At the time of this reason the first part of what will be the final season of Netflix’s Ozark has started streaming. Ever since the premiered back in 2017, there has been a slow but steady barrage of hostility towards from quite a few TV critics and viewers in a general. Some of them have even posted at this very site, saying things such as Ozark is the last series with a ‘white male antihero that I can tolerate or that this is where we learned that Peak TV has reached critical mass. It is rare for a truly overrated series to have so many people openly dislike: the series I have dealt with so far in this column generally have a loyal fanbase. Ozark by contrast seems to have just as many people who hate it, and I completely see where they’re coming from.
There is, however, one group that truly seems to love Ozark far more than warranting: groups that give awards. It has been fairly dominant among the Emmy nominations and awards the three seasons it has been on the air, two of which were when Game of Thrones was still in competition. It also has done well among the Golden Globes, the SAG awards and (for shame) the Critics Choice – at least as far as nominations go. It didn’t seem anywhere near reasonable to me that in 2020 Ozark dominated the nominations and This is Us wasn’t able to get a Best Drama nod that year. And I’m very pissed that Jason Bateman and Julia Garner were nominated and Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn (who were infinitely more deserving for Better Call Saul) were ignored that same year.
Now there are many series I loathe that tend to dominate the awards year after year – if it’s not Game of Thrones, it’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But at least with those nominations it could be justified that the Emmys were still following a loyal fan base. Ozark doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of following. So why does Ozark get nominated and other, more deserving series get ignored? I have a theory which I’ll get too in a bit, but for now I’m going to start by dealing why I find this series fundamentally flawed and why I think so many people feel the same.
Unlike so many of the other series I detest, I actually made a concerted to watch Ozark. I actually made my way through the entire first season before giving up in disgust. And it’s clear pretty much from the get-go why people might think it was quality and why many others might recognize it as tosh.
Let’s start with the ‘white male antihero’ Marty Byrde. Marty is a criminal when we first meet him – a money launderer for a drug cartel. Within the first fifteen minutes of the Pilot, he learns his partners have been embezzling from the cartel, he witnesses them being executed and in order to save him and his family, he talks about a scheme one of them has to go to the Ozarks where there’s no law enforcement and clean $500 million for the cartel in the matter of months. The boss, who is clearly more amused by the idea, then thinking its possible agrees to let Marty and family to go to do this. And Marty without any real explanation to his family at all takes them from Chicago to Missouri in the dead of night.
Stop right there. Walter White never dreamed of that kind of money. To try and save his family he thought they could survive on seven hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars. He didn’t start beginning to dream of a multi-million dollar empire (which, for the record got so big that Skyler thought it could never be laundered) until the series was almost over. $500 million might as well be a zillion kajillion for all the reality. No matter how smart Marty think he is, it seems like an impossible goal. The fact that he seizes on to it as a realistic possibility rather than say, a chance to run, is impossible to buy as a series premise right there.
It doesn’t help at all that Marty starts out as an overbearing asshole. At least going in you could be willing to buy that Walter White was basically Mr. Chips. Marty isn’t Mr. Chips or Scarface; he has neither the stomach for the violence that needs to take place nor the brilliance to outthink any of the people he has to deal with. Yet not only does he not even bother to explain to his own family for most of Season 1 why he’s even done this, he berates his own children for every action they take. (We’ll get to Wendy in a minute.) And even though the only ability he has is to launder money, he arrogantly thinks that ability gives him the right to boss the criminals he meets in the mountains around as if he were above them. Now the Langmores may appear to be hayseeds, but it’s clear from day one that Ruth has the measure of adults, and pretty much can outthink Marty at times. More to the point, they are just as capable of violence as the cartel. But initially he barely thinks they need to be dealt with. And he completely underestimates Jacob Snell from the get-go and it isn’t until the climax of Season 1 when he thinks his plan has outsmarted them that he realizes he’s underestimated them again and its cost him even more. Walter White may not have been the best judge of character, but at least he had the brains to come up with ways to outmaneuver and destroy his enemies. Marty has already found out in the Pilot how dangerous the cartel was(and as we learn in a flashback episode in Season 1, he knew going in how deadly they good be and still compartmentalized it) and still thinks he had can outwit everybody long enough to stay alive. He’s a cocaine addict who keeps thinking if he keeps on going, he’ll be back on top despite the odds.
Now I give credit to Jason Bateman. He is really cast against type here. He’s played his entire career being likable and in Arrested Development in particular, the only sane choice among a family of lunatics. But unlike so many of the antiheroes in this early, he starts out being an arrogant monster and never gives us a chance or really a reason to like him. Hell, when a dying man kills an assassin he admonishes the shooter for making things worse. I get why so many people our convinced this is their last series with a white male antihero. This would put me off most of them.
