Tom's review: "Ozark" on Netflix

I grew up in rural Missouri, an hour or so north of Lake Ozark, the huge man-made lake locals like to boast has more shoreline than California has Pacific coastline. My parents honeymooned at The Lake (that’s what Missourians call it). I have friends and relatives who either live there full-time or spend every summer weekend at their vacation homes or aboard their houseboats. 

So I was excited to watch Ozark, a new Netflix series about Chicago financial planner Marty Byrde (played by Jason Bateman who also produced and directed) and his wife Wendy (Oscar nominee Laura Linney) who move to Lake Ozark to launder drug cartel money.

While staying in a fleabag motel, a suitcase containing millions in fresh crisp bills is stolen from their room by Ruth, a devious blonde with a painfully phony southern accent (played by New York actress Julia Garner whose performance has received stellar reviews). Ruth’s accent is doubly wrong because rural Missourians don’t speak with southern accents, they speak a derivation of Appalachian English, as spoken by the western Virginia/eastern Kentucky Scotch-Irish folks who settled the region 200 years ago. While Yankee viewers won't notice it, there’s a very real difference between a southern accent and the accent Ruth’s character should have used that will stick in the craw of any Missourian.

Marty confronts Ruth and, in return for a vague promise of eventually funneling some of the money back to her and her trailer-trash family, convinces her to give him back the suitcase. Ruth says sure.

A few episodes later, Marty makes Ruth the manager of a titty bar he has just bought from its unwilling-to-sell owner in order to launder cartel money. Ruth, who gave back $8 million in cash, happily agrees to a salary of $1,000/week. She hires new strippers, replacing one who appears to be nine months pregnant – the natives, the directors apparently assume, are so stupid and/or perpetually stoned they’ll watch anything – and rakes in $80,000 in revenue the first weekend. Not bad.

The bar’s former owner is murdered by the series’ main antagonist (more about him later) and found floating around the dock of Marty’s house but Marty convinces the sheriff it’s an unfortunate coincidence. The sheriff, a moron like every Missourian in Ozark, buys the story.

One Sunday morning Marty happens upon a church service being conducted on the lake by a minister preaching from a boat and has a Eureka moment; he can launder money faster by offering to build the congregation a physical church on land and inflating the costs. He and Wendy meet with the minister to propose the new building and the minister accepts. As if any preacher would say okay to such a generous gift from city slickers who just moved to town and bought a strip club.

Construction begins immediately but Marty, who, all things considered, has had an easy time because everyone he has dealt with up to this point has the IQ of a deer tick, finally meets his match, a local heroin dealer who has been laundering his ill-gotten gains through the strip club. The dealer is pissed not only because his launder-mat, the club, is under new ownership but because, once the church is built, he will have no way to distribute his heroin, a task he has been accomplishing by hiding it in hymnals passed out every Sunday to boat owners posing as church congregants.

There is no other way for the dealer to smuggle his heroin out of town. It is, apparently, impossible for him to drive it out, hidden in the wheel wells of his pick-up truck. Or to load it on boats, as the dealers did in Bloodline, another Netflix series. Nor does it occur to him to pack it in condoms and stick it up the orifices of his hillbilly buddies.

No, the only way to get that heroin on the street (and the whole plot revolves around this idiotic premise) is to continue packing it in hymnals distributed on the water, so it is absolutely, positively, essential that Marty not build that church. The dealer orders Marty to cease construction … or else.

The writers clearly didn't take into account that the dealer might want to consider another means of distribution because eight months out of the year, the boat church wouldn't be operational anyway due to the weather. Nor did they consider, when the dealer points out to Marty that the heroin-filled hymnals are a different shade of blue than the ones handed out to bona-fide worshipers, that they might as well hire skywriters to spell out, "Hey po-lice! We're doing something shady here!"

After seven episodes, I couldn't take any more and turned Ozark off.

There are dozens of other issues, large and small, that anyone who has ever spent any time at The Lake will spot instantly. For instance, a rich city kid, who winds up deflowering Marty’s 15-year-old daughter played by an actress who could easily pass for someone in her mid-thirties, purchases a six-pack of Busch. Any Missourian knows that rich kids buy Bud, not its cheaper sister brand. Busch is for po’ folk.

Ozark, in my opinion but not the opinions of professional reviewers who have generally given it favorable (albeit tepid) reviews, is unwatchable. The script is God-awful; the writers obviously believe viewers are as dumb as the natives. The characters are either crooked, stupid, insane, inbred, or any combination thereof. There isn’t one who is likable or even vaguely admirable, including Marty’s 13-year-old son for whom viewers should have some sympathy because, through no fault of his own, he was just yanked from his cushy suburban Chicago existence and set down in Deliverance, but he eviscerates animals for fun.

What is, ultimately, most disturbing is that the lead actors agreed to lend their names to this dreadful soap opera. Didn’t it ever occur to them to say, “Wait a minute, this is really bad writing?” Or did they simply take the job for the money? Either way, viewers need to hold Bateman and Linney accountable when deciding whether to watch future series or movies in which they may appear lest those vehicles turn out to be as simple-minded as Ozark.

To add insult to injury for Missourians who hoped to enjoy the scenery of their home state, the exteriors weren’t even shot around Lake Ozark but in Georgia. Missouri officials, according to an interview I read with the show’s creator, a St. Louis headhunter turned screenwriter, wouldn’t give the producers tax breaks.

Good for them.