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Is Ozark on the verge of a breakout season? A year after the Netflix drama's premiere, it picked up four Emmy nominations, including two nods to star Jason Bateman for acting and directing. Now, with season two set to premiere right at the end of the summer - August 31, to be exact, making it a great Labor Day binge for anyone looking to get a little dark over a holiday weekend - the show feels well-positioned to make big pop-culture waves. But what if you watched season one and don't really remember all the details? Or you didn't watch at all and want to jump right into year two? We're here to help with a recap of all the essentials for Ozark 's first season.

The Byrde family is on the run

Much like Breaking Bad, a clear inspiration for this show, Ozark features an average guy who is digging himself out of a tragedy that happens in the series premiere. In that episode, directed by Bateman himself, we met Marty Byrde, a relatively nondescript Chicago financial adviser whose best client happens to be the Mexican drug cartel. Marty's dumb partner made some very bad decisions regarding the cartel's money, so in the show's first surprise of many, he wound up with a bullet in his head. It looked like Marty would get one to match, but with his life on the line, he did what he does so well - talked himself out of one problem and into another. He convinced the cartel that he could take the entire operation down to the Lake of the Ozarks, way below the radar of the Feds and where there's plenty of opportunity to launder their cash. He promised to "clean" $8 million quickly, with the promise of millions more over the next few years. It was a good enough pitch to save Marty's life, but it's really just the start of his troubles.

Marty and Wendy aren't a happy couple

Just before he's forced to relocate to the Ozarks, Marty learned via a private detective that his wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), was cheating on him. Any temptation to leave Wendy is overwhelmed by the fact that the Mexican drug cartel may very well assassinate his entire family, but it's important to remember that the Byrdes' marriage was on the rocks before the threat of murder forced them to stick together. The Byrdes also have two kids, daughter Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and son Jonah (Skylar Gaertner). Understandably, neither are too happy about uprooting their lives in Chicago to live in the middle of nowhere.

Marty made frenemies in the Ozarks ...

Digging into the criminal underworld in the Ozarks isn't quite as easy as Marty made it out to be, but he does find a resort and strip club through which to launder the cartel's cash. The former is run by Rachel Garrison (Jordana Spiro) and the latter by Ruth Langmore (a series-stealing Julia Garner), who's part of a local, small-time crime family and clearly has the brains to run their whole operation one day. Rachel is more scared of Marty's criminal life than anything else (though that doesn't stop her from taking off with some of the cartel's money), while Ruth is ready to go toe-to-toe with him, even killing her own kin to protect Marty from the Feds. (More on that below.) But here's an especially important detail to keep in mind: Ruth's father, Cade (Trevor Long), is the real head of the Langmore crime family, and he could be getting out of prison this season. He's not a fan of Marty Byrde at all. Will Ruth get caught in the middle between them?

... But he also messed with innocent people

Marty totally ruined the life of a local preacher named Mason (Michael Mosley), who could end up blaming him for the death of his pregnant wife, Grace (Bethany Anne Lind). Poor Grace was killed by Jacob (Peter Mullan) and Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery), a pair of notorious heroin dealers whom Mason confronted because they were running drugs through his parishioners. The Snells responded by murdering his wife and making him a single father, and he's left a broken man at season's end. But if you thought Mason's arc was over, think again: Chris Mundy, the show's head writer, told Thrillist, "He's definitely going to show back up. He hates Marty. The minute Marty came into his life, everything fell apart."

The FBI are trying (and failing) to catch Marty

The Feds were on to Marty from the start, and the Byrde family is followed throughout season one by an agent named Roy Petty (Jason Butler Harner), who uses some of the locals to eke out information and leverage against them. However, Petty finds himself in a relatively useless place at the end of the season, stuck on the outside of the nefarious dealings going down around him. His biggest influence so far is an indirect one: After strong-arming Ruth's uncle Russ (Marc Menchaca) into cooperating with the FBI, Ruth and Marty hatch a plot to murder him before he can make a run for it. What role Petty will play in season two is unclear, but he didn't get much done in season one, other than getting Russ and his brother killed.

