Ozark is many times a complex weaving of emotions. The story line is always fresh and edgy, with not only multiple character stories, but more importantly multiple subtexts for those characters. Most impressively the protagonists are constantly confronted with imminent danger with safety hinging on their decision making on the fly. The action is tactical as long-term goals are obscure and the essential battles are literally about survival week-to-week. The allegiances and trust are tenuous, yet many times the critical support and life-lines comes from the most unexpected actors.
Ozark is the swamp of living in a world of greed. It is about the compound interest due from bad choices. It is about our inability to extricate ourselves from conditions we've constructed and those beyond our control. It is about the endless cycle we inhabit when we first practice to deceive, both others and ourselves. Season 2 dives deeper into the morass.
Television series have long been an abused genres; taking advantage of trite stores, cheap laughs, melodrama, and a plethora of over used moral tales and tugging at heart strings. Thankfully many modern dramas have dug below the surface and confront us with the hazy moral oblivion with bathe in, eat in, and sleep through daily. Ozark presents the culpability we all share for wrongs in the world, and wrestles visibly and graphically with these moral complexes and inversions. These are many of the same constructs, ironies and hypocrisies we all tread through albeit without often giving notice to.
While the dialog is not outstanding, it is at a very high level. Often the situations and circumstances are vague and open-ended and we're challenged to assert our own solutions quickly. As mentioned, the most brilliant feature is the constant hazard and life-threatening dilemmas the main characters must bridge nearly every day. There are layers upon layers of confidence games, contracts to be extended and broken, and frameworks of trust based on vague understandings and limited personal associations.
Ozark resonates around multiple familial and business allegiances, each cut through a patchwork of the emotional subtexts. The people living, dieing, hustling and lying in this world are all critically flawed and desperate. They are busy grasping for meaning and relevance in a cynical world. Ozark is the dark box kept in the closet with the secrets we deny even to our own selves; those that walk in the night and moan in the dark. It's the dark mirror of ourselves we try everything to avoid.