Ozark

             I just finished bingeing on the first two seasons of the Netflix series Ozark, starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. It was very good, although maybe a bit too complicated in all the plot twists and turns involving their connections with the Chicago drug cartel and the Kansas City Mob. The two of them, Marty and Wendy Byrde, have agreed to launder money for the cartel. Marty is an accounting genius and he assures his wife that it would be perfectly safe for them and oh so lucrative. It requires them and their two children to relocate to Missouri in the Ozarks, where they have the task of proving to the cartel that he can actually create clean money of the dirty five million they give him. And the plot takes off from there.

Bateman was nominated for an Emmy for lead actor in a drama. And he’s excellent, as are all the people who live there on the miles and miles of shoreline on the lake created there—the Snells, who own a huge amount of the land along that shore and who grow poppies to make heroine for sale along the water; and the Langworths, trailer trash who are much smarter than people give them credit for, especially Ruth and her cousin Wyatt. Laura Linney as Wendy Byrde is so good she should also have been nominated for an Emmy. But my favorite of all of them has to be Julia Garner as Ruth Langworth. She is one tough cookie who, at nineteen, can take care of herself and all of those she loves. She has the turned-down mouth grimace down to a science. This series may not be quite as good as Fargo or Breaking Bad, but it’s still very good and I can’t wait to see what they do in the third season. And it, just like Fargo and Breaking Bad, makes blue language the norm, maybe even more so. As a person born in the Thirties, I didn’t think I could ever get used to the frequent use of Anglo-Saxon 4-letter words or of rather explicit nudity and sex scenes, but I did. Now it seems almost normal for everyone to talk that way. As with movies, the other thing I like about episodes done on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon is that they can slow down the dialogue and allow the characters to act instead of what we too often get on regular networking that have only so much time to tell their stories and must have their characters speak in incomprehensible, machine-gun staccato. There are places where we need pauses to let the faces do the talking instead of the mouths. We get a lot of that in Ozark. If you have Netflix, go there and binge on Ozark.