So, let’s talk about running times. As has been customary in previous seasons, Ozark Season 3 routinely presents us with episodes that run right up to, and sometimes cross, the full 60-minute mark. In the past I might have called this “Netflix Bloat,” part and parcel of the same mindset that led the Netflix/Marvel collaboration series to run, oh I dunno, four to six episodes too long each season.

In Ozark‘s case, at this point anyway, I don’t think that’s a fair criticism. I never feel bored during an episode, never wonder why we’re spending time watching the cinematic equivalent of paint drying—the way I often did on Jessica Jones or Luke Cage, when characters would be shot just walking to the places where actual scenes were happening, as if the show needed to clear its throat before actually getting down to business.

What Ozark‘s lengthy runtimes do produce is a sense of disconnection between what happens at the start of an episode and what happens at the end of it. For example, Ozark Season 3 Episode 6 (“Su Casa Es Mi Casa”) ends when Ben Davis, off his meds for a previously undisclosed bipolar disorder, and his nephew Jonah Byrde track Ruth Langmore to a cash dropoff that goes south when unknown parties in black SUVs show up and gun down the Kansas City mob grunts tasked with the dropping off before blowing up the truck they were driving.

I was so engrossed by the whole business—by seeing how Ben’s condition was manifesting itself, by Jonah’s use of his drone, by the evident care and tenderness Ben feels towards Ruth, by Ruth’s relationship with the KC assholes, by whether they were going to fuck with her again, by whether Ruth would get out of there in time when the shit hit the fan—that I completely forgot how the episode began.

I reviewed episode six of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

I believe that covers everything? This is an eventful show, with a real gordian knot’s worth of plot threads. It’s to the point where it can be hard even to remember where we were this time last season. (Remember Rachel and the Blue Cat? They haven’t even been so much as mentioned.) One moment you’re digging up dirt on an FBI agent and the next you’re apologizing to a horse breeder for cutting an animal’s nuts off for no good reason. Then again, I suppose this is how life feels for the Byrdes, perhaps the busiest main characters in any prestige drama I can remember. Every time Wendy asks Charlotte to put something on her schedule I cringe a bit inside. How much more can these people take?

I reviewed episode five of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

In the end, Marty gets dropped back off at home after his forcible sojourn to Mexico, and all is right with the world, more or less. But there are ominous signs for the future. (Aren’t there always?) I’ve got no idea how his scheme to corrupt a federal agent is supposed to play out. And Helen’s warning to Charlotte (who knows nearly everything about her family’s dirty deeds) that no one must ever tell her daughter Erin (who’s in the dark) anything lest they face dire consequences is a Chekov’s gun if ever there was one. This is not a show in which people succeed in keeping secrets; indeed, constant revelations are the very engine that powers the entire story. Poor Erin Pierce is gonna find out soon enough what her mother’s real job entails, and I wouldn’t want to be in the blast radius when that particular bomb goes off.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ozark Season 3 for Decider.

But most promising of all, I think, are the curveballs the episode throws. I like how out-of-nowhere Wendy’s decision to reclaim custody of Ezekiel is; that makes it hard to pin down as just another plot beat and makes it seem more like the product of a personal decision. I also like how Uncle Ben seems like…not such a bad dude! He’s a fine confidant for Wendy, who tearfully tells him about the affair she had that helped blow up her marriage (“It fuckin’ sucked” is her verdict after the fact), and a halfway decent suitor for Ruth, who like I said actually smiles at the dude. (It says a lot about Julia Garner’s talent that she can make her character scowl in like forty different expressive ways, to the point where you might not even notice she’s never happy until, all of a sudden, she is.)

I reviewed episode three of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

As a title, Ozark pegs the show to a unique location. It has a nice oddball ring to it as well. But if this show were looking for another name, A Series of Unforeseen Events would work pretty well. Every time Marty and Wendy Byrde do…well, pretty much anything, some other unexpected thing comes back to bite them in their collective ass.

