But in the end, I enjoyed the bulk of my time in Ozark’s world. Clearly positioned as Netflix’s answer to the canonical prestive-TV crime dramas, it succeeded in creating a visually distinct world peopled with compellingly broken characters. With the exception of a Ben Davis here and a Ruth Langmore there, it never quite held the incandescent power of those earlier shows in its hands. But I appreciate the boldness of its core performances—Jason Bateman as the perpetually scowling Marty, Laura Linney as the crescendoingly dangerous Wendy, Julia Garner as the raw nerve that was Ruth Langmore. And I respect its bleak outlook, never bleaker than here in the finale—a view of a fallen world. Welcome to Ozark Country, population: us.

I reviewed the series finale of Ozark for Decider.

I’m starting to wonder if, in the end, we’ll look back at Ozark as primarily Wendy’s story rather than Marty’s or even Ruth’s. I wonder if watching her American dream completely fall to pieces, scattering dead bodies all along the way, is the whole point.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark for Decider.

“I know I’m not easy to love,” Wendy Byrde tells her husband Marty.

Long pause.

“…That’s not true,” he finally says.

But it’s the pause that does the talking here. I do believe Marty still loves Wendy, in that bone-deep way that people who’ve thrown their lot in together do—despite their bitter disagreements, despite their enmeshment in criminal conspiracy after criminal conspiracy, despite their constant life-and-death danger. Or maybe not despite them, but because of them. Hard though Wendy may be to love, I can’t see Marty taking her up on her suggestion that, after it’s all said and done, she’ll understand if he leaves her. They’re simply in too deep together. And in Ozark Season 4 Episode 12 (“Trouble the Water”) may well be where they finally start drowning.

I reviewed the antepenultimate episode of Ozark for Decider.

There’s other business to attend to in this episode, of course—Wendy and Camila attempting to force Claire Shaw to uphold her end of the old deal with Javi, Ruth getting declared Wyatt Langmore’s heir and thus the inheritor of a large portion of Darlene Snell’s holdings, FBI SAC Hannah Clay (Tess Malis Kincaid) trying to force Marty to remain in charge of the cartel—but I’ll freely admit to being most fascinated by the return of Rachel and Wilkes. These once-and-future main characters, seemingly swept aside for others, are now being put back in play for the show’s endgame. What will their moves at this late stage mean for the game at large? I have no idea—and that’s a thrilling place to be. More shows should leave the viewers guessing like this, I say. Bring it on.

I reviewed Ozark Season 4 Episode 11 for Decider.

Two momentous developments bookend Ozark Season 4 Episode 10. Both feature members of Wendy Byrde’s family. Both involve executions. But beyond that, they couldn’t be more different. It’s a hell of a parallel that writer John Shiban and director Melissa Hickey construct here, first showing us how a decent person dies, then how a deeply compromised person kills.

I reviewed Ozark Season 4 Episode 10 for Decider.

It’s business as usual in Ozark country. After a killer mid-season premiere that effectively functioned as an interlude based on a single plot point—the murder of Javi Elizondro by Ruth Langmore, in response to his murder of her cousin Wyatt—the show has returned to the status quo ante. Tense phone calls, shifting loyalties, last-second business deals, lots of characters driving back and forth to talk to other characters for two minutes or less: The tropes that have made Ozark what it is, for better and for worse, are back with a vengeance.

I reviewed Ozark Season 4 Episode 9 for Decider.

Ruth Langmore behind the wheel of her truck. Ruth Langmore standing in the middle of a country road. Ruth Langmore sitting atop her trailer. Ruth Langmore listening to music and sipping coffee in a diner. Ruth Langmore following Wendy and Marty Byrde. Ruth Langmore crying in an underground parking lot after shooting a man to death.

You could practically reconstruct the plot of Ozark Season 4’s mid-season premiere (“The Cousin of Death”) from lingering closeups of Ruth Langmore alone. Writer/showrunner Chris Mundy and director Amanda Marsalis know what a weapon they have in the form of actor Julia Garner—I’ve waxed rhapsodic about her myself, multiple times—and in this pivotal episode from the show’s final season, they’re firing at will. Even aside from the repeated use of lengthy shots of nothing but her face, this whole hour is a star turn for Garner, and a turning point in the life of the character she plays.

I’m covering Ozark‘s final episodes for Decider, starting with my review of the mid-season premiere.

