BY RACHEL TESON Running out of shows to binge watch during quarantine? Well, your prayers have been answered. Netflix’s has just released their third season of Ozark, a druggy Breaking Bad-esque thriller set in the titular Ozark Mountains. Ozark stars Jason Bateman as Marty Byrd, whose specialized skill is finance instead of chemistry. Marty is forced to become a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel because of his now-dead partners’ foiled attempt at stealing money from them. The show opens with a Mexican drug lord named Del (Esai Morales) killing all of Marty’s business partners, and only allowing Marty to live so he can make up the money his partners had stolen (without his knowledge — yes, Jason Bateman gets pretty royally fucked in this show). He then moves his whole family to a bumblefuck lake resort in Missouri where he hopes he can discreetly wash Del’s illegal money.
Unlike Breaking Bad, Marty’s wife has been the hypocritical annoying spouse from the get-go. As if Marty didn’t already get the shit end of the stick — he discovers his wife having cheating on him with a much richer man. Unfortunately for his wife’s lover, he gets caught up in the Mexican-druglord-problem and gets thrown over the side of his 80th floor apartment. The next day Marty, Wendy the Cheating Wife, and their two kids are on the road to Missouri. Once there, Wendy tries to normalize cheating, saying “People cheat! People have sex with people they are not married to! It isn’t unique” to which her loving husband responds, “The satisfying sound of your lover hitting the pavement is the only thing that gets me to sleep every night” — damn, if only the kids could hear this.
Once they get to Missouri, Marty soon realizes how hard it will be to launder $8 million in cash in the narrow window he’s been afforded before Del comes to exterminate his entire family. Through a series of chaotic redneck-y events, Marty begins working with Ruth Langmore, whose family quite literally came up with the word “white trash.” Together they attempt to launder the money, but nothing is ever easy when dealing with drug lords and bank statements. So Jason Bateman stops cracking jokes and gets deadly serious, displaying the determination and brains of the famous Walter White, as he races against the clock to get the deed done. Will he get caught? Will his family be tossed into barrels of sulphuric acid to destroy any evidence of their existence? Will the creepy old man in the basement stop harassing the girls about their “period plugs”? Well, there is only one way to find out: grab your remote and check out Ozark.