Ozark a shining example of the new age of TV production

Why should taxpayers keep funding an ABC TV that is obsolete and providing increasingly mediocre productions?

Laura Linney as Wendy Byrde in a scene from season three of Netflix TV series Ozark. Picture: supplied

The current Golden Globe Awards for film and television excellence have put in parenthesis the revolution in popular culture that has taken place over the past decade. The streaming platforms now rule supreme in providing home entertainment, and more, in crafting the stories of the time through which people read their lives. The lockdowns of the COVID-19 year have simply accelerated the existing trend; and sounded the death knell for free-to-air television, except for its sports coverage.

Even the cinema may be doomed to slow terminal decline. And books, which might have been expected to benefit from the closing down of public life last year, hardly rose in sales — fiction up a bit, non-fiction down. Leisure time has been commandeered by Netflix, Stan, Binge and Amazon Prime.

Netflix dominates the 2021 Golden Globe nominations across the board, including sweeping one entire television category. It is providing drama directly, and cheaply accessible, in every living room around the country, as it is around the Western world, unlike the old Oscar-winning films. Local film and television production is under threat. But so too are television stations themselves.

Indeed, why should the federal government keep funding an ABC television that is obsolete (unlike ABC radio), providing increasingly mediocre productions watched by ever-dwindling audiences? It would make organisational and financial sense to hive off the parts of ABC television that are still viable, like ABC Kids, and give them to SBS. I suspect I am typical of many: 20 years ago, the ABC was my television staple, but today I don’t even bother to check what’s on.

The huge challenge posed by Netflix and the other streaming platforms is the sheer quality of their leading films and television series, as reflected in the current awards. They have taken off from where the pioneer, Home Box Office (HBO), started, when it produced long runs of first-rank storytelling — The Sopranos, over 86 episodes between 1999 and 2007, set the early, very high bar.

Let me use one of the series that features in this year’s awards to illustrate. Ozark opened in 2017, and has had three series to date, with a fourth and final one currently in production. It has maintained very high quality, in scripting, acting and dramatisation — with a couple of virtuoso performances. While not of the peerless rank of HBO’s The Sopranos and Deadwood, it manages to open up intriguing and profound life questions, raising issues about what, if anything, controls the strange paths that different lives take. This is no small achievement.

Ozark transcends the ephemerality of time-passing soap opera by reworking one of the great archetypal stories of Western culture — Macbeth. It employs the technique of midrash, as known in the Jewish tradition, whereby old mythic stories are brought up to date by being reworked in terms that speak to new times.

Ozark introduces Marty and Wendy Byrde, who make a decision in 2007, after 12 years of marriage, to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel. Marty is a financial adviser who combines a brilliant knowledge of world money markets and great financial strategic acumen with an obsessional focus on detail. The cartel lieutenant says admiringly that Marty has a gift; he’s the best he’s ever seen. Marty’s stated motive is family: so that they will never have to worry about money again, a motive that is borne out through the series. But he is also drawn by the challenge, and the frisson of excitement, although he is by nature a cautious, risk-averse man.

Jason Bateman as Marty Byrde.

The decision is made at a time when Wendy is extremely depressed, to the point of hospitalisation. She confesses to feeling a fraud. Ten years later, when the program opens, she is having an affair; at one point, she robs Marty. Her unstable identity finds illustration in a childhood prank of breaking into other people’s houses and imaging herself living their lives, rearranging pictures and furniture, raiding their fridges.

The Ozark sequence of events is triggered by Marty’s partner. The cartel murders him for stealing from it. From this moment, early on, the Byrdes’ life plunges out of control, deep down into nightmare horror. The only thing that saves Marty is an agreement to flee their home in Chicago, in order to launder drug money in the remote Lake of the Ozarks, in Missouri.

In the Ozarks, things spin ever more out of control. Marty buys businesses to provide fronts for laundering, but he can never get ahead of cartel demands. Marty is plunged into desperate dizzying anxiety, as he often is, racing to thwart the cartel reflex, which is to exterminate whenever crossed. His overriding motive throughout becomes his family’s escape — his preferred destination, the Australian Gold Coast.

Wendy, meanwhile, slowly takes to the new life, drawn by money and influence, fascinated by the crime world and opportunities for her to engineer expansion. She uses her considerable skills as a political campaign organiser to operate in local power elites. She gains the confidence of the cartel boss, and is excited out of her depression by a fraught concoction of hope, power and danger.

