Robert Jackman

This year’s best crime dramas

  • From Spectator Life
Inventing Anna (Netflix)

You’ve got to hand it to Ozark, Jason Bateman’s showy crime series about a slippery financial adviser who becomes immersed with Mexican drug cartels. In the years since its debut, the narco drama (whose final season arrived on Netflix last week) has been on somewhat of a journey. And then some.

When it premiered back in 2017 – with an opening episode in which Bateman’s character, Marty Bird, goes from sexless marriage to a near-death encounter with a drug kingpin – its shtick felt too obviously derivative to be taken seriously. Here was a drama, you felt, that had been commissioned for one purpose: to serve as Netflix’s ‘next up’ show for viewers who’d just binged Breaking Bad and couldn’t be bothered to reach for the remote.

Half a decade later and Ozark is a very different beast. Gone are the cartoonish ultraviolence and Grand Theft Auto-style body-counts that ruined its first season. In its place stands a mature and claustrophobic thriller about a family (headed up by the superb Laura Linney as Wendy Bird) trying desperately to launder the riches of an impatient drug cartel through a riverboat casino already subject to round-the-clock FBI monitoring. Last season’s stellar mental health subplot was just the cherry on the cake.

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Jason Bateman and Laura Linney in Ozark (Netflix)

Is it a coincidence Ozark‘s approval ratings soared at the time its death-counts started heading in the opposite direction? Of course not. Its writers have discovered the apparent paradox at the heart of the best crime and mafia dramas: the more the lead characters participate in mindless tit-for-tat violence, the less we actually care if they live or die. Having cracked that nut, they have everything in place for a superb send-off.

And there’s more good news: Bateman’s Marty Bird is far from the only watchable scoundrel on screen this season.

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