Byrdes Fly South:Ozark S1.

"I was told over the phone you had organic pistachio ice cream. All I see is mint" - Wendy Byrde

I'll be 52 in ten days time so, understandably, I'm not too up on the way young people talk and the words they use but one new pejorative I have recently become familiar with is Karen. A Karen is a woman, almost always white and middle class, who uses her privilege to make demands beyond the scope of what is appropriate and necessary and often lacks the self-awareness to even realise she's doing so.

Wendy Byrde's passive-aggressive request for organic pistachio ice cream hits that nail squarely on the head but understanding what a Karen is isn't the only way I've got with the modern world recently. On 11th August 2020, 23 years after it was founded and about a decade after most of my friends signed up to it, I finally got Netflix. Lockdown's still not fully eased, the gout was preventing me from walking too far, and, love her though I do, I can only watch so much Lucy Worsley.

There's a lot on there and I'll work my way through some of it soon enough but, following recommendations from my friend Ben and others, I thought I'd kick off with Ozark. There's three seasons of it available, with a fourth on its way, but this assessment will cover the first season only. The basic premise revolves around the life of Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), his wife Wendy (Laura Linney), and their two kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner).

Marty's got a big house in Chicago and a good job as a financial adviser but something has gone wrong, both in his marriage and his work. He watches porn in the office and jacks off in his car while Wendy's having an affair while, at work, a money laundering operation for a Mexican drug cartel he's been tempted into by his partner Bruce Liddell (Josh Randall) takes a very nasty turn and soon he needs to get out of the windy city - and fast.

His destination of choice, the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri - "more shoreline than the coast of California", gives the programme both its title and its southern gothic flavour. There are elements of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, and even John Boorman's Deliverance as the Byrdes start their new, and uncertain, life in the Ozarks.

With Camino Del Rio (Esai Morales) demanding, often with menaces, debts repaid and scores settled, Marty finds himself with both the cartel and the FBI on his back. His attempts to up his laundering game to settle these debts and keep his family safe bring him into contact with local business owners and local criminals and there's a thin, and very porous, line between the two.

One of the joys of these long form US series' is that there is plenty of space for character development and though that's at least partially true for Ozark the action does ramp up exponentially pretty quickly. Marty 'invests' in the Blue Cat hotel and bar (run by Rachel Garrison, a fantastic Jordana Spiro), the Lickety Spitz titty bar (owned by the sleazy Bobby Dean (Adam Boyer)), and even gives money, with conditions - obvs, to Pastor Mason Young (Michael Mosley) so that he can move his floating sermons to a newly built lakeside church.

To varying degrees all of these people have their qualms about Marty but bigger problems arrive in the form of the Langmores, a local criminal family whose most astute operator is Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner plays her as a trailer trash version of Virginia Madsen's Dolly Harshaw from Dennis Hopper's 1990 film The Hot Spot). Jacob Snell (Peter Mullan, you wouldn't know he's Scottish if this is the first thing you've seen him in) and his wife Darlene (Lisa Emery) are even more of a threat. Oozing an easy hillbilly menace from every pore in their bodies as they keep watch over their large poppy farm with shotguns and pistols.

The scenes where Chicago city slicker Marty comes face to face with the southern fried Snells play out as if a muscle memory of the Civil War. But where that war was a tragedy that resulted in the loss of more than half a million lives, these scenes play out more as a comedy albeit a very dark one and that's one of the few things Ozark doesn't always get right.

Occasionally the makers of the show go for a cheap gag at the expense of the narrative and it sometimes jars. It's a minor quibble and more worrying are the elements of poverty porn (ha ha, look at the stupid hicks and the stupid ways they dress) and the prevalent idea that the very worst criminals of all are always the Latinos. Seasons two and three may alter my view on this but it seems that, unlike almost every other character, the Mexicans don't warrant a back story or any motivation beyond pure greed and self-interest. It's a narrative even Trump could get behind.