And this series has a great cast: Laura Linney, one of the greatest actresses in history. Brilliant character actors like Peter Mullan and Janet McTeer have been killed on it (and honestly they should be grateful they can move on to other projects now) And by far Julia Garner’s work as Ruth Langmore is a triumph and I’m actually glad she got one of the Emmys she did. (Last time though, it should have gone to Helena Bonham-Carter or Meryl Streep.) But all of the actors are playing utterly loathsome characters even if they aren’t outright criminals. This isn’t like Succession where some fans love the series even though everybody’s loathsome. We’re supposed to like Bateman and Linney’s characters. Hell, they should have bonded in a horrible in a situation. They’re at each other throats from day one and I really don’t get why Wendy didn’t run when she had the chance of Season 1. Why the hell did she listen to her kids?
And maybe this is a minor squabble compared to everything else: Why is every episode so long? Other hour-long Netflix series like The Crown and Stranger Things are traditionally shorter than the hour they take up. This is generally a good idea in my opinion: it makes you want more. Episodes of Ozark often run longer than an hour and seem even more interminable. Why would you want spend more time with these people than you have too?
So given all of that, and the fact that so many people aren’t exactly fans of that, why those awards groups keep giving it nominations? There’s actually a good reason for that. Ozark was designed for just that.
If I were to ask the average filmgoer what an Oscar bait movie is, you probably wouldn’t have to think twice. It’s Merchant-Ivory, it’s an adaptation of a very complicated novel, it’s a film where a foreign actor uses an American accent or an American actor uses a foreign one. At its most cynical it’s the fundamental difference between the Steven Spielberg movies that came out in the summers of 1993, 1997 and 2005 (Jurassic Park, The Lost World and War of the Worlds, respectively) and those exact same years in December (Schindler’s List, Amistad, Munich, ditto).
If one were just as cynical, you might consider any period piece series the same kind of thing for the Emmys. The problem is that argument doesn’t generally hold up. One could say that for Downton Abbey and the lion’s share of Masterpiece Theater, but HBO, pretty much the only source for great television for much of the 2000s, produced Deadwood and Rome in that era, and while both were infinitely better than so many PBS’ oeuvre, they didn’t dominate the Emmys the same way Sopranos did. This generally holds true for the lion’s share of other recent period pieces, even the ones that you’d think would dominate the Emmys. Showtime’s Masters of Sex had all the trademarks of an Emmy bait series – and was infinitely better than so many of the shows that were nominated during its run –but never received a single Best Drama nod. (I know, Mad Men. I’ll get to that.)
Now I need to make this clear up front: I don’t object to Emmy bait series as long as they provide entertainment. This is the fundamental makeup of almost every limited series that has aired on TV for pretty much the past decade – from True Detective to Fargo, from Big Little Lies to American Crime Story – all of these series gather big name casts and big name writers to lure in an audience and also awards. You look over my top ten lists at this column over the years, I’m relatively certain there are at least three or four Emmy bait series on them. And that is generally because in small doses, they can almost always provide brilliant and often surprising drama. I’ve no doubt when ABC debuted American Crime they were considering it more for its awards potential more than ratings – the fact that it was one of the most brilliant series I’ve seen in the past decade was surely incidental.
The thing is that it can be hard to know you have a series that will dominate awards shows. Did the creators of MASH or Hill Street Blues or Cheers know there series would be dominating the Emmys for years to come when they created them? Almost certainly not. They might have thought they would with Frasier or 24 but it’s doubtful. And I know for certain that nobody thought The Sopranos or The West Wing would get there. Almost every major series that wins awards gets them by luck. You can’t build them. The problem is, just as with movies, network executives try to do just that and the results aren’t just not Emmy worthy; they’re often unwatchable.
An Emmy bait series, far more often, is a show that combines an amazing cast with a great writer or idea and then the nominations theoretically start rolling in. I say, theoretically, because far too often the series themselves are disasters. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was the definition of one – it was created by Aaron Sorkin and featured an all-star cast headed by Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry, Steven Weber, Amanda Peet and D.L. Hughley. In its cast were future winners Merritt Weyer and Sarah Paulson. Everybody expected it to be one – and it crashed and burned very quickly. (Indeed, NBC ran promo ads for 30 Rock where Alec Baldwin thought he was joining that show about a sketch comedy. Little did he or the network know that this would be the big award getter for the network for seven years.)
