Ozark

I think my season three summary would be: Everyone's life gets progressively worse!

You watched the whole thing already?

No comment

(Yes)

I've liked the first three episodes enough that I expect I'll be finished in a few days. I will say that I'm surprised by Jason Bateman's direction (can't remember if he directed episodes previous to this season)--quite solid.

The plot with Wendy's brother becomes the source of much stress once you find out what's really going on

Agreed, his direction was good

Ben reminds me of Jason Lee in Almost Famous. The REO Speedwagon stuff in episode 3 cracked me up. "Are there any dentists out there?!"--right out of a Simpsons episode. The metal torture in episode 4 was a nice reference back to Noriega. Didn't find the scene in episode 4 where Maya visits Wendy at home all that credible (I mean even within the incredible world of the show). She's sharp enough that surely she must know Wendy's deeply involved in everything.

One of the first concerts I saw as a kid was REO Speedwagon at a large outdoor event in 1991!

They might have had one of the shortest "few minor hits transitioning to playing primarily community events and conferences" careers.

I cracked up at "Hey, this guy is wondering if we could do some money laundering.." as if it was a normal ask for their booking

Yeah, that was great. Deep somewhere in the Ozarks, no less.

also shows how completely obvious "hey, we could have some of our employees run the merch booth.." and other questions are to anyone who has any idea about what money laundering looks like

Episode 5: the guy Wendy goes to about intentionally losing money at the casino in exchange for a 6% kickback--I have no recollection whatsoever of who he is. Zero.

Sue the therapist is a great character, so is the guy Wendy keeps calling, Damian Young from House of Cards.

Who’s watchin OZARK..? I just started. This MFs got serious PROBLEMS. But he can Talk his Fn ass off!

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) April 2, 2020

Sue the therapist rolling up Goodfellas-style in her flashy new sports car killed me. "Mar-ty...trust the process."

So long, Sue.

Helen Pierce is scary. (Ben's commitment was a bit much, though.)

The episode that starts with Ben's monologue in the taxi and ends him in the restaurant--first episode I didn't like at all. He was a great addition early on, by this point he's a simpering annoyance who gets way too much screen time. I wanted Mike Ehrmantraut to show up and say "Shut up, Ben" before plugging him.

"ends with him"

so what you're saying is his plot arc is becoming clear

Unfortunate spoiler typo...

For what it's worth--I'm sure you did too--it was easy to guess where the episode was heading halfway through in the light of how they present Wendy this season. She's well into Lady Macbeth territory by now.

"She wants me to meet her mom."

That ending to episode 10 was incredible.

I didn't even realize that was the season closer till I went to read up on it now...

I liked s3, which I didn't expect as I really didn't like the first series. The writing isn't great but it's not awful. I recently tried to watch the first series of Mexico Narcos and it was appalling, such cornball no-nuance 80s soap opera with a big budget For Blokes trash.

So now I'm looking for something else to fill that Sopranos-style hole - latest series of Mr Robot is waiting but I just know I'll spend the first 3 or 4 episodes utterly clueless as to what is going on (why can't production companies cobble together a 10 minute recap at the start of each new season? WHY?). S3 and 4 of Billions is there but I get the feeling it's going to take a turn for the ludicrous.

What else is there that I've missed? I'm waiting until next week before I binge the latest Better Call Saul, but have I missed any great well-written HBO/Netflix dramas in the crimey non-fantasy realm?

Highly recommend the second season of Fargo--which, except for one connection (fascinating but not crucial) can be watched as a standalone, independent of the first season.

S1 of The Sinner is good. Unbelievable is a fine one and doner.

Would like to anti-recommend Fargo.

oh, i like all seasons of Fargo.

Will check The Sinner, thank you. Loved all of Fargo, really loved it

I don't know if it's a consequence of being stuck inside so much but life on the Redneck Riviera seems pretty ideal.

I've liked the first three episodes enough that I expect I'll be finished in a few days. I will say that I'm surprised by Jason Bateman's direction (can't remember if he directed episodes previous to this season)--quite solid.

He directed quite a few episodes of The Outsider and they were good too

Good news (both that it's been renewed and that it's the final season so won't drag on and should hopefully have resolution)

Netflix's Ozark will return for a fourth and final season, split into two parts. https://t.co/IRiVnYp8OQ pic.twitter.com/WkXr1JxlBt

— IGN (@IGN) June 30, 2020

Cool. This is a good show

I wish they had cast someone more interesting as Wendy

Ruth makes it all worthwhile though

You don’t like Laura Linney?

wtf Laura Linney was so good

I don't like some of the contortions they take her character through, but Linney herself, I always like her.

ffs Ruth is a yank from NY

It took me, at least, four bags of cool ranch Ds, and 2 bags of popcorn and one pint of mint chip to make it through season 2, are you serious there’s another season of this shit

This show is terrible but I can’t stop watching
Season 3 romantic hookups are so dumb
Laura linneys brother just stepped in from a season 3 perfect strangers episode

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

S4 of my junkiest favourite show is up on Netflix now...will have to rewatch that incredible ending to S3 first.

