The Prestige TV Podcast - 'Ozark' | TV Concierge

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo recap season 3 of 'Ozark,' the moody and violent show about money laundering in Ozark, Missouri, starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. Hosts: Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TV concierge. My name is Bill Simmons. Ryan Rosillo is here. He has been a big Ozark fan. I became a big Ozark fan. I'd been saving it like a bottle of wine in the cellar waiting for the right time. Guess what was the right time? A quarantine where there's just a lot of TV to watch.

I banged out 30 episodes of Ozark. I would say in about maybe three and a half to four weeks. I would rank the seasons, season one. I have first, season three, close second, season two, third. How do you rank the seasons just out of curiosity? Yeah, same. Okay. No question. I mean, you know, honestly, I like season one the most of them. But, uh, yeah, I mean, I don't want to say like it rebounded in season three because season two is good. I mean, it's just, the simplest way to put it is like anybody that hasn't seen it,

just go, you're going to enjoy it. Like, you're going to like watching it. I know that sounds really simple, but of all the other grand shows and say, oh, is it this is a, look, just put it on. You're going to watch Ozark. You're going to like it. We're doing spoilers in this one. this podcast is for people who saw Ozark season three. Let's start with the season finale, the last image. Shocker. No, I wasn't shocked. She was up.

Helen was done. Something had to happen big. This show takes big, big swings. Yeah. And they tried. They tried to be like, wait a minute. Maybe Wendy and Helen are going to be buddies. Their parents.

They have a lot in common, teenage angst daughters. And then it was like, nope. Like, I'm about. me and I'm about me and I like they tried and then it fell apart. You weren't shocked when it was like Marvin and Pulp Fiction. Her head just was all over the place, all over Laura Lina and Jason Bateman. That shocked you not at all? The most shocking thing was that Wendy sort of like after PTA meetings was just text

buddies with the head of a cartel. So that that part, which again, they did a great job of setting that up by giving you her backstory that she was a campaign manager and that she should be capable of operating these worlds. Like if she was just straight up mom, Girl Scout cookies, you'd be like, this is a bit of a reach for a story. But that was a good way to make you go, oh, okay, fine. I mean, in the show, again, really pushes the edges of all of these storylines. But I thought once they kind of played together and then didn't get along, Bill, then we knew, okay, well, somebody's done out of this trio.

It's not part. It seemed like, yeah, by like the sixth or seventh episode, it became clear that Ben, the brother was going to die. And that Helen was probably going to try to get the birds killed, but then get double crossed in some way. I thought it would be season four when it would happen. I didn't think they would play the card ending season three like they did. Let's go to MVP really quick. MVP is season three. I think the two big candidates, you would say Laura Linney playing Wendy, really had some good moments in episode.

And episode nine, which was the best episode of the season, she's amazing. But I thought Ben the brother was incredible. Tom Pelfrey. I really loved his performance. I thought it was one of the most distinct ones. season performances in a signature show like this that I can ever remember. You know, we, Sopranos had a couple of these, too, where like Ralphie comes in for a year or Richie Prio comes in for a year and they're in and out. They're just kind of on the team like Bison

DeLay and the 97 Bulls or something. I just thought he was an incredible actor. Like, I'm excited to see what he does next because that's a part that could have gone sideways and it just did not with him. Okay, I can't believe you brought the Sopranos, but you're good at this, so that's why you did. The Sopranos, as great as it is, has one of the all-time advantages of any show that we've ever watched, and that because it's built around the mob, you can just have guys get out of jail and boom, season three, we get a new character. Like, there has to be, there's no backstory. It doesn't matter, and it's all very acceptable. You're like, oh, okay, this guy got out of jail. All right, this guy's back, this whole thing. Other shows can't just magically have these characters that all the main

characters have always been invested in without us knowing about it. But yet with the brother in this spot, it works. You know, it's not always easy to pull off. And I think what Pelfry does, which is really hard to do is if you were to sit there and say, okay, I want to write this character that's bipolar, you probably would fall into the habit of like having them do crazy things all the time. And anybody that's ever had any experience with it, whether it's friends or relatives, I think the thing that's always hard to explain to people that don't have experience with it is that it's not like this thing where the person isn't, like it's on the boundaries. You know, you don't always notice it all the time. And then you'll notice it in some

of these extremes, and that's the polar part of the whole thing. I'm obviously not speaking to it as an expert, but he has to be normal in scenes. And then the cab ride when he gets out and he's talking or it's an Uber driver or something, I think it's an Uber. I don't think if it's a taxi or Uber. The way he's, he's rambling, nonsensical, because he's kind of manic in that moment, I thought it was really well executed. And you can't do too much there. It just sort of gets out of control. And I think he played in the boundaries of somebody with that. with that challenge, I guess I'm saying, the mental health part of it, he did it well.

