Five Ways Ozark Is Better Than Breaking Bad
AU brings the heat.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.Â
Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.
"It's a poor man's Breaking Bad."
That was the refrain I kept hearing about Ozark before I started watching it. Made sense: That's what it looked like from what little advertising about it I'd seen, that's what its critical reputation and level of general popularity would suggest, that's what any number of other good-not-great shows have been in the wake of Vince Gilligan's unanimously acclaimed drug drama. And that's why I waited three seasons to start watching it: Who has time to watch a show with such an obviously low ceiling? The answer of course: Me, eight months into a socially distanced pandemic with sports options dwindling to nil. Batter up.
Much to my surprise, though, Ozark was not in fact a poor man's Breaking Bad. Sure, the similarities are there, and obvious: Straight-laced working man is unexpectedly thrust into a world of drugs and crime and ultimately drags his family in with him, to catastrophic ends. Same plot skeletons no doubt, but very different shows -- the tone, pacing, writing, direction and characterization of Ozark is all wildly different than Breaking Bad. And in a lot of ways, I think it's actually the better show.
You'll notice I won't go quite so far as saying that it's better on the whole than Breaking Bad: I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far, and I couldn't say so definitively until after the upcoming fourth and final season anyway. And Ozark is far from a perfect show: The cops and drug lord characters are all terrible, the pacing is at times exhausting, some plot elements feel a little too familiar and the overall dreariness can be a real drag. It’s not as inventive as Breaking Bad, and for the most part it’s not as much fun.
But here's the thing about Breaking Bad: It's not actually as good as you probably remember, either, and it's definitely not as good as its reputation would suggest. It was at times breathtakingly suspenseful and unexpectedly hilarious, and its peaks are certainly higher than those of Ozark — a show that generally favors gothic dread and unbearable tension over pulse-racing action and maybe has only ever been funny once so far in three seasons (when Ruth kicked that guy in the balls and then threw him off the casino boat).
But... man, Breaking Bad could be really, really annoying. It was a show desperately in love with its own cleverness and the mythologizing of its anti-heroes, and a lot of its plot contrivances were absolutely ridiculous. I enjoyed its original run about as much as any TV show this century, but looking back on it now, a lot of it feels downright cartoonish at times -- especially because Ozark, for better or worse, allows itself comparatively few self-indulgences, making it perhaps less immediately satisfying, but also less cloying in retrospect.
Anyway, I'm as surprised to be writing this as you probably are to be reading it, but here's five ways that Ozark undoubtedly gets the drop on Breaking Bad.
It doesn't drag its feet with the bad-breaking
My main fear with watching Ozark was that I didn't think I could take another TV show where a character thrust into extreme situations makes increasingly shitty decisions over the course of many TV seasons until he looks around and realizes MUH GOD WHUT HAV I DUN towards the end and whoa, tragedy. Ozark just bypasses this part of the arc entirely: By the time the show's started, Jason Bateman's central character Marty Byrde has already long been in deep with his laundering for a Mexican cartel, and he's long past the stage of accepting his place in it or agonizing about the morality of it -- he's made the decision, now he just has to deal with the consequences.
Same with Laura Linney's character Wendy, his wife, who we quickly learn knows everything about what Marty's been up to too. No season-long arcs of Marty trying to hide his malfeasance from his spouse, only for her to feign outrage upon discovery but then slowly get ensnared and ultimately enamored with the lifestyle herself. Hell, even their kids are in the loop by the end of the second episode. It's so refreshing to be able to fast forward past this entire corny phase of the good-guys-go-mob crime drama, which already felt kinda stale even by the time of Breaking Bad's debut. Instead, it's just -- here we all are, now what? Much preferred.
The main family doesn't suck
It was easy to get invested in Walter White's transition to scowling drug kingpin in large part because his home life was the fucking pits. Wife Skylar was mostly portrayed as clueless, icy or checked out altogether over the course of the series (with a brief dabbling in complicity), while son Walt Jr. rivaled Friday Night Lights' Julie Taylor for the brattiest, most parent-blaming teen in Prestige TV history. Not like Marty Byrde was living in domestic bliss either pre-series -- Wendy was cheating on him and his kids were typical terrible teens -- but once the show kicks into gear, Wendy proves his equal (if not his superior) in crime-world navigation and their kids grow up real quick. It's a family whose dynamic you're actually invested in, one that resonates beyond just setting the events of the plot in motion, with no members who you spend the entire series rolling your eyes at.