Thankfully, those cavils don't detract much from a drama that is tense, tangible, and even part of a story that though about as realistic as the one told in Breaking Bad (surely a major influence on Ozark) is played out with, for the most part, a straight enough face to defy you not to fall for its artifice. The novels of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, the music of Bobbie Gentry and Drive-By Truckers, and the paintings of Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth as well as earlier films like John Huston's Wise Blood and Debra Granik's Winter Bone serve both as forebears and parallels for Ozark's maelstrom of animals with their innards sliced open, eyes in jars, vultures, and burning churches but, besides the stock tropes of southern gothic there are nods to key events in US history (the disappearance of Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa), the baseball rivalry between the St Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, and how the US (and global) economy only survives because of its tacit reliance on drug money.

Throw in a house that looks like Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed it and abstracted digressions into woke concerns about homosexuality, toxic male behaviour, female emancipation, and the difficulties in finding genuine personal and physical connection and it would seem like it occupies the intersection of what is an almost perfect Venn diagram for me.

Which it was - about 80% of the time. Scenes of darkened makeshift FBI offices with mugshots pinned to clipboards are just a bit too cookie cutter for these kind of dramas now, Marty Byrde survives more assassination attempts than Fidel Castro, and one or two scenes of yacht parties on the lake look more stylised like hip-hop videos (and particularly The Lonely Island and T-Pain's spoof I'm On A Boat) than real life.

Much better are scenes like the one between Del Rio and Marty in which, during a flashback to Chicago '07 and over glasses of extravagantly priced cognac, they discuss the nature of ambition, integrity, and ethics and ponder the social contract and how the differences between legitimate businesses and criminal enterprises are very small and extremely fluid. At the core of Ozark is the idea that if people really want to do something they will often find a way to morally justify their doing it. Either before or after they have done it.

Sometimes the action, surely intentionally, adopts the style of a faded Polaroid picture and it's a nice trick in a show that never lacks for style. But, earlier critiques notwithstanding, there is substance to Ozark too and a lot of that is down to the fine performances that each and every actor puts in. Peter Mullan's Jacob Snell has something of the ruthless, psychotic nature of Prisoner Cell Block H's Geoff Butler (the Ray Meagher of Missouri?), and Jason Butler Harner as monomaniac FBI agent Roy Petty is a masterclass in resentment, thwarted ambition, and toxicity but some of the minor characters deserve credit too.

Michael Mosley plays Mason as a man of God torn between two devils (Jacob and Marty) and his wife, Grace (Bethany Anne Lind), gets one of the best lines in the whole ten episodes when she tells Mason that it wasn't God that saved him from a gunshot, the kid just had "shitty aim". Estate agent Sam (Kevin L Johnson) and his domineering mother Eugenia (Sharon Blackwood) play out a dysfunctional relationship for both laughs and drama, McKinley Belcher III (as FBI Agent Trevor Evans) performs well in a tough role as one of the few seemingly honest players in the show, and Harris Yulin (Buddy Dieker) provides light relief as he ambles down to the lakeside butt naked and chats to Jonah about his terminal illness.

Yes, despite scenes where Sam covers his cock (thankfully unseen) with peanut butter and gets a small dog to suck it off, it is a show where terminal illness provides light relief. The main players (Bateman, Linney (whose Wendy redeems her earlier Karen behaviour with the great line "I'm just a big fat existential mess"), Hublitz, Gaerner, Spiro, Garner, Morales, Mullan, and Marc Menchaca as Russ Langmore) are all great and, as I watch seasons two and three I'll get to write about them, or some of them - no spoilers here, more but it's also worth taking time out to give some props to a quite impressive soundtrack.

Radiohead, DJ Shadow, The Rolling Stones, Buddy Holly, Run The Jewels, and the hitherto unknown to me Polish artist Daniel Spaleniak all feature alongside Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band and one of my favourite tracks of the last five years, Black Beatles by Rae Sremmurd. There was no place for Missouri's most celebrated musical son Chuck Berry but other than that the makers of Ozark mostly did Missouri proud and the lake itself looks so beautiful I can imagine the tourists have already started flocking there safe in the knowledge that both Jacob Snell and Ruth Langmore are fictional creations.

As a very clear fiction Ozark was never likely to have the verisimilitude or exactitude of something as epic and incisive as The Wire but compared to its closet rival and forebear Breaking Bad it scrubs up pretty well. I'd say Breaking Bad, on the basis of first seasons alone, has the edge but it's tight enough that when I dip into the second season, and it won't be long, my expectations will remain as high as one of Jacob Snell's clients.