Yeah, and then you had to have the temper thing because the first time we meet him when he flips out and he's teaching the classroom, that establishes like, oh yeah, you know, there's no ceiling on how crazy this guy might get in a given scene because that scene's insane. He's throwing iPhones into a woodchipper. But then when he goes to see Helen,

and he's so mad at her, and the daughter's there, and he's screaming at the daughter, there's like spit coming out of his mouth. Like, that's one of the better scenes I can remember anybody having in the last 10 years on a TV show. Like, he's so upset. And it feels like in real life, he probably needed like 15 minutes just to calm down

after he filmed that, right? No, you're right. I was thinking about that, too, like, how worked up you must have to get yourself as an actor to go, all right, like, I'm sorry, but I'm going to suck for like the next half hour as I get myself really tuned up here. and, you know, I don't know what kind of screening that that grade school was doing, though, for their substitutes. And you know what I did love to, a little bit of a trick, is his accent, you know, all of a sudden, like this rural hick brother shows up. And then he mentions how Wendy tried as hard as she did to lose her accent from South Carolina.

Right, right. And you go, ah, I see what you guys did there. But he's great. He's great in it. Episode nine was a signature episode. I think if we remember it, like when people remember the great shows, they remember like Osmandias and all that stuff. I also really liked the casino subplot.

I just kind of like being at the casino. I thought they did a good job with how it looked. It was realistic. You know, I don't know how fast it would be to build a casino like that. I also don't really understand how easy or hard it is to launder money. This show makes it seem like it's the fucking easiest thing in the world. It's like, ah, we'll open a casino. yeah, we'll front some money to this political figure.

And it's just like, yeah, how much did you launder? 40 million. I don't know how they get to the math. Oh, we'll invest in Darlene's heroin farm. Do you feel like you could launder money now after you watch this show or now? I don't know that it's easy, man. Like, the whole point of this show is that it's been really, really challenging the whole time. You know what I used to do going back to the first season is I would try to keep track of Marty's losses.

and for whatever reason I'd be annoyed and be like, oh, man, that seems like it wasn't worth it. And then I go, so how much can he lose here before the cartels? You're a laundering expert. Yeah, we understand like 20% maybe is the cost basis of doing this stuff. But, you know, the whole point of this is that we're not losing all this money. Like, is he able? Like, how is the Blue Cat owner just able to steal hundreds of thousands and go on a bender?

And it's like, okay, like the math still works out because of the casino part of it. Yeah, he always has a spare million bucks to throw around. where like even after the first episode when Ruth gets in trouble she throws Frank Jr. over the railing and he's like, hey, how can we fix this? Would $800,000 do the trick or whatever he offers? Yeah, or the percentages.

Yeah, like it's like, hey, here's another deal. Like, oh, the deals always seem to be getting worse and worse for Marty throughout the entire thing. But, you know, as you mentioned the casino, this show is just, it's big swing after big swing. And instead of going, hey, we're going to have this family go out to the Ozarks, he has no choice, right? It's a little breaking bad in that sense where, you know, he has no choice where Walter White has a choice and he decides just to keep going with it because he likes it.

So it's different there. But this is really what I think we want now in shows is that I don't want some show that's like, oh, there was a there was a mix up with the locals in episode eight. It's like, no, there's a Mexican drug cartel where their guy gets whacked and they don't care and they send another guy. And then you've got heroin local farmers. You get the KC mob that comes along later. you've got this lawyer for the cartel. You've got the FBI, which is even more messed up on that storyline. And by the way, the Kansas City mobs have said.

So it's just these things circling the main character throughout where it also opens up all these other possibilities once you accept how corrupt the whole thing is. Plus post-puberty Jonah, I thought he navigated it pretty well. You know, that we've seen that gone bad on some shows, most notably A.J. Soprano, tough post-puberty run for him. But I thought clearly there's sense. setting up, he's going to go off the rails at some point. I got an important question from somebody who just watched 30 Ozark episodes.