Julia Garner. Julia Garner. Julia fucking Garner.

I reviewed the mid-season finale of Ozark Season 4 for Decider.

Simply put, there’s no way this ends well. The half-season itself, however, has every chance of ending very strongly—drawing on the smiling sociopathy of Laura Linney as Wendy, the badly damaged sweetness of Julia Garner as Ruth, the gawky gentleness of Charlie Tahan as Wyatt, and so on down the line. I just wouldn’t get too attached to anyone. There’s only one way all this ends, as the episode’s punning title “Sangre Sobre Todo” hints: Blood above all.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of the first half of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Ozark has a grim view of our country, and that may be its strongest characteristic. In Ozark’s world, everyone’s a grifter, everyone’s constantly hustling, everyone’s on the make and on the take. Art imitates life, you know?

I reviewed episode five of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Wendy Byrde is becoming a loose cannon in Ozark Season 4 Episode 4. Not that she’d acknowledge it if you asked, of course. Like just about everyone in the Byrde family, she’d be the first to tell you that everything’s under control, provided we all stick together As A Family. This, of course, became markedly harder to do after she made the Sophie’s choice of sacrificing her brother to protect her husband and children. (And herself.) Her son Jonah hates her, and has joined what amounts to a rival drug organization with Ruth Langmore and Darlene Snell. Her husband, meanwhile, watches dumbfounded as she repeatedly says, falsely, that her brother Ben had addiction issues—which is why, she says, he is missing today, and which is also why, she says, the Byrde Family Foundation has gone into business with Shaw Medical Solutions to open opioid rehab centers. 

“It’s reckless,” Marty says. 

“It’s good PR,” she replies.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ozark‘s fourth season for Decider.

There’s a point early on in Ozark Season 4 Episode 3 where FBI Agent Maya Miller notes that cartel boss Omar Navarro, with whom she has been dragged to a meeting, has a two-month-old son who was nearly killed at his own baptism. It’s a time frame worth remembering: Everything we’ve seen on this show since that baptism massacre—all the ups and downs, the betrayals and backstabbing, the schemes and plans, the life-changing upheavals—have taken place in a matter of just a few weeks. Ozark storytelling is a bit like the omicron variant: In just a little time, it’s fucking everywhere, man.

I reviewed the third episode of Ozark‘s fourth season for Decider.

The funny thing about Ozark is that despite packing so much plot into any given episode, it feels strangely slow-moving. Tons of stuff happens, but the sheer volume of plot mechanics is such that any one development hamstrings the movement of any number of others. I think that, ironically, the show would feel much faster and more gripping if it limited itself to a smaller number of storylines at a time. Is that likely? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Literally titled “The Beginning of the End,” the show’s final season premiere (technically speaking, anyway—the season will be divided into two parts, released separately) starts out in typical Ozark style, i.e. a shocking cold open. Perhaps you recall how Ozark Season 3 ended, with the Wendy and Marty Byrde’s frenemy Helen Pierce getting her brains blown out right in front of (and all over) them? Well, we start out half a continent and an unspecified amount of time away from all that. Wendy (Laura Linney) and Marty (Jason Bateman) chit-chat about an FBI meeting. Their kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), talk about leaving behind laundered money as a surprise for some lucky person in the future to find. They’re all so distracted by basically being happy together, for the first time in god knows how long, that they don’t see an oncoming truck until it’s (almost) too late.

Which, as I sit here thinking about it, is not a bad metaphor for Ozark in general. The Byrdes are constantly bombarded with do-or-die assignments and ultimatums, bearing down on them like a tractor trailer headed into oncoming traffic. In this episode, for example, they are tasked by cartel boss Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) with shutting down the heroin operation of local crime boss Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery) and securing some kind of sweetheart deal with the FBI for Omar himself, who wants to retire from his criminal enterprise a free man. This is how Ozark works: The Byrdes are told to do something under pain of death—in this case either at the hands of Omar himself or his grasping nephew Javi (Alfonso Herrera)—and we watch them figure out how to do it or die trying. No one’s died yet, so they must be doing something right.

I’m covering the first part of Ozark‘s bifurcated fourth and final season for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere.

