The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Netflix’s new drama ‘Ozark’ uses lakes Allatoona, Lanier
Money laundering for a drug cartel is the family’s new business.
Jason Bateman’s character Marty Byrde on Netflix’s “Ozark” is a stressed-out financial expert, trying to dig himself out of a huge hole that has placed his life and his family’s lives in danger. During a sleep-deprived moment, he watches Sarah McLachlan on late-night TV doing her usual pitch helping abandoned, suffering animals when she addresses him directly.
“Marty,” she says in his hallucination. “I don’t trust you to care for these animals. If you adopt them, they will die.”
The specter of death is overarching on Netflix’s latest drama
that’s obnoxiously openended,” he said. “We wanted to give everything we had in hopes people will like it enough to do a sequel as opposed to a second season. … There is a clear beginning, middle and end.”
He spent 13 months in the area working on “Ozark” as a producer, lead actor and director of four episodes. He’s shot at least three previous movies in Atlanta as well. “I should have a Southern accent by now,” he mused.
Bateman said the tax credits were a primary draw to Georgia, but the lakes certainly did the job of capturing the look he was seeking for the show. “It provided the rural aesthetic as well as the lake environment,” he said.
Linney enjoyed her six months on set. She said it felt a bit like summer camp. “My whole family is from southern Georgia,” she said. “I’ve been to Atlanta a little bit, not a whole lot. I certainly have spent time on Lake Lanier in the past. The lakes are gorgeous, just beautiful. I felt very much at home.”
The echoes of “Breaking Bad” are hard to avoid in “Ozark,” though Marty doesn’t revel in his immorality quite as much as Walter White ultimately did.
Rather, Bateman likes Marty’s Everyman quality, a quality Bateman himself naturally owns in almost every film and TV show he’s starred in, including “Arrested Development,” which is also part of the Netflix family.
“While most people have eccentricities, most try to stay in the median of their personality,” he said. “That’s Marty. He’s like a proxy for the viewer.” At the same time, Marty justifies his questionable ethics through “hubris and intelligence,” saying he needs the money for the sake of his family. (Sound familiar, Walter White?)
So far, critics have mostly liked this morality play of a show though some found it lethargic and derivative. Metacritic, as of Wednesday, compiled 17 positive reviews and 11 mixed reviews, with an average of 67 out of 100. Viewers on the site gave it a solid 80 out of 100.
Entertainment Weekly couldn’t help but reference “Breaking Bad” in its positive review: “Bateman’s commanding performance powers a gripping, twisty, sometimes spotty yarn that plays like ‘Breaking Bad’ in reverse, a darkly comic deconstruction of antihero fantasy about a man flailing to rediscover the value of human life.”
Alan Sepinwall of Uproxx, on the other hand, found the premise tired and execution failing to transcend past tropes: “What might have felt like a novel idea 10 or 15 years ago — middle-aged white anti-hero does something terrible to help his family, and only gets pulled in deeper and deeper — is now so tired that it would require sheer brilliance to come out feeling as fresh and untainted as all the money that Marty cleans. And ‘Ozark’ isn’t up to that challenge.”