NBC didn’t learn that lesson and in 2012 tried to launch another clear Emmy bait series Smash – a musical based series with Tony winning writers, heading by Oscar-winner Anjelica Huston and Emmy winner Debra Messing. They gave it the lead after the Monday night premiere of The Voice in 2012. The series may have managed to at least run two seasons, but that spoke more about where NBC was as a network at the time; if anything it was a bigger disaster than Studio 60 with even fewer rewards. (That same year ABC tried something similar with Nashville, a female led music drama led by Connie Britton and Hayden Pattiere, with co-stars such as Eric Close and Powers Boothe. This series would be more successfully critically and have a longer run, but only after it threw all aspirations for quality away and became a pure soap.)
If there’s a clear example of an Emmy bait show on TV today, its Apple TV’s The Morning Show. It has an entire cast of actors that make up awards shows, from Reese Witherspoon to Jennifer Aniston to indie film gurus Billy Crudup and Mark Duplass. And it has managed to get the award nominations and have the success that so many of these series don’t. The problem is the lion’s share of critics do not like it and even those who do think it’s closer to camp than actual drama. It is considered a success, more because of where it comes from than actual quality; I have a feeling if The Morning Show ran on HBO or Showtime, or even Amazon or Hulu, critics wouldn’t think as highly of it.
This is in effect why I don’t think anyone should consider Mad Men an Emmy bait series. Yes, it’s a period piece but 1) the cast was made almost entirely of complete unknowns when it premiered, 2) the period was one that up to then wasn’t really explored the same way before and 3) most importantly, it was the first drama ever to debut on AMC. Had it premiered on HBO – which considering Matthew Weiner had offered it to the networks was a real possibility – it could have been considered an Emmy bait series, much like all of the limited series and movie they make. Because it premiered on a network that until then had only done one mostly forgotten original series, it was clearly a revelation.
In that sense, this is how Netflix became the behemoth for original series it does today. Just as with Mad Men, HBO was offered House of Cards first, but despite the talent associated passed on it because they weren’t willing to agree to a two season commitment. House of Cards might only have been viewed as another HBO drama, even with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright attached as leads and David Fincher as producer. The fact that Netflix took that risk - and that it paid off – is pretty much the reason for their success. (HBO was also offered Orange is the New Black and The Crown before Netflix took them. Whoever chose those series and went to bat for The Newsroom and Here and Now – critical messes that were also clearly Emmy bait shows – should have been fired.)
This brings us back to Ozark. When the series premiered back in 2017, it was essentially the kind of Emmy bait series that so many networks have designed and failed. It has an all-star cast, the kind of dark plot that filled so much of Peak TV particularly in the 2010s and centered on a ‘White Male Antihero’. But Ozark is nothing like any of the other Netflix dramas that have gotten Emmy nods for Best Drama for the past decade. It has none of the sly wit and intrigue that House of Cards had (at least initially), nor any of the looks into race, gender, sexuality or social issues that Orange is the New Black did, nor a real look behind English history with humanity that The Crown does, nor the sense of wonder and joyful youth that Stranger Things has.
Hell, there was actually a better Netflix crime drama that aired before Ozark that under lesser hands would be considered Emmy bait. Bloodline had an all-star cast (Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini, Sissy Spacek and Ben Mendelsohn) playing a family getting deeper and deeper into the mire of their brother’s criminal behavior. It was designed the writers behind Damages (a series which had the cast of an Emmy bait drama but an entirely different style that made it unique) It received several nominations (none for Best Drama, sad to say) and Ben Mendelsohn took a deserved Supporting Actor prize in its final year. So why do so many critics consider Mendelsohn’s prize a disappointment and the ones that Julia Garner has won a triumph? I’m still puzzling this five years after the fact. But almost no one gave a damn about Bloodline. A lot of critics (and quite a few people I respect) really give a damn about Ozark. Yet Bloodline was a radically different series, better written, directed and acted. Ozark is basically what everybody says it is – another dark drama with a white male antihero.
And to be clear, it’s not even particularly better than some contemporary dramas with ‘white male antiheroes’ Mr. Robot was infinitely more imaginative, creative and enthralling than Ozark ever was. After its first season, it basically disappeared from the Emmy ballots and the last two years it aired, it got nothing and Ozark dominated. Better Call Saul is so much more than Ozark ever will be, but the last season both shows were eligible Ozark dominated and Better Call Saul was left behind. (But I repeat myself.) I don’t pretend to know what Emmy voters think half the time, but I can’t comprehend their love for a show that is so clearly inferior than so many of the dramas that it competes against.
I can take some comfort, however cold, that Ozark will soon be over. Maybe we’ll stop seeing shows that are clearly designed to get Emmys dominated the category. Of course, I’ve already complained about Succession and there are signs that Morning Show will continue to dominate those categories for awhile. And as we speak, the creator of Downton Abbey has just debuted his follow-up series for HBO. The more things change…
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