Counterfeit: Netflix's Ozark is No Breaking Bad

Since Breaking Bad went off the air in 2013 there have been plenty of shows that have tried to duplicate its formula.  And even some like Amazon's Mad Dogs that I enjoyed almost as much.

I'm not sure any show has tried to duplicate Breaking Bad's formula as closely as Netflix's Ozark.  There's a relatively ordinary middle-aged guy who becomes involved with drug dealers, cops, and redneck scumbags.  There's a family with a blond wife and two kids (a boy and a girl), though in this case two teenagers.  There's often grotesque violence and people being killed in creative ways.  There's also purchasing and managing a business (or businesses) to launder dirty money.  So there really are most of the elements.  Yet it never really worked for me.

The plot is that for years Marty Byrd (Jason Bateman) and his partner have been embezzling and laundering money from a Mexican drug cartel to the tune of $8M.  But when the cartel gets wise, they kill Marty's business partner.  They would have killed him, except he comes up with a desperate scheme to save his skin:  he'll move his family to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri and launder the cartel's money during the summer.  This is based on a brochure his partner gave to him that day.

First he has to get the $8M back, which requires a lot of maneuvering.  His wife Wendy (Laura Linney) gets wind of something being up and goes to a lawyer she's been shtupping for help.  The cartel catches up to her and tosses the lawyer out the window of his penthouse.  Marty and Wendy agree to a fragile truce for the sake of their children.

Once they get to Missouri they have to find a home and a business to buy.  Wendy is in charge of the former and finds a nice house that's under their budget because there's a catch:  a dying old man named Buddy lives in the basement.  He comes with the house, which is why there's the discount.

Meanwhile Marty tries multiple businesses to persuade them to sell to him:  a self-storage place, a bar, and finally a strip club.  Eventually he manages to get his foot in the door at a rundown resort.  The idea is that he can put in orders for ordinary things like office supplies or food for the resort's diner to things like new carpet or air conditioners and pad the invoices to launder the dirty money.

But of course there are many complications.  The first is that a gang of rednecks steal the money Marty and his wife casually left in suitcases in their cheap motel room.  Their kids were supposed to watch it, but really, you expect teenagers to sit around a motel room all day and watch suitcases?  So Marty has to find the rednecks and talks them down into keeping only $20,000 because the rednecks would surely get caught otherwise.

Another complication is the local strip club owner who knows what Marty is up to because he's doing the same thing!  Only he's doing it for the local heroin syndicate that grows poppies (Wicked Witch voice:  Poppies!  Poppies!  Bwahahahahaha!)  Marty talks to some strippers and finds out the "owner" of the place is whoever holds a certificate that's like a bearer bond.  With the help of a redneck girl he gets that bond and thus ownership of the strip club.  Woot!

His next genius idea is to build a church for the preacher who every Sunday has boats gather on the water to preach to them.  (What if it storms?  Or in winter?)  The only hitch is that the heroin syndicate uses hollow hymnals to smuggle their product on the water.  Um, sure, that makes sense.  The syndicate pressures Marty to cancel the construction of a new church, but the preacher and his wife aren't having it--until one of them ends up dead.

To make some quick cash Marty talks an old lady into investing her savings with him.  Then the old woman gets hit by a garbage truck like the next day.  When her son wants a lavish funeral, Wendy ends up buying out the funeral home to add that to their empire.

Meanwhile there's a sociopathic gay FBI agent who seduces one of the redneck guys and turns him into an asset, though he kinda sucks at being an informant.  This never really pays off since the FBI doesn't really accomplish anything.

There's one whole episode that's a flashback to ten years earlier.  I fast-forwarded most of it because it didn't really seem to be adding much.

There were some things that didn't make sense.  In the first episode there's a scene with Marty and a babysitter and it seems to imply that he was fucking her, but this is never mentioned again.  Especially with his wife's unfaithfulness, shouldn't this have been mentioned?  Later, Wendy buys a house that was under construction and stalled for them to use in their scheme but nothing seems to happen to that.  Unless they were converting it into the church?

Overall like I said I never really warmed to the show.  I probably should have liked it.  I mean I liked Breaking Bad and this was a decent production with good actors.  But as I've said before, sometimes it's better to be first.  I guess I wasn't in the mood for Breaking Bad Lite.  It just seemed like a lot of complications for the sake of complications. (2.5/5)