I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

These strongly delineated characters, and the performances behind them, keep the show afloat. As Marty, Bateman is all quiet cynicism and resignation; he always seems to be struggling just to get through the day, and his volume never rises above a four. Linney’s Wendy alternates between chipper, we-can’t-lose plan-making and peals of derision when her saturnine husband tries to shoot her down. And Garner, the real star of the show, portrays Ruth as a woman who always has to keep proving herself, sometimes succeeding, sometimes lapsing into impulsive outbursts of anger when someone accuses her of falling short.

You can string a lot of story between these three opposing poles, that’s for sure. They’re sturdy, they’re easily recognizable, and they play off one another beautifully. (It’s impressive, in its way, for the show’s auteur Bateman to continuously take a back seat to the more dynamic performances of his leading ladies.) The Redneck Riviera setting and the tangle of competing criminal enterprises give the show its own unique flavor, too. Yes, the show has its obvious precedents and its storytelling tics, but I’m still glad the Byrdes are back.

I reviewed episode one of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

I’ve never been quite sure if Ozark is about anything. Its criminal parable is so broadly drawn, and the plot is so oddly specific (all those timed ultimatums), that it’s hard to read it as anything but the crudest allegory for the corrupting effect of money and secrets. But it uses its gorgeous watery and woodsy locations as well as any show this side of Game of Thrones, it gives interesting actors a chance to dig deep, and it seems comfortably settled into a slow-and-steady pace. Breaking Bad comparisons are well and good, but I wonder if The Americans isn’t a better point of reference. Like Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, Marty and Wendy Byrde are living the nightmare side of the American dream, trying to pretend to the world, and their children, that there are no monsters under the bed at all when they are those monsters themselves. It’s a show I’ll be thinking about for quite a while.

I reviewed the season finale of Ozark for Decider. Given Netflix’s track record there’s no way of knowing if the show’s current level of quality can be maintained, much less improved, but it really does remind me of where The Americans was at at this stage in its development: not great yet, but carrying the seeds of greatness within.

The episode’s cold open gives us a sense of what the Snells in one another, and how Darlene’s wild side is not some out-of-the-blue thing, as it’s at times seemed. In a flashback set to Glen Campbell’s gorgeous romantic dream of a song, “Witchita Lineman,” we see Jacob as a just-returned Vietnam veteran, clean cut in his uniform. Darlene is a young hellcat — there’s no other word for it — who crashes the date he’s on at the local diner and, promising him a life of excitement that won’t leave him wishing he’d died in ‘Nam after all, whisks him away to skinnydip. She’s half naked by the time she even introduces herself. So, y’know, I get it.

So does Jacob. During a rueful conversation with Marty and Helen, he learns he’s made an error that gives the government claim to nearly all his land just like what happened to his ancestors in 1929. The camera lingers on actor Peter Mullan throughout Marty and Helen’s explanation of just how badly he’s gotten swindled, giving it an effect that’s like the opposite of the similar “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE” speech at the end of There Will Be Blood — here, the point isn’t the glee Jacob’s enemies take in beating him, since they really aren’t taking any, but in his own sense of failure, his realization that Darlene was right and they never should have gone into business with the cartel, his other realization that things wouldn’t have gotten this bad if Darlene could control her anger, and no doubt a sense of stupidity about spending a lifetime trying hold on to what his family built up from nothing, only to lose it all again. (Though millions in cash from the casino would probably salve the pain a little.)

Anyway, at the end of it all, he asks Marty this: “What do you do, Martin, when the bride who took your breath away becomes the wife that makes you hold your breath in terror?” It’s a gorgeous, portentous line, and Mullan savors it; I wish he’d had been given anything that Boardwalk Empire/Deadwood-memorable during his recent stint on Westworld, just for example. He knows he forged a connection with Darlene so deep from the start that severing it will be a disaster. He was just wrong about who’d bear the brunt.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. Love Peter Mullan, love Julia Garner.