Marty's last, best plan blew up in his face

In the season-one finale, Marty looked like he might lose his family after a drug-cartel underling turned up dead, so he sent Wendy and the kids on the run. They reunited, but the heat is about to get turned up even more: Marty learned that the Snells, who manage the drug trade in the Ozarks, are just as vicious as the Mexicans - if not more so. At first, Marty mostly just wants to keep the Snells happy, but then he tries to merge his two worlds in the season finale, convincing the Mexicans, represented by Del (Esai Morales), to funnel their money laundering through the Snells' heroin operation. It seems like Marty may finally be out of the laundering game as the two most violent people in his life shake hands, but then Del makes the mistake of calling Darlene Snell a "redneck," an insult which he pays for with his life. How Del's cartel bosses will respond when he doesn't come home is the show's biggest, most pivotal cliff-hanger for season two.

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A (Very) Condensed Recap to Ozark Season One

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Is Ozark on the verge of a breakout season? A year after the Netflix drama's premiere, it picked up four Emmy nominations, including two nods to star Jason Bateman for acting and directing.

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This Ozark review contains spoilers.

Ozark Season 1

Let's say, hypothetically, that you decide to launder money for the second largest Mexican drug cartel. Just hypothetically. Say you really like the sound of the money and decide that it's worth taking your chances with their terrifying reputation to fund your children's futures and put an end to relentless job searches and debt. What do you do when it all turns sour? Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) has the answer, and clearly it's what we've all been thinking. Move to the Ozark mountains.

Ozark is not a story of a man on the run. It's a story of a man buying time. When the imposing cartel boss Del (Esai Morales) lines up Marty's colleagues from his accountancy firm and swiftly puts a bullet in each of their heads, Marty has mere seconds to concoct a plan that will make him more useful to the mob alive. He grabs a stray brochure for a waterfront resort on the Lake of the Ozarks and frantically spouts plans about setting up a booming laundering business off the back of the area's tourism. He is given a second chance, albeit one where he will be under relentless surveillance and immense pressure to deliver on his promises. Marty, his wife Wendy (Laura Linney), and children Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) up sticks from their Chicago home to a house that is conveniently under their tight budget. That may have something to do with Buddy (Harris Yulin), an ill elderly man who comes with the house, planning to live out his final months in comfort... nude walks to the lake and all.

What begins as "straw grasping bullsh*t," as Del puts it, becomes the Byrdes' reality, as they try to settle into a town that is anything but an easy hideout. The show's often beautiful but unsettling soundtrack works well to reflect the remote and alien beauty of a place where you know who is boss... and it ain't the sheriff. It all gets a little bit Nicholas Sparks at times, with the isolated community's dodgy family, the Snells a-raspin' and a-snarlin' about all of the bad things they do while the fairly dodgy Langmore family make frequent reference to a family member they have behind bars that ain't for messin'. That said, a couple of gems shine from the other side of the tracks, including Ruth, who is played with conviction and nuance by Julia Garner. The troubled daughter of a convict, we see Ruth battle between her loyalty to her kin and her own instincts while she storms around telling the men of the family what's what. Russ Langmore (Marc Menchaca), too, is a compelling character with a little more than just vengeance and pride on his mind, as he is forced to ask himself some questions when the Byrdes' arrive in town.

Bill Dubuque's TV scriptwriting debut is generally depressing in tone, with upbeat moments few and far between. Not that a show with such high stakes requires a musical number as a pick-me-up, but the relentless stress, depression, and often terror can occasionally be wearing. You will, however, want to persevere to find out what is going to happen to the Byrdes, and this is largely down to the believable and raw performance of Jason Bateman as a father and husband who is broken and desperate yet determined. Laura Linney, too, puts in a moving and, at times, humorous performance as Wendy, a mother who does not want to beat about the bush with her kids and who will lose the plot if she hears one more country song on the radio.

