Ozark Review

Ruth Langmore is the reason to watch. Julia Garner plays a young woman from a family of thieves who is smarter than everyone around her and knows exactly how little that will help, and she won three Emmys for it. Jason Bateman is deliberately opaque as Marty Byrde, and the choice pays off over time: a man whose only visible trait is competence turns out to be the most unsettling kind of accomplice. Laura Linney is better served still, and her steady progress from horrified spouse to the most ruthless person in the story is the strongest arc across all four seasons.

Bateman directed a long run of episodes himself and won an Emmy for it in 2019, and the photography is a real signature, everything desaturated to teal and slate until the whole state looks hypothermic. The plotting is the weakness. Each season repeats the same structure of one more deal, one new local faction and one betrayal, and the body count rises faster than the stakes. What carries the show past that is the marriage at its center, a partnership in crime that neither Byrde can leave, and the finale lands its last scene even where it reaches for more ambiguity than it has built.