Now that’s more like it. After treading water for an episode with a ginned-up kidnapping crisis and Screenwriting 101 religious debate involving a character way past his sell-by date, Ozark returns to its strengths in this antepenultimate installment of Season 2. Titled “The Big Sleep,” it’s a slow-burn affair that spends its time widening the cracks in the Byrde clan, ratcheting up tension between their various partners, and digging into the fundamental questions of family, trust, and honor among thieves that serve as the show’s primary fuel. All without a “you have 24 hours” deadline in sight.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. I want David Lynch to make another movie or show just so he can work with Julia Garner in it.

You have 48 hours to find an episode of Ozark Season 2 in which no one is given 48 hours to do something. Or 24 hours. Or two minutes. Or any artificially imposed time frame, actually, though I mention those numbers specifically because all three are cited in ultimatums issued in this episode alone. A black-marketeer gives Ruth and Cade Langmore 48 hours to steal a fancy thermal imaging system for him in exchange for ten thousand dollars. Marty Byrde gives Darlene Snell two minutes to tell him where she’s hiding his wife Wendy before siccing the cartel on her. Pastor Mason Young gives Marty 24 hours to retrieve his infant son from the foster system or he’ll kill Wendy, whom he’s kidnapped. Ozark Season 2 Episode 7 is called “One Way Out”; it might as well be named that after the strategy employed by the writers’ room.

Honestly, the timed-ultimatum thing is more funny than anything else at this stage, to the point where I wonder if it’s not intended to be some kind of recurring gag. The bigger problem with this episode, which follows one of the series’ strongest, is how much it feels like wasted time.

I reviewed episode seven of Ozark Season Two for Decider. This one is an old-school wheel-spinner digression, though holy shit, Julia Garner puts in work as Ruth Langmore.

This one sneaks up on you. After a big prestige-crime blowout in Episode 5, the second season of Ozark heads into the homestretch in the cryptically titled “Outer Darkness,” its sixth and best episode. The title phrase calls to mind cosmic concepts from Lovecraft and Tolkien, but the episode itself is a stately and intimate thing — a surprisingly thoughtful mood piece about death and the severing of human connection by both mortality and immorality. I dug it.

I reviewed the elegiac episode six of Ozark Season Two, my favorite hour of the show to that point, for Decider.

I’m much less sold on the waterboarding of Ruth Langmore, orchestrated by Helen to determine whether or not she’d ratted Marty out or if his trust in her, despite it all, was valid. I get the need to portray the cartel as the supreme badasses, and to sell Helen as the slay-queen sort who can torture teenagers on behalf of mass murderers but still wish she was at home playing with her kids; since you can’t just pause the action and turn to the camera and recite the URL for these cliches on TVTropes this will have to do.

But I have a harder time swallowing the idea that a billion-dollar drug operation believes this form of interrogation yields any useful information whatsoever when everyone outside the Republican Party knows it just makes people say what they think you want to hear, or that we as viewers need to suffer through the brutalization of a teenage girl to reinforce the bogus notion that Torture Works.

To add insult to injury, the scene was superfluous, because the issue of whether or not Ruth would flip was already tense and emotional as it was. You had the whole weird sexualized intimidation routine with Petty. You had the normally stalwart Ruth hiding, crouched in strip club office, wondering how to make it past the cartel alive. You had Marty learning Ruth had tried to kill him, and Ruth learning that Marty learned it, and Marty talking to Ruth directly about it, and Ruth admitting it. You had Wendy and Cade floating around in the mix too, with their own agendas and reactions to everything. Wasn’t watching these four people figure out what to do about the mess they were in more interesting than a Zero Dark Thirty reenactment?

I will at least give the show credit enough to believe that Ruth’s experience will wind up being the most important aftershock of this sequence, not Cade’s thirst for revenge or Marty’s guilt; Ozark has taken great pains to build Ruth up as its most interesting and well-rounded yet still difficult character, and I don’t see them suddenly non-lethally fridging her to make the menfolk feel things. But I can really only talk about what’s on screen in the here and now (at least until the Netflix UI automatically rolls me over into the next episode), and it was corny and ugly and pernicious. I expected better, and more entertaining to boot.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. I wanted to draw attention to this (uncharacteristically) unsavory and unnecessary sequence in particular.