When Marty first makes the hesitant decision to work for the cartel, he reflects: “Any decision made, big or small, has an impact around the world.” There is a “snowball effect”. In what will follow, Marty reflects pensively from time to time on decisions and their consequences. In his case, one decision, fallen into unsurely, and with a blind hope that not much was at stake, does change lives, irreversibly and calamitously.

Let me turn to the Macbeth blueprint. Macbeth is governed by “Nothing is but what is not” — its own impenetrably enigmatic line. This is a metaphysical play — and like none other. It is a blisteringly nihilistic tour de force. Nothing much that humans do is worthy — not their ambitions or their motives; not their characters or their emotional complexions; and not their attachments to each other. Macbeth’s own personal psychic chaos is overwhelmed by cosmic currents of destiny, a maelstrom of iniquity that swamps humans and their motives. Destiny becomes the central player in this drama, with human agency — that is, decisions — contracting to zero, summed up at the end as the “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”. Life is turned into the “damned spot” that Lady Macbeth, in her madness, wants to wash away: “Out, out, damned spot!”

Macbeth’s prevailing mood is, in one of its most repeated words, “weird”, not normal — weird in the drama’s own terms of fate, destiny, or even death, drawing on Old English meanings. In a constantly gyrating world, one without balance or stasis, all is tipped into becoming; things constantly turn. One hesitant act — Marty’s small decision — triggers a raging torrent of further acts, while darkly malevolent supernatural forces take over.

Macbeth is not himself a complex character. His ambition, parallel to Marty’s greed, is sparked by prophecies made by witches at the start of the play. The third prophecy, that he will be king, he brings about himself by murdering King Duncan, egged on by his diabolical wife. The play traces the story of the malevolent couple, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; just as Ozark follows the fate of another unhinged couple.

Macbeth is destroyed by guilt; in his case unable to sleep, obsessed by his bloodstained hands, and seeing the ghost of his former friend, Banquo, whom he had murdered. His frenzied rule turns his fellow lords against him. As the whirlpool of disaster spins faster, the once ruthless, psychopathic Lady Macbeth is herself suddenly afflicted by conscience; she takes to compulsive handwashing, unwinds into madness, and kills herself. Wendy is part Lady Macbeth.

The most admirable trait in Macbeth is self-awareness. Clear-sighted about his motives, and the moral laws he transgresses when he kills the king, he speaks of his own “black and deep desires”. If anything, he tries to unknow himself as the narrative progresses, banishing time for thought by hurtling into action. Macbeth is always in a rush (as is Marty), piling deed on deed, as if to forget himself, escape from whom he has turned into. Only when all is lost does he relax and regain composure, reflecting bitterly on the meaning of it all.

Evil is hypnotic, as in Ozark, Satanic and beyond human. Allied, the dominant emotion in both dramas is fear. Everyone is afraid. Formless terror washes through the stories, sucking every character at different stages under, struggling for breath. Macbeth may “sleep no more”, leaving no antidote to frenetic action and nervous exhaustion. It is as if Marty, too, has murdered sleep.

Macbeth is a metaphysical parable, with the impenetrably Gothic supernatural in ascendancy, impressionistic, enigmatic, caught up in helter-skelter rush, as if dizzy momentum is subject and substance — and Macbeth himself a mere pawn. Out of control seems close to the true centre of gravity of this dark mood poem, as it is in Ozark. Everyone and everything pitches out of control, like an aeroplane with spluttering engines diving into a tailspin.

To employ a different metaphor, Macbeth is like a long winding trail of dominoes, each stood on end, in procession, set off by a slight nudge at the front, so the fore domino topples and triggers the rest, as if in slow motion, one by one, until the trail is flat and exhausted. The Ozark trajectory is identical.

Here, Shakespeare is close to Greek tragedy, which was itself not greatly interested in subtlety of character. Weirdness, all is weird, means events are predetermined, as foretold by three hideous, scrawny hags, themselves ambassadors of the supernatural order that rules the play — in Ozark, the drug lords in distant Mexico play the role of vindictive and capricious supernatural forces.

Marty can’t escape from the nightmare of his own creation, as it keeps hurtling him along, taking unforeseen twists and turns, himself helpless victim despite his own brilliant ingenuity and hair-raising fortitude. His “decisions” have little effect.

Ozark is not the only successful television drama to rework Macbeth. The American House of Cards (2013-18), also from Netflix, portrayed an unscrupulous and ruthless couple, lacking any shred of conscience, single-mindedly focused on gaining the power of the American presidency, but also finding their lives spiralling out of control. But this drama, a more literal, black-and-white midrash, lacked both the character range of Ozark, and its metaphysical resonances.

John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University.