The main guy is never supposed to be cool
I liked the parts of Breaking Bad when Walt was just, like, flailingly bad at being a mobster -- when he'd try for a minute to act like a tough guy or criminal mastermind, and one or both of Gus and Mike (or even Skylar) would quietly sigh, give him a patronizing pat on the head and send him home to sleep it off. That made sense: No matter how smart a science teacher is, chances are that upon being thrust into the wildly unfamiliar world of the international drug trade, he'd struggle to insert himself as a kingpin. But eventually, as Walt fell in love with himself as the bad guy, so did the show -- they gave him a nickname and a cool hat and decided, nah, he actually is Scarface after all, outmaneuvering and outmuscling entire criminal enterprises. Didn't love that!
By contrast, Ozark never glamorizes or overextends Marty's ultimately small-scale villainy. He's not a thrillseeker looking to prove anything to himself or his family, and he's definitely not some secret badass just looking for a pair of dark sunglasses and a motorcycle jacket in order to properly self-actualize. He's just a very good accountant who made a calculated decision to do some shady business that ultimately backfired, and the show never suggests he's anything more or less than that. Even in the unlikely situations when he impressively wiggles out of a world of shit, he mostly does so via his white-collar superpowers of bureaucracy and paperwork. No one's ever gonna go as Marty Byrde for Halloween, but ultimately he's a much stronger, more believable and less preposterous character than Walter White.
The female characters are good
While Skylar (and by extension, actress Anna Gunn) obviously got an undue amount of shit from Breaking Bad fanboys who didn't get why she wouldn't just let Walt cook (literally and metaphorically), there's no doubt that her character was not exactly written to be a fan favorite. Really, good female characters were a weakness of the entire Breaking Bad universe -- only Jesse's landlord/girlfriend Jane and corporate villain Lydia prove all that memorable, and both of them have fairly limited series runs. (Skylar's sister Marie had her moments, but was also forced to spend most of her time in the thankless role of Wife Getting in the Way, with DEA husband Hank yelling at her for getting interfering with his home-brewing and confusing rocks with minerals.)
By contrast, nearly all of the best characters in Ozark are female. Wendy is a worthy co-star and occasional adversary for Marty, Julie Garner's Ruth is the Jesse-like heart of the series as Marty's foul-mouthed protege (and again, occasional adversary), hick drug farmer Darlene is one of the more indelibly psychotic villain characters in recent television, and perma-glaring drug lawyer Helen is chilling in every scene. Even Rachel, the forever-down-on-her-luck local hotel owner that the show mostly runs out of things to do with in the second season, would be at a minimum the third-best female character in Breaking Bad's history. Not only is a much richer show for the balance, but it means that Marty never really has to shoulder an unhealthy amount of the show by himself -- hell, he practically becomes an afterthought for stretches of the third season, and that's fine.
There are no long drug or crime montages set to fun obscure old jams
The filmic tricks of Breaking Bad: fun at first, oppressively predictable shortly thereafter. I can't tell you how sick I got of the seemingly inexplicable cold opens, of the unbearably tense stretches of extreme quiet between characters, of the jumpy camera movement and unusual perspective shots during action scenes. But mostly, I couldn't stand the montages -- the extended, painstakingly detailed, almost music video-like sequences of Work Being Done, usually set to a little-remembered and lightly thematically relevant pop song from decades past. They're cute, but they're tiring, and they're insufferably self-impressed -- like they're spending the entire time nudging you and going, "Boy we sure put a lot of work into this one, huh? And how about that choice of soundtrack -- pretty unexpected, right?" By the final season, they were verging well into self-parody.
Ozark is not anywhere near as visually dynamic a show as Breaking Bad. In fact, many critics have decried how the show's defining visual characteristic is its at-times inexplicably dim lighting, to the point of obscuring the action -- I wasn't particularly bothered by that, but obviously, it's indicative of the show's relative lack of cinematic flair. Nevertheless, one thing you have to say for it: It never bats you over the noggin with its cinematographic ingenuity, or tries to dazzle you with a three-minute setpiece where you get everything you need from it in the first ten seconds, or pulls out a song to make you exclaim, "Whoa that song is light but this scene is dark!" In Ozark, everything is just kinda dark, and that works OK. It's a mood, y'know.