Ozark is getting weird in its old age. Why not, right? When you’ve got ten full Netflix-length hours of television to fill — the kind of runtime that makes a show feel old not even halfway into its second season — with nothing more than blue-gray early-autumn atmosphere punctuated by the occasional out-of-nowhere escalation of the threat level that Ozark employs as plot movement, you can afford to do some strange, melancholy shit. And “Stag” (Season 2 Episode 4) does it in spades.

I reviewed episode four of Ozark Season Two for Decider. It’s nice to see a show flow out into little stylistic filigrees every now and then. It shows confidence.

So you can add another ticking time bomb to the pile as the FBI gets back into the action, along with Wilkes, the Snells, the cartel, the mob, the Langmores, and no doubt other players to be named later. We’ll bet you an investment opportunity in a promising local business that at least one of these storylines will involve someone getting shot in a cold open. If it ain’t broke, right?

I reviewed episode three of Ozark Season Two for Decider. This show sure loves timed ultimatums and shooting people during the opening sequence.

If it wasn’t already apparent, women have the meatiest and most engaging material throughout the hour. Aside from Wendy’s power-playing and will-she-or-won’t-she angle and Darlene’s out-of-the-blue baby fever, there’s Ruth Langmore to consider. The young gun has been netting bigger and better assignments from her boss Marty for a while now, including a $25K per year raise, various management responsibilities, and the task of securing the purchase of a Proud Mary–style riverboat to serve as the cartel casino, which she manages by tipping over the seller’s wheelchair and kneeing his sniveling underling in the balls.

But Ruth is still very much under the thumb of her father Cade. She spends most of the episode regaling him with a vision of a picket-fence future paid for by Marty’s money, and winds up watching him stick up a convenience store just for fun, before he bashes her head into the dashboard of their car and insists she figure out a way to fuck the Byrdes out of their money, or else. That there’s an incestuous edge to all of this goes without saying.

And far, far away, Rachel (Jordana Spiro) resurfaces. You remember Rachel: She was the original owner of the Blue Cat Lodge, a sad-ass lakeside motel that Marty turned into his main front business. Once she got wind of what he was really up to, she stole a hundred grand and hit the road, and has apparently been living from flophouse to flophouse ever since.

When she gets brought in for DUI, who should resurface but Agent Petty (Jason Butler Harner), whose lover Russ Langmore got electrocuted by Ruth over all the Byrde-related craziness. He’s now out for vengeance — though why he needs any witnesses cooperation when the feds are clearly all over the Byrdes’ operation is beyond me — and, in a tedious tough-guy speech, he forces Rachel to help him take his quarry down. I may not be 100% sold on, well, any of this, but the entertainment value is as tough to dispute as a three-strikes-and-you’re-out felony verdict.

I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Two for Decider. It’s one of the most “if you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like” shows in recent memory. (I kinda like it.)

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.

[…]

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.

Marty himself still feels odd. I think Jason Bateman (who directed the finale) has done fine work with the character, particularly during moments of rage; it’s hard to articulate, but Marty gets angry the way real people get angry, in concentrated but random bursts. Yet overall, Byrde reminds me of another business-whiz antihero whose show took a while to figure him out: Joe MacMillan, Lee Pace’s character from Halt and Catch Fire. During Halt‘s first season Joe felt more like a series of gestures in the direction of a person than an actual person. The comparison isn’t perfect — Joe was designed to be a larger-than-life, master-of-the-universe type whose secrets and foibles were just as grandiose as his ego and successes, and Marty is a much more low-key figure. On Halt, the supporting characters carried the weight until Joe could catch up, or more accurately until the writers figured him out. The powerful scenes in this episode involving Ruth and Wyatt dealing with Russ’s death, Charlotte and Jonah struggling with the idea of forming new lives under new identities without their father, and Agent Petty doing his best Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire as he explodes with rage after the failure to arrest Del, remind me of that dynamic.