Gripping? Yes. Great? Though it’s often talked about in the same breath as the likes of Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, two other shows about family men behaving badly, those comparisons don’t quite fly. Ozark is like those shows, sure. But prestige-TV analogies fail to recognize the difference between this series and the others: This is a Netflix show, designed by creators Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, showrunner Chris Mundy, and producer-director-star Jason Bateman, with Netflix’s binge model in mind. You’re meant to get onboard quickly and stay onboard for the duration. As such, Ozark’s creative decisions make it the Platonic ideal of a Netflix drama. It is its own unique beast.

I wrote about Ozark and the Netflix drama model for Vulture.

That episode begins with this scene of Ben alone in a taxi, talking to the driver a mile a minute, walking up to the edge of lucidity about his predicament but unable to do anything about it. I’ve read that you stuck to the script in that sequence, but your performance, it felt improvised in the best way.

That was written by Miki Johnson, and I’m sure we’ll all be hearing her name for years to come. Having finally seen what they used, I noticed that there were a few times where I was repeating lines; that must’ve been a certain take where I was just looking for a purchase.

But it was, in my opinion, some of the best writing that I had ever read. Even though on one level, objectively, you’re like, This is kind of rambling and doesn’t fully make sense, I thought that the writer did an amazing job of giving it this flawless emotional logic. Once you can find that, then it’s just a matter of, I want to show up word-perfect because I cannot make this writing better. There’s not a version of me improvising that scene that makes it better. The only thing that could happen with me improvising that scene is making it worse. She’s the writer for a reason, and she’s where she is for a reason, and so you just show up as prepared as possible.

So I spent weeks just going over and over and over the lines because that’s my job. When you know the lines that well, you do really give yourself the freedom to relax and play and let the words work through you, and you go for this ride where you’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen. I just can’t overstate this: It’s the kind of freedom and opportunity that is only possible when the writing is that good, and I really think it was that good.

I interviewed actor Tom Pelphrey about his phenomenal work as Ben in Ozark Season Three for Vulture.

And so passes a season of Ozark that largely, if not quite entirely, did away with the previous season’s writing tics—the timed ultimatums, the ultraviolence during the cold opens—and dug us deep into a brand new character, only to yank him away from us by the end, Sopranos-style. It may not be a canonical drama, no matter what the awards shows say, but it’s an entertaining one, and one that isn’t afraid to aim high now and then. At the end of last season I speculated that the show might be on the verge of greatness, and said I’d be thinking about it for a long time. I don’t think either of those predictions quite played out, but the show kept me engaged and never insulted my intelligence in the process. Sometimes, that’s plenty.

I reviewed the season finale of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

There’s a Sopranos episode, maybe you remember it, called “Long Term Parking.” In that episode, [CHARACTER A REDACTED] reveals to [CHARACTER B REDACTED] that they’ve been working with the FBI, in hopes that Character B, too, will want to flip on the mob. The two separate, and then Character A receives a phone call from [CHARACTER C REDACTED] that Character B has attempted suicide, and that [CHARACTER D REDACTED] will come pick Character A up to visit Character B in the hospital. As Characters A and D take that ride together, your brain reels back and forth from relief to dread to relief again, since it seems Character A is in the clear. Only they’re not, not by a long shot. Character D isn’t there to give them a ride—at least not the ride they wanted. Character D is there to drive Character A out into the middle of nowhere and murder them, which Character D does. All these characters who seemed to love Character A are revealed as charlatans, or at the very least as people who put their own safety ahead of every other consideration. If you pose a risk to the family, you will be killed. It’s that simple.

Anyway, the cinematographer for that episode of The Sopranos is Alik Sakharov. Sakharov also directed Ozark Season 3 Episode 9 (“Fire Pink”). Why do I bring that up? Oh, no reason.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

What we have here is a chickens-come-home-to-roost episode. Ozark Season 3 Episode 8 is titled “BFF” for reasons that I must say elude me at the moment; it’s the antepenultimate installment of Ozark‘s third season which sees a lot of long-delayed reckonings, as characters wake up to truths that should probably have been self-evident. And the truth hurts.

I reviewed episode eight of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

The thing I keep returning to while watching this show is how taxing it must be for Marty and Wendy to constantly have to think at maximum brain capacity, all day every day. Like, that casino license business—what must it take to keep stuff like that in line and still find the time and energy required to, I dunno, eat dinner or go to the bathroom or schedule a doctor’s appointment? It must be enormously draining for everyone involved. I think Ozark may be an experiment in seeing how far and how taut a string can be pulled before it finally snaps.

I reviewed episode seven of Ozark Season Three for Decider.