about the show’s most direct antecedents (and likely inspirations, if Netflix’s algorithm-dictated creative model is anything to go by), Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
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I don’t think this amounts to much in terms of a moral message that applies to anyone’s daily lives in anything but the most broad-strokes allegorical way, but hey, not every prestige-format show has to actually have prestige. Sometimes atmosphere, a handful of enjoyable performances, and some murders are enough.
I’m back on the Ozark beat for Decider, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.
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