Happy families? Jason Bateman and Laura Linney in Ozark season two.
Warning: Contains spoilers for the second season of Ozark.
Netflix has always wanted Ozark to be its Breaking Bad. A worthy aim for sure, but a bit of a fool's errand.
Breaking Bad is one of the greatest television shows of all time. Without wanting to overstate things Walter White's journey from mild-mannered school teacher to hubristic meth kingpin was a triumph of ambitious storytelling, cinematic artistry and a display of true mastery over its medium.
Getting one of these three things right? Difficult. All three? Fuhgeddaboutit.
Ozark, it has to be said, does get damn close. It follows the numbers, perhaps a little too closely, and, on paper at least, has everything that made Breaking Bad such satisfying television.
But much like the accountant at the heart of its story, Ozark lacks the imagination, inventiveness and creative flourish needed to elevate it from great to exceptional.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't watch it. You should. Season one was really good and its new second season builds on those foundations in all the right ways. The world gets bigger, the stakes get higher, and the violence more frequent and dangerous. It expands and grows without ever bogging down or dragging.
The show's zippy pace is one of its strengths. It doesn't muck about. Aside from one ill-advised attempt at artiness late in the season, where an intro sequence needlessly fools about with the timeline by showing events in reverse order, it generally keeps things clean and simple.
Based on that frustrating attempt, it's a very good thing the show mostly plays it straight and gets on with it. There's terrible mob beatings, all-guns-blazing cartel hits, attempted patricide, poisonings, kidnapping, overdoses, extremely dirty politics, armed robbery and cold blooded murder. Oh yeah, a kid also gets expelled from school...
All problems and obstacles met with protagonist Marty Byrde's gulped catchphrase, "oh, okay". Likeable everyman Justin Bateman is almost too likable in this role. He's constantly stressed and frazzled, visibly weary and constantly churning water in an effort to not just keep him and his family afloat but also keep everyone not dead.
You can't help but root for Marty, he's struggling, often conflicted (albeit usually only momentarily) by a moral compass that doesn't completely point to the dark side yet, and he genuinely does try to help those around him.
But this season has been largely about his growing realisation that he's not just a removed accountant shuffling money around as he likes to believe. He's complicit, with blood on his hands and an increasingly active player in that dark, criminal world.
You could say he's broken bad. But he's been bad from the very start. Laundering dirty drug money for violent drug cartels most definitely marks you down as a bad person.
The show played off Bateman's easy appeal and likeable charm and we've been watching and waiting for him to fully go gangster as events spiralled wildly out of his well-planned control. Business partners went rogue, unlikely alliances grew increasingly tenuous, a brutal mob took an interest in him, a close associate became an FBI informant, a murder too close for comfort shook him to his core and, on top of that, his teenaged daughter wanted to emancipate.
Really, it was only a matter of time before poor old Marty cracked and either got a bad attitude, a goatee and a fancy hat or shrivelled up in the corner to sob hysterically.
But the real trick of season two, and why its recommended viewing, was that it had us watching the wrong person...
As the increasingly strained Marty gulped and got on with things his wife Wendy, played by the superb Laura Linney, was steadfastly arranging the chess pieces and ensuring the whole enterprise didn't disintegrate on them.
Using the calculating and scheming nous of her previous life as a high level political consultant, she's ensured Marty's crazy and unlikely plan to get a casino up and running for the cartel actually had a real shot at happening.
Wheeling and dealing, charming and seducing, and engaging in the dirtiest, grubbiest of politics, we've watched her motherly character morph into a fairly awful person - especially at the season's chilling conclusion when she coldly offers Marty the explanation that "it's always better to be the person holding the gun than the person running from the gunman" to explain choices she made that there's no returning from.
Ozark finally broke bad. And by choosing to break Wendy, instead of the expected Marty, next year's third season just got a whole heck of a lot more interesting.