Netflix’s ‘Ozark

In Paramount+’s newly released The Offer, various characters spend 10 hours wandering around telling anybody who will listen that the movie they’re making isn’t about the mafia, but rather about family and the American Dream. Because the movie they’re making is The Godfather, they’re largely correct.

The concluding seven episodes of Ozark are similarly dominated by characters attempting to frame 44 episodes of Netflix misbehavior as being all about family and the American Dream. I’d glibly call it The Awful, but that would overplay my series-long ambivalence toward Ozark.

Yes, I think the show’s second season probably was awful and its third season was probably comfortably better than average. In the balance, though, I’ve thought Ozark was a mixed bag — always worthy of consideration thanks to a few standout performances and a reliably churning sense of suspense, but also infuriating for its thinly conceived supporting ensemble, narrative sloppiness and my sense that the show the characters kept talking about rarely aligned with the show I was watching.

Guess what? The last seven episodes of Ozark don’t suddenly become anything better or worse than the show has been overall. I was annoyed and rolling my eyes. I was on the edge of my seat wondering if the show would do anything truly surprising. And I appreciated these last few hours of watching Julia Garner and Laura Linney, whose work here consistently withstood the inconsistency of the show around them.

Ozark ends as Ozark. And if I just stopped there, I could leave my editor with some free time this afternoon. Based on the episodic running times — four of seven episodes are over an hour, and the finale is 72 minutes — you’d think the Ozark editing team took lots of afternoons off, but that too is just Ozark being Ozark.

When we left things back in January — and this should count as your spoiler warning for anything up to this point in the series — Garner’s Ruth was on the verge of going full-on berserker after Javi (Alfonso Herrera) killed her cousin Wyatt (Charlie Tahan) and Wyatt’s wife Darlene (Lisa Emery). Ruth’s well-deserved rage presents itself as a major home-stretch risk as Marty (Jason Bateman) and Wendy (Linney) Byrde are trying to adjust their relationship with the Mexican cartel (topped by Felix Solis’ Omar) and beef up their political foundation in the hopes of going legitimate. They still believe they can return to something resembling normal life after a tenure in the Lake of the Ozarks that was far shorter than makes any sense if you stop and consider it for even a second.

The Mexican cartel, the FBI, and Ruth’s unpredictable fury would make for ample final-season adversaries, but Ozark loves including several thinly written straw men for complications. Adam Rothenberg’s inexplicably ubiquitous PI, a lesser addition in the first half of the season, is still around. Plus, Richard Thomas returns creepily as Nathan, Wendy’s father, who arrives in Lake of the Ozarks hoping to get answers about Ben’s (the great Tom Pelphrey) disappearance, targeting his grandchildren — Sofia Hublitz’s Charlotte and Skylar Gaertner’s Jonah — either as pawns or out of compassion (though nobody in Ozark does anything out of genuine compassion, “family” be damned.)