!

Forgot this was tonight!

Re-watched the final episode of S3, but I still had lots of trouble remembering connections in the opening episode of the new season. It's been two years at least--can't remember the significance of Wendy's brother, why he had to be killed, the arrangement between Marty and the FBI agent, why the daughter's so on board all of a sudden (as the son reminded me, she once sued to get out of the family), etc. Javi seems to have wandered over from Better Call Saul--he's so Lalo Salamanca.

Always intrigued the way series that start out with virtually no pop music often seem to give in at a certain point and go semi-Scorsese: Sam Cooke, A Tribe Called Quest, Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam" (which I feel like I know but can't really place how), and--mercifully brief, so I'll give it a pass--the Ides of March's "Vehicle."

Plastic Bertrand!

This season is really not great so far (I'm 3 episodes in). The private eye guy is the latest in the show's string of "how long will this annoying asshole be around before someone shoots him" characters. I do like the addition of Richard Thomas to the cast, as he's very good at playing scary guys who are underestimated until it's too late.

Is Thomas new? I couldn't remember him from previous seasons...such a good actor the past few years.

The thing I find so bizarre about the new season is the two kids. The daughter's about-face is practically Michael Corleone-level (not to mention the ongoing evolution of evil crime lord Laura Linney), while suddenly the son is a central character. And also...well, just about everything is absurd, including Jason Bateman's robotic detachment from it all. And, in spite of all that, or because of all that, I still find it compelling.

Yeah, this season is weird. The daughter's about-face is def odd, but she's also been pretty marginalized as a character at this point, she's not really bringing much beyond delivering messages for the Byrdes without any agency of her own. It also feels like the already not always subtle Breaking Bad comparisons are being made even more blindingly obvious, what with the larger presence of the cartel players, the Lydia cipher working for a huge corporation with shady connections and, not least, Wendy's Walter White moment when she (apparently, I've not yet seen episode 6) watches Darlene die without intervening).

Feel like Ruth Langmore could give Logan Roy a run for his money in artistry in swearing.

She says something like "What the actual fucking fuck, Marty?" in E4. One guy I like is Wendy's behind-the-scenes political operative; the same guy played a behind-the-scenes tech operative in House of Cards. Both characters are shadowy and reptilian and seem to just appear out of nowhere.

Yeah, he's good.

Ruth will never top "I don't know shit about fuck", but she's been good this season.

Yeah, he's good.

have always liked him popping up in things since his roles in a couple early hal hartley films. weird-good presence.

they draw the line at election fraud! lol

I was thinking today that the only time I've seen a TV show use a single artist the way Nas was used in E8 is a great Freaks and Geeks episode that had three or four different Who songs.

I don't mind what they were going for with the ending from a character perspective honestly, but I felt that the events themselves were a bit anticlimactic. As did many I guess. Something even old fashioned about Ruth's final scene in particular, with Camila walking out from behind a random tree and Ruth being all "whelp the jigs up, ya caught me fair and square, just answer me this see, how did you find out whodunit?". I feel like if they had a draft of the script where Ruth gets into something more intense regarding Camilla... a chase or a fight or something etc. that would trigger shit hitting the fan this would have been a better payoff. As the party was getting into full swing and everything was going well and they were all talking optimistically about the future, it felt as if they were setting things up, overtly telegraphing even, an inevitable shit-fan-hitting. The fact that everything held together (aside from the Langmore curse delivering its ultimate punishment) seemed like the writer's way of "subverting expectations" or something?

Finally finished. A lot of the time, as often happens with me in S4s and beyond lately, I'd lost the plot. Things like the Foundation, or the urgency near the end of laundering money through--and only through--the casino, these things had long since lost meaning.

One good thing: in the final episode, I actually cared about the fate of Ruth. In this big convoluted mess, there was a character I cared about. And I liked "They Reminisce Over You" in the car just before she got to where she was going. How I thought that'd end: Camila admires that Ruth did the right thing by her family, and lets her go, maybe even enlists her for the cartel. I was looking for a storybook cartel ending--that's how I think.

As for the actual ending, standard Godfather stuff. It was okay

Wendy got off one great line to that guy Sam (the purpose of whom I never quite figured out): "I'm sure she'll be willing to teach you a lot of things."

The ending was, fine, whatever. I've spent time with worse shows and Ruth was a joy to watch to the end.

