Dr. Thomas J. West: I think that Ozark is significantly more interesting than Breaking Bad. It’s not that I don’t like Breaking Bad. In fact, like so many other viewers, I found myself utterly transfixed by Bryan Cranston’s performance as Walter White, the school teacher who turns to cooking high-grade meth to help pay his medical bills and begins a slide into moral depravity. And it has to be said that in some ways Ozark is a bit derivative of Breaking Bad (though it’s also fair to point out that Breaking Bad was itself derivative of other crime dramas that preceded it). Like its predecessor, it focuses on a mild-mannered man who gets increasingly caught up in the world of drug cartels and money laundering. Marty flees to the Ozarks with his wife Wendy and their two children Jonah and Charlotte to set up a new series of money laundering operations for his drug cartel overlords, as they get further sucked into the criminal vortex.
For far too much of its run, Breaking Bad seemed to work overtime to make Walter White's wife Skyler into the sort of castrating bitch stereotype that is all-too-common in premium cable dramas focused on the “struggles” of deeply dysfunctional men. Ozark, however, takes a very different approach to the question of criminality. To start with, Bateman’s Marty is no Walter White. Though Bateman does have moments of intensity, for the most part he’s a far colder personality, more cerebral and ultimately less hubristic than Walter ever was. More than that, though, the series seems genuinely invested in its female characters and how they contend with changing fortunes of the Byrdes.
One of the fascinating things about this show is the fact that Marty and Wendy, despite everything, do seem to genuinely love one another, and there is never any question that they also love their children and will do anything to protect them. By the time that we get to the 3rd season, Wendy’s own sense of what is best for her family has begun to diverge sharply from Marty’s, in part because, when it comes right down to it, she’s more ambitious than he is. Whereas a show like Breaking Bad, with its relentless and cloying interest in Walter’s toxic masculinity, would paint such ambition as deviant and dangerous, in terms of the narrative it is Wendy’s ambition that keeps things rolling forward and, strangely enough we in the audience find ourselves wanting her to succeed. She’s the antihero that we’re led to cheer for her as she steadily keeps up with Marty, forging alliances with unscrupulous billionaires (and then betraying them), manipulating politicians to get a casino gambling license approved, and cozying up to Navarro.
Marty is a long way from Walter White. And as played with intriguing opacity by Jason Bateman, those differences are what helps Ozark find its own rhythm. The horror of Breaking Bad was its reveal of the murderous, greedy megalomaniac hiding beneath the surface of a seemingly mild-mannered chemistry teacher. In Ozark, our antihero never deliberately kills anyone, never plots anybody’s death and never really changes from the slightly wonkish number-cruncher we meet at the beginning of the first season. We’re not even sure if he’s actually evil—if anything, Ozark’s horror is that the audience doesn’t know precisely how to feel about this wholly anonymous nobody. In Arrested Development, Michael Bluth was always confident in the fact that he was brighter than all the spoiled idiots in his family—a realization that often led to laughs when his overconfidence resulted in his own comedic undoing. Marty carries that same edge of superiority into every scene he enters, especially when he lands in the Ozarks, using his polite, unthreatening manner to sweet-talk failing local-yokel business owners into selling their shops, presenting himself as an “angel investor” whose financial acumen can turn their stores around. Marty is the very model of a blank-slate financial planner: He’s got a head for numbers and is adept at convincing people to trust him, but he seems so devoted to logic that he’s almost entirely programmed out anything about himself that might be human. Marty justifies his potential involvement with the cartel by explaining flatly, “I wouldn’t be a mule, I wouldn’t be a dealer — I’d be just pushing my mouse around my desk.”
That kind of rationalization is how he handles everything in Ozark. Walter White built his meth empire to feed his need for power, getting off on being the badass after decades of feeling like an ineffectual loser. Marty does nothing out of emotion or for his ego—everything is executed with the bloodlessness and cold efficiency of a keystroke. As Marty’s life gets more complicated in Ozark and different people want him dead, he doesn’t discover a newfound, darker persona or get a taste for killing. In fact, Marty never once even mentions the idea of bumping off any of his many adversaries—a move that Walter White and other characters have discovered is a handy way of getting out of tight spots. Marty is too buttoned-down to ever consider something so heinous. If he’s indeed evil, it’s the kind that’s a lot less showy.
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