At what point was it okay to become attracted to Darlene? Like, first season, was it something you grew into or did you know right away? Like, when she starts getting frisky, I'm actually not going to be horrified, even though she's a horrifying character. I was going to eat a sub after this. And I don't like the way you preface this question. You're asking it as if I've. confirmed to you that it happened for me.

I'm just guessing. We still don't know. What sounds like this is more, do you want to just answer your own question here? Because I don't have any answer for you here. I have no idea how old she is. You can tell me she's 70. She somehow pulling off the romance with Wyatt.

There's something about the way she carries herself. I enjoy it. Yeah. I don't know if it's a stunt double going on in the Wyatt scene, but she is definitely the season three MVP for me. Because you know every single person wants her dead the entire time. And I think we need Darlene. Oh, yeah.

You don't want her dead. They did a great job in the scene when she ends up killing her husband, or the episode when she kills her husband, of setting up young Darlene, where it's just like, here's the all-time lady you just need to stay away from. And he can't. And he knows it.

He knows it from day one. It's like, this is going to be too hot to handle for me. I can't, I can't resist. I just got to see this through. and he ends up getting poison. Quickly, Jason Bateman, I feel like he kind of put a stamp on this season.

And I say that out of an incredible amount of respect for what he did with the show, watching the 30 episodes in a row and how many of them he directed and how good he was as a director. I thought in this season, Marty's just kind of set in picks, doing everything in a monotone.

He's doing a lot of, no, no, it's okay, honey, it's fine. I don't know what happened to him this season. I thought he was my LVP. his character though is not ever going to be somebody like the whole thing for him is this like stoic thing i'm not disagreeing with you by the way but it's it's this stoic baitman thing that he's nailed in multiple different ways like this isn't a huge deviation from some other batements that we've seen but i mean here he is in this impossible situation i love that they

started it off where the family wasn't happy you know it was a great pilot opening scene he's watching a video his wife cheating on him i mean that's that's like way up there stuff for the beginning. But this felt a little bit like, you know, Game of Thrones in the final season, it felt like female empowerment throughout. This was, was very, I mean, Darlene's in control, and she's not listening to anybody. Wendy's in control. And then Wendy and Helen are kind of the back and forth, the, hey, this is going to work out. No, it isn't. And then Helen's working to maybe take them out. And a little Ruth, too. Ruth kind of steps it up a little bit. Right. And like, you know, the character that I've always thought was impossible was the teenager who's, you know,

a B or C character, the teenage daughter. Like, it's just hard. It never seems to be written really any differently. It's like, okay, you're, I mean, Dana Homeland is the poster child for like the most unlikable teen daughter in a drama. But I find Charlotte really likable. Like, every point she's making is totally reasonable, even though she's accepted this deal. Like, other than the emancipation thing, which I think was a good storyline. Like, that's a hard thing to pull off.

I don't care. Male, female, whoever you are as a writer, like that, that character usually ends up being incredibly unlikable. And you're right. Jonah and Charlotte are both, like, at the end of it, I'm like, all right, I'm down with these guys. So you're giving Charlotte comeback player of the year, it sounds like. Charlotte, maybe Jonah, though, although I still don't understand how you let Darlene cut his hair like that and the family just let it ride for a little while in season two.

Yeah, that's another weak moment for Marty. Ruth, we didn't talk about enough, but I thought she was great this season. Quick prediction for season four based on what you saw in season three. Ruth, probably going at Marty. So that was a good. going to be my prediction. It's setting up for Ruth versus Marty, which I'd never in a million years would have guessed. But I feel like things are now lining up for that and that'll be really fun. Ruth and Darlene. But then one of them will turn on the other. I think Ruth wins. Like,

Darlene probably has to die in season four. And then it's a Ruth Marty showdown. Does Wendy make it out of season four? You really shake the foundation of the story, though, if Marty or Wendy are dead, right? That has to be something that happens in the final one. I feel like we didn't talk about Ruth enough, but Ruth feels like Prime Shack in a fantasy draft where you just go, like everyone loves Ruth. Like Ruth makes it all work. She's probably the strongest actor, actress

throughout the entire thing. Also, maybe move out of the trailer after you're making a lot of money at the casino. Maybe get a small house, invest in something. We have to go. That was Ozark Season 3 for TV concierge. For Randerson, Bill Simmons. We'll see you next time.