There are moments during 's early episodes where you may wish you had purchased "Money Laundering for Dummies" to keep up with Marty's illegal exploits, with an explanation of what is going on coming a little too late for some of the early money washing action. You will, however, understand more of what is going on if you were a fan of Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad, a show that you cannot help but think about while drug deals and the laundering of millions of dollars take place in this one quiet spot in Missouri. Rightly or wrongly, Ozark will undoubtedly be compared to Breaking Bad, not only because it also follows the actions of a family man trying to protect his wife and two children from the drug lords but also because of the striking similarity of some of its visuals. I'm sure you remember the floating eyeball.

Ozark is a must-watch for crime drama fans, although the strength of the central performances will likely attract and hold the attention of Netflix subscribers who have yet to step into gang land territory. While Ozark does at times take the platform format for granted (if you want to ensure people keep watching for 10 hours, you might want to throw in a few more cliffhangers), it offers an intriguing narrative that expertly intertwines the lives of numerous characters. It's a step into a world where trouble is inescapable, the innocent are inevitably dragged down, and no one is to be trusted. Oh, and don't call the hillbillies "rednecks."
Read and download the full Den of Geek SDCC Special Edition magazine here!

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This Ozark review contains spoilers. Let's say, hypothetically, that you decide to launder money for the second largest Mexican drug cartel. Just hypothetically. Say you really like the sound of the money and decide that it's worth taking your chances with their terrifying reputation to fund your children's futures and put an end to relentless job searches and debt.

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On the road by Friday.

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Where's my money?

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Jason Bateman Actually Likes Reading Reviews Of His Acting

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Television criticism: A rhetorical perspective

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(1975). Television criticism: A rhetorical perspective. Western Speech Communication: Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 81-91.

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Article #1

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Jason Bateman in "Ozark" on Netflix. Credit Credit Tina Rowden/Netflix

At the beginning of "Ozark," debuting Friday, July 21, on Netflix, Jason Bateman's Marty Byrde is a money manager sleepwalking through life in the Chicago suburbs - his children are disinterested in him, and his wife, played by Laura Linney, is plainly dissatisfied.

By the end of the first episode, he is wide-awake - he has witnessed multiple murders and is moving his family to Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks in a last-ditch effort to placate the drug lord he has been laundering money for in secret. His new mission: "Clean" $8 million by the end of the summer, or everyone dies. Also, parry the F.B.I. officers, local cops and crime clans that plague him along the way.

This primary narrative makes for a thriller that checks many boxes of the genre: Marty, an Everyman dropped into a fraught situation, negotiates mortal jeopardy and an inexorably ticking clock as he wriggles out of one perilous situation after another (after another, after another).

"There are no tricks to it," said Mr. Bateman, who also directed four episodes and is an executive producer of this show. "It's going to rely on our ability to make it feel authentic and raw, and to get the audience into that vicarious place."

But beneath its choppy crime-drama surface, "Ozark" explores deeper issues.

It's a middle-class nightmare amped to the extreme - in a blink everything you've worked for is gone, your stability shattered and the future full of peril. The show also suggests, in flashbacks depicting Marty's descent into money laundering, that the line between ambition and felonious greed is thinner than we might like to believe.

Early in the production process for "Ozark," the showrunner Chris Mundy explained the general story to Netflix. Then he did it again.

"I said 'I'm going to lay this out to you twice - once on a pure plot thriller level, and once on an emotional family level,'" he said. "Because we thought of it as both things."

As much as it is a story of a man trying to scramble out of a life-threatening bind, "Ozark" is equally about a fractured family that is forced to reconnect. The early moments find the marriage between Marty and Wendy on the rocks and their children absorbed in their own melodramas. Their daughter, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz), is a classic teen, resentful and lost in her phone. The son, Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) is quirkier, and might have darker inclinations.

"For us, the big question of the season was, can this family stay together somehow?" Mr. Mundy said.