I only have really two complaints about it:
1. The Camila/Ruth resolution was fine but way, way, way too rushed. Oh look, here's Clare Shaw to conveniently spill the beans at the most opportune moment!

2. Worse for me was the whole framing of the Byrde's car wreck. I get that they were going for a Gilligan-verse style flash forward thing, but holy shit was that pointless. Build up to a car crash that everyone walks away from without a scratch and is never referenced again, not even by the next scene, and had absolutely zero narrative implications. Just terrible and really soured me on the finale.

Shit! Why did that not work? Mods?

You need individual spoiler tags for each paragraph.

I watched s3 and the first half of this season + the finale and my primary takeaway from the show is that everyone is awful, everyone is bad and not part of your team

Glad you mentioned the car wreck--yes, totally pointless. (Had actually forgotten all about it by the time it happened.)

Everyone's behavior is so arbitrary and in service of generating more misery, it's a somewhat fascinating exercise in how much contempt you are willing to endure from your entertainment

And--basically the same point--too cynical by half: make sure that the two characters who seemed decent, Ruth and the detective, get punished, and use all the bad people in service of the Godfather ending (Wendy's last line + Jonah = Michael Corleone).

lol this last season (and especially the last half of it) was such a slog, I had to force myself to watch an episode every couple of days just to get it over with. clemenza OTM that all of the big plot points lost all meaning and it just felt like an arbitrary series of events that I could not invest anything in no matter how hard I tried. I could be mistaken but I feel like Wendy actually started out as a pretty smart and crafty Claire Underwood type in the first season or 2 but imo her feud w Jonah was a real shark-jumping moment for me, she made soooo many stupid rash impulse decisions at odds w like any sort of long-term goal achievement. also watching her turn on her like stammery charismatic manipulator voice with ppl grew v v tiresome. the final scene was incredibly disappointing, I truly wished the Byrdes had just fuckin died tbh, or at least some of them. For a second I actually thought they'd be daring enough to go there, shame on me.

I thought Wendy early on was a lot like Skyler in the first two or three seasons of Breaking Bad: she seemed to be rational and moral, trying to hold the family together in the face of stuff she was trying to figure out. Skyler wavered some for the rest of the show's run; Wendy just got silly.

Rewatching--insane comfort viewing...Missed this the first time around; S2, E6, played by Rachel off a jukebox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj71uB2j9gE

Can't seem to pin down the date--sometime between '66 to '73 is the best I can do (Bear Family compilation).

I'm generally hyper-attentive to how pop music is used in movies and on TV, but for some reason I didn't make mention of this above--ending of season 2, fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZGfbmHapLw

epic show

Laura Linney

Love when she swears, she is the best swearer

I looked into "Drip Drop," the Dion song in the clip above (I have a Belmonts compilation, but not one covering Dion's solo work, so it was new to me). It's a Drifters cover--that is on a compilation I have, but it's not anything I took notice of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIquZiOho14

Dion's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew22aJV3iNU

It doesn't usually work this way, but I like Dion's version better.

agreed that Laura can swear with the best of em

I assumed you meant Ruth "Dice" Langmore.

I wrote a bit about her above, but Sue the therapist ("She was a good listener"--Nelson) has got to be one of the funniest-weirdest incidental characters I can think of in a series like this. Marty's expression here says it all.

https://i.postimg.cc/FHprZ2S2/sue.jpg

A scene, by the way, that basically reprises this one from Goodfellas.

https://i.postimg.cc/8P1XSn0C/coat.jpg

“What’d I tell you, huh? What did I say?”

Marty: What's this?

Sue: It's a car.

Marty: It's a Transformer, and I spoke to you about conspicuous spending. Send this back.

Sue: Now, see, Marty, that's your problem.

Checked above, and my reaction to S3 was same as the first time: really strong through the first eight or nine episodes, then Ben, Wendy's brother, turns into a basket case and the show stops dead (not recovering until the incredible last scene). Ben's monologue in the cab is interminable and really over-the-top in mannered acting.

Something I find implausible (Ozark is a very realistic show, and I found something implausible): that this powerful, terrifying drug cartel is so preoccupied with the comings and goings of the Byrde family.

Another pop song I didn't mention first time around--weird, because it's one of my faovurite songs ever. (Wendy: "This song sucks, by the way"--and Laura Linney directed the episode!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cbaa8t5jrk

Ozark is the third series where I've picked up on a recurring line that turns up again and again. In Friday Night Lights it's "all right," which can mean a whole bunch of different things depending upon context (skepticism, impatience to end the conversation, etc.) In Mad Men it's "That's true," usually said with a wry smile--a counter to all the stuff people say in Mad Men that isn't true. In Ozark it's not words but "hmmmn." Often skeptical or sarcastic, sometimes intrigued, sometimes just processing.

I enjoy this show but it must be maximum blue filter