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I just finished up Season 4 of Ozark. Woo boy, what a ride.
As a refresher, I do these reviews from time to time. (Here is a link to my Euphoria: Season 1 review). I break these into three categories: addiction, recovery, overall grade. There are a few mild spoilers but nothing that I think would ruin the show.
I’ll first give you a quick synopsis of the show. It stars Jason Bateman, Laura Linney and Julia Garner, and it’s a show that revolves around a money laundering operation run by Bateman’s character. He moves the family to the Ozark and starts working for a Mexican drug cartel. It is four seasons long, about 45 hours of total TV, and it is darkkkkkkkk. It’s a frantic whirlwind tour of a world filled with drugs, murder, money, greed and lots of broken laws—and broken people, too.
ADDICTION
As weird as this may sound, the show centers on drugs… and yet doesn’t deal much with actual usage. We stay with the power players of the cartel and the money laundering operation, so we don’t often see where all the opium harvest ends up and all the damage that is done.
There is an overdose from one minor character in the middle of a casino, and I found the run-up to his overdose to be quite convincing. You see him sneaking into bathroom stalls and hiding the amount of his use from everybody around him in a way that I could certainly identify with.
The main example of addiction came in Season 3, when we got introduced to a private investigator trying to stay sober. He eventually has a bad slip in a police evidence bunker, and he literally ends up with the evidence up his nose. It was a pretty jarring visual.
So there wasn’t a ton of addiction in the traditional sense of drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc. But I will say that I ended up identifying a lot with some of the characters because of the addictive nature of more. Everybody in the show wanted more—power, money, revenge, and on and on. My addiction is a disease of more, and it just so happens to be that I turned to drugs and alcohol. But it could have easily been other things that sucked out my soul instead of alcohol and drugs, and that is on full display in Ozark. Bateman and Linney, who play Marty and Wendy Byrde, don’t seem to have drug and alcohol issues, but “more is better” in everything they do.
I especially identified with the way their morals changed constantly to fit whatever they needed them to be. I certainly said I would never do about 100 things that I ended up doing, and that’s how the Byrde family operated. From episode to episode, you could see them doing gymnastics to try to bend their morals to fit their behaviors, and I shuddered a little bit watching a familiar story arc for me of slowly and steadily corrupting what the right thing to do is.
RECOVERY
The one big showcase of recovery is the PI who’s trying to get sober and stay sober, and the writing is pretty good for his character’s plot line. It’s pretty easy to tell when a show has a writer or two in the writers room who is in recovery or studied up hardcore on sobriety and how we talk. As anybody in sobriety can attest, there is a language we have that only other sober people can pick up on, and I found that to be the case with Ozark.
I did laugh out loud, though, at a crucial scene involving the sober PI guy calling his sponsor. I have sponsored many people over the years, and had a sponsor for the entire 13 years that I have been sober. I’ve heard some tricky issues that sponsees try to navigate with the help of their sponsor, but the one in Ozark is perhaps the most dreaded call you could ever get from somebody new to sobriety. I’m hoping I never get a call like this guy did.
The PI is in a seedy hotel room, after months investigating Bateman’s family for money laundering and killing multiple people. He knows the truth—that the Byrde family is capable of anything. Terrible, terrible people with a moral code that changed every 12 minutes. But they make him an offer for a full-time police job as long as he looks the other way on some truly horrific things that they did.
So the phone call from the PI to his sponsor laid it all out and asked what he should do. Imagine that call for a second. “Hey man, it’s me. I discovered a couple of murders that this family committed… but they got me a pretty good job offer to ignore it all. What do you think I should do?”
Uhhh, holy s**t, I’ve had a few calls over the years about whether somebody should get a new job or break up with their girlfriend, and those were hard to figure out what to say to the person on the other end. I can’t fathom throwing in a drug cartel and some death to the equation.
I won’t tell you what the sponsor says, other than to say he gave some feedback that I think 0% of current sponsors in the world would give about what the next right thing might be.
OVERALL GRADE
I loved the show. The actors are incredible in it, and the show is one of the most propulsive things I have ever watched. The characters are constantly being boxed into corners where you think they can never get out of… and then they do somehow, in ways that were always surprising.
I never could quite get my arms around where the show was heading, and I loved that about it. I also am very impressed by TV shows that are able to introduce you to bad people doing bad things, and then you end up rooting for them. As a writer, that’s really hard to do. That’s why most TV has good guys and bad guys, and there isn’t much nuance to them. They’re cardboard cutouts because that’s what they think the audience needs to understand motivations and actions.
That wasn’t the case with Ozark. The Byrdes do roughly 500 horrific things, some of the worst things people have ever done on TV, and yet I was rooting for them down the homestretch of what is an incredibly violent and cynical series finale. Bravo to the writers for that. It ain’t easy.
I’m giving the show an overall grade of 93. I took off a point or two for the laughable sponsor-sponsee conversation, and I also took off a few points because I don’t know what the show really has to say that is important for the world to see.
I think the finale takes a few swings at trying to give us a message that the world is corrupting and the bad guys always win. I don’t necessarily disagree with that idea, but it is a very cynical take and one that I think the show didn’t really lay enough breadcrumbs for. It felt like a show that is what it is—a nonstop dark, violent punch in the face that you can’t help but binge. If Ozark was a food, it’d be Sour Patch Kids: quite tasty, and you end up eating the entire bag… but don’t look at the nutrition information, because there’s not much nutritional value to it.
But that’s a pretty minor toe stub at the very end. Ozark was wild and worthwhile, in my opinion, and that’s why it’s in my top 10 of best shows ever on TV.
It also made me grateful for never having had to call my sponsor about what I should do regarding all the drug cartel murders and money laundering that I am investigating!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Two eggs, a sausage and an English muffin walk into a local bar for a drink. The bartender looks up and says, “Sorry, we don’t serve breakfast here.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2000, Trina W. from Elizabeth, Pennsylvania)
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