I reviewed the season finale of Ozark, and wrote out some thoughts on the season as a whole, for Decider. In the end, despite problems like the one above, I found there was more to enjoy than not. I’m glad I watched it.

So I hope you’ll bear with me for a brief rant about Netflix and spoilers. I’ve never understood the contrarian contention that spoilers don’t matter at all. When I say spoilers matter, I’m not joining forces people who complain that the review they chose to read of a movie they haven’t watched yet contains some plot information. Nor am I basing the argument on stories that have nothing more going for them than some big twist, without which the drama is sucked out entirely. What I’m saying is that the rate and timing of plot information is an artistic decision, just like the casting or the editing or the soundtrack or the cinematography. Ideally, you’d learn what happens in the story when it happens in the story, as per the filmmakers’ design.

If you care about art in this way, Netflix’s “the whole season drops at once” model essentially mandates that you cram a show down your throat as fast as possible simply to avoid getting spoiled. As a business move, it’s very canny, since it creates the self-reinforcing impression that viewers can’t get enough of each show. And since most of their many, many, many original series arrive with no fanfare, by the time you hear enough about a new show to get interested, the people who happened to climb aboard right away are already talking about the finale. That spoilery video I mentioned above? It was uploaded just four days after the season debuted. Imagine watching a whole new season of Twin Peaks or Game of Thrones or The Leftovers that way. It’s insane!

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season One — and also went off on a huge rant about spoilers and Netflix’s “whole season at once” compulsory-binge business model — for Decider. Don’t let that stop you from reading the thing, though — once again, the cast playing the Langmores do beautiful work here.

Ozark depends on momentum. Not as much as our old breakneck-speed friend Breaking Bad did, of course. Nor even as much as the show it reminds me of the most, Mad Dogs — Shawn Ryan and Amazon’s one-season wonder about middle-aged city slickers who get hopelessly in over their heads with a Latin American drug cartel in a verdant coastal environment where none of them belong. But Ozark did establish its métier as early as the pilot: Marty’s going to keep escalating things, or other people will keep escalating things for him, to the point where the series will burn through more major antihero-drama plot points in an episode than other shows do all season.

So it’s a curious choice, after the emotional explosiveness of the previous episode, to do what Ozark does in its eighth installment, “Kaleidoscope.” Rather than continue the escalation in the present, the show flashes back ten years, revealing what happened to set Marty, Wendy, and (surprisingly) Agent Petty on their respective roads to psychological ruin.

I reviewed episode eight of Ozark for Decider. It’s a flashback episode that has its moments, but also enough missteps to make it a wash.

This is all prelude to the final sequence, which crosscuts between Marty and Wendy having a knock-down drag-out fight about their life together and Charlotte, exhausted after a long and arduous day during which she attempted to flee “home” to Chicago, nearly drowns in the dark lake. Marty is incensed to discover that Wendy has been making plans to return the kids to their hometown officially, which he reads as a run-up to her departure as well. In response, he blasts her with both barrels about her affair, rattling off all the moments she could have said “no” to her lover in a truly painful litany. Wendy tearfully responds that without any intimacy or affection from Marty, all of which dried up the moment they decided to launder drug money, there was no reason for her to say no. When he says that he’s only keeping her around out of “necessity, not desire,” she asks him why he didn’t simply let Del kill her when he had the chance, and Marty doesn’t even have an answer. All the while, Charlotte is struggling for air, and seemingly succumbs, only to regain her strength and launch herself back above the surface, the smile on her face indicating some sort of perverse exhilaration in this brush with death.

The sequence brings out the best in all three actors: Jason Bateman pushes his odd Type A energy into the red, Laura Linney gets to work with real desperation and trauma, and Sofia Hublitz continues to plumb the umpteenth sullen-teen-daughter character you’ve seen on prestige TV for new depths. No pun intended, honest — the fine work being done here is no joke.

I reviewed episode seven of Ozark for Decider. It really was the Langmores’ episode in many ways, as I describe for the bulk of the review, but this final sequence with Marty, Wendy, and Charlotte hit hard.