Family comes first

TV Se­ries

After four very in­tense sea­sons, the Ozark se­ries came to an end with­out dis­ap­point­ing its many fans. Until it was re­leased in the sum­mer of 2017, many peo­ple – Amer­i­cans in­cluded – had no idea what the Ozarks were: a moun­tain­ous, forested area of Mis­souri with a large num­ber of nav­i­ga­ble lakes and rivers. “The red­necks’ Riv­iera”, as one of the char­ac­ters de­scribes it. The so­phis­ti­cated Byrde fam­ily ends up in this part of deep Amer­ica. The fa­ther, Mar­tin, is a major fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sor from Chicago who years ear­lier de­cided to look the other way when his part­ner started laun­der­ing money for a Mex­i­can drug car­tel. A bad move from his the part­ner, how­ever, leads Mar­tin to find him­self in a dif­fi­cult po­si­tion: ei­ther he agrees to col­lab­o­rate more closely with the Mex­i­cans, or he and his fam­ily will be killed. The only so­lu­tion he can think of is to pro­pose the Ozarks as an ideal des­ti­na­tion – with more coast­line than Cal­i­for­nia – to laun­der huge amounts of money. Thus, with the con­stant threat on his life and those he loves, Mar­tin ends up get­ting more and more in­volved in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties. Ac­com­pa­nied by his wife, Wendy, and their teenage chil­dren, Char­lotte and Jonah, he will have to ex­change the lux­u­ries of Chicago for a shabby motel first and a house shared with a dying old man later. As we get to know the dif­fer­ent mem­bers of the fam­ily bet­ter – Wendy’s ex­ces­sive am­bi­tion, for ex­am­ple – a strong con­nec­tion is es­tab­lished with a fam­ily clan in the area, the Lang­mores, petty crim­i­nals who live in a car­a­van camp. This is where Ruth comes in, the 19-year-old daugh­ter. Every­thing she lacks in phys­i­cal­ity – she is very pe­tite – she has in bold­ness, stub­born­ness and badass­ness. Ruth will end up be­com­ing the right hand of Mar­tin, who has great dif­fi­culty find­ing busi­nesses from which to laun­der money.

The se­ries, with a great sound­track that sets music to a land­scape of mun­dane and human con­trasts, cap­ti­vates with in­trigue, sus­pense and un­ex­pected plot twists, al­ways with a sense of dan­ger hang­ing over the Byrdes, and gets us to end up em­pathis­ing with char­ac­ters who move be­tween du­bi­ous moral val­ues and the need to sur­vive. Much of Orzak’s suc­cess is due to the mag­nif­i­cent per­for­mances of Jason Bate­man – far from his typ­i­cal com­edy roles – Laura Lin­ney and Julia Gar­ner, in the roles of Mar­tin, Wendy and Ruth, re­spec­tively. Based on an idea from screen­writer and cre­ator Bill Dubuque, both Bate­man and Lin­ney were closely in­volved from the start. As well as being pro­duc­ers, they have also di­rected some episodes. In total, there are four sea­sons and 44 episodes of ap­prox­i­mately an hour each, which have ac­cu­mu­lated sev­eral Emmys and which lead to a sur­pris­ing, emo­tional and twisted end­ing that will leave no one in­dif­fer­ent.