As in nervy crime dramas like "Breaking Bad" or "Bloodline" (Mr. Mundy has written for "Bloodline"), a major theme of "Ozark" is how the sins of one family member affect, infect and jeopardize the whole group. But the twist in this case is that the lawlessness might bring them closer together, said Bill Dubuque, the screenwriter ( "The Accountant") who came up with the story and wrote the first two episodes.

"We thought, why don't we take this on a trip where the familial bond, and what these children are capable of, are actually benefited by what they've gone through rather than decimated by it?" he said.

Elsewhere on the lake, assumptions about families and class are similarly subverted. An extended clan of petty crooks is overseen by one of its youngest members, a teenage girl. Perhaps the warmest relationship on the show is a marriage between two other local criminals, a pair of murderous heroin dealers.

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Laura Linney in "Ozark." Credit Jackson Davis/Netflix

These dynamics get at how families can function as both liabilities and sources of strength, and at their fundamentally esoteric nature. They are really only understood from the inside, even as the members can be mysterious to one another.

"They all have secrets, and they're all going to learn a whole lot about each other," Ms. Linney said.

"When you hear the word 'Ozark,' there's this immediate perception of what you're dealing with," Mr. Dubuque said." But to make it interesting, you've got to stand that on its head."

Mr. Dubuque, who grew up in and still lives outside St. Louis, spent many summers at the Lake of the Ozarks, a 54,000-acre man-made reservoir with 1,150 miles of coast line. He remains fascinated by its contradictions. It's a place of pristine natural beauty better known for revelry - The New York Times once described the lake's Party Cove as "the oldest established permanent floating bacchanal in the country" - where expansive waterfront mansions sit within a few miles of trailer parks.

The annual summer influx of tourist cash also made it an ideal setting for a story about money laundering. (The series's 10 episodes were shot partially at the title lake but primarily in Atlanta.)

"Here's an area you just don't see on television," he said. But "the one thing I stressed was, you can't make these people stereotypes."

Marty, the arrogant Chicago financial expert, is consistently thwarted by locals who are smarter than he assumes, with schemes of their own. "He makes a really bad miscalculation in what he perceives that environment's going to be, and his ability to manipulate it," Mr. Bateman said.

This story about urbanites confronting a heartland culture they don't understand coincidentally captures a dynamic that has received plenty of attention since Donald J. Trump won the presidency. Initial "Ozark" scripts were written long before the election. But Mr. Bateman allowed that the parallels between "a pseudo-intellectual guy who thinks that he can go down to the sticks and big-city these simple folk" and President Trump's critics, flabbergasted by his victory, "weren't lost on us."

"These people are not in a cosmopolitan, metropolitan, 'progressive' society, and they are to be reckoned with," Mr. Bateman said. "They have a different set of ideas and rules about the way things are done."

The filmmaking reinforces the themes - in one scene in the pilot, directed by Mr. Bateman, the camera pulls away dramatically to isolate family on a rocky cliff, suggesting what they're up against. But the overarching metaphor actually posits the newcomers as the interlopers bringing chaos to a stable environment. At one point, Jonah watches a documentary about the European starling, and how it wreaked havoc upon its introduction to North America. (The Byrde family, get it?)

"That came out of the idea that this family was an invasive species," Mr. Mundy said "If they'd never come in, think of people who would still be alive, whose businesses would be fine."

"They disrupted, without knowing it, a whole ecosystem," he added.

But amid all the carnage there is a simpler and perhaps encouraging point, in these divided times, about the ultimate fruitlessness of clinging to regional or any other prejudices.

"You've got highly intelligent people everywhere in the country, and you've got remarkably stupid people everywhere in the country," Mr. Dubuque said. "It's not geographically specific."

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'Ozark' on Netflix: This Lake Has Hidden Depths

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At the beginning of "Ozark," debuting Friday, July 21, on Netflix, Jason Bateman's Marty Byrde is a money manager sleepwalking through life in the Chicago suburbs - his children are disinterested in him, and his wife, played by Laura Linney, is plainly dissatisfied.

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Gorgeous.