Ozark got better by stepping out of Breaking Bad’s shadow
When it premiered, Ozarkwas met with a certain degree of skepticism and even suspicion. Though it garnered positive reviews, many TV critics had mixed emotions about the latest sleek Netflix drama. “A lot happens but not much is going on,” wrote Mike Hale of The New York Times,while over on Vox, Emily St. James found the white guy antihero trope lazy and overdone. It was universally acknowledged that the show was binge-worthy — the metric streaming services furiously chased back in the day. But it was just as quickly described as “tired,” “phony,” and as “taking itself suffocatingly seriously.”
Not helping matters was the fact that a critical darling loomed large over the show, inviting comparisons that Ozarkwould never match. That show, of course, is Breaking Bad, the crown jewel of the good-guy-turned-drug-kingpin genre. It was inevitable to put them side by side given some of their similarities. After all, in Ozark’s earlier episodes, it did seem like Marty (Jason Bateman) was going to be the heart of the show. It’s his voice we first hear, waxing poetic about how “money is, at its essence, that measure of a man’s choices.” When we meet him, though, his decision-making is nothing short of catastrophic. To avoid being shot in the head by his pissed-off cartel clients, Marty strikes a deal: He’ll help them launder millions of dollars in exchange for his life. To do so, he moves his wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), and two kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), to rural Missouri, where he hopes his criminal activities will be easier to pull off undetected.
In both Ozark and Breaking Bad, we had two middle class men trying to provide for their families. Circumstances had driven them to the underworld of
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