This is not an official post. The following thoughts you read will not be coherent. This show does not deserve coherent thoughts. But since there wasn’t going to be a post today, I thought I’d give you my stream-of-conscious thoughts on Ozark Season 3. A TON of people recommended this season to me. To the point where I was expecting one of the all-time great seasons of television.
That is not what I got.
What I got was shoddy writing, awful acting, and an all-around disaster of a season. But let me start with the good. The bi-polar brother character was good. His storyline worked. But he was the only storyline that worked. Everything else ranged between bad and terrible.
The thing that frustrates me most is that no one on this show knows how to write towards a goal. The season started out with a plan. The Byrds buy a casino boat they can launder money on. Okay, that’s something we can use to build a storyline around. But by the fifth episode, the casino had become background noise, something the Byrds occasionally went over to and checked on.
By the way, I’m three seasons into a show about money laundering and I still don’t know how money laundering works. And I’m positive that half the writers on this series don’t know either. Whenever money laundering is brought up, it’s done so in general terms. Some character over in the corner is doing it. Or if Marty is doing it, he keeps to himself about it. There’s never any explanation of how much money is being laundered or what the ultimate goal is other than there’s some guy in Mexico who “needs his money laundered.”
Speaking of Marty, HE HAS NOTHING TO DO ON THE SHOW!!!! The only purpose of this character is to come into a scene when two other characters are arguing and say, “Guys! Guys! We need to focus here. Okay?” I swear he said a variation of that line six million times in the season. Isn’t Marty supposed to be your main character?? Why doesn’t he have anything to do!
In Marty’s one big episode, that I call, “The Laughably Awful Excuse for a TV Episode” episode, Marty is kidnapped and taken to Mexico so the big drug cartel guy can scare him a little. The awfulness of the writing was confirmed to me when they cut to Marty, in a cell, ravenously ripping rice off a bowl with his bare hands, jamming it into his mouth, desperate for food. The problem with this moment? Marty had only been in Mexico for a FEW HOURS!!!! And he’s already starving to the point where he’s ripping food off bowls. It’s classic amateur writer hour. They want all the drama and none of the logic. It’s probably going to take your character longer than a few hours to be starving. This sequence is intercut with some faux important flashback of Marty as a kid waiting in the hospital when a parent is dying and he keeps playing one of the video games down in the waiting area. I’m sure to the writer, this video game had a ton of significance. It was symbolic. It was a metaphor! To us, it was, “WHY THE F%$# ARE YOU FOCUSING SO HARD ON THIS RANDOM STUPID VIDEO GAME??”
Oh, and don’t get me started on Ruth. The actress who plays that character is one of the single worst actresses I’ve ever seen allowed on a professional TV set. She makes the wrong choice on EVERY SINGLE LINE she reads. It’s clearly meant to be read one way and she, without fail, always emphasizes the wrong word or says the sentence the wrong way, completely killing the meaning of the line. It’s actually quite spectacular that you can make the wrong choice that many times in a row. And I didn’t keep count, but she says the word “f%$king” at least 1000 times over the course of the season. It’s one thing to keep a character’s verbiage consistent, it’s another to be plain lazy. Give the character SOMETHING to say other than “f%$king” every single time she opens her mouth.
But I soldiered on. I kept going. Because everyone said the ending of the season was great. I figured this had to all come together somehow. That something world-changing was going to happen.
I guess (spoiler) everyone was talking about the fact that they killed off the brother. And that was a nice moment. But I was expecting more.
And the baffling part about that is they killed him in episode 9. So episode 10 rolls around, after all the air had been let out of the balloon, and as a result they had NOTHING TO DO IN THE EPISODE. It was like watching a real-time 60 minute car crash. It was clear the writers had no idea where to go or what to have the characters do. Every scene was characters either standing around outside discussing something that had already happened or sitting down inside discussing what already happened.
YOUR FINAL EPISODE SHOULD NOT BE ABOUT WHAT ALREADY HAPPENED! IT SHOULD BE ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW!
I couldn’t believe what I was watching.
And look, I’m not here to tell anyone who loved this season that they’re wrong. I get that when you become attached to characters as an audience, you don’t see the same flaws other viewers do. So if you cared about these people, your experience was likely different. The only person I cared about was the brother. But every other character was so poorly written (except for Wendy and the lawyer lady at times) that I couldn’t muster even a microcosm of interest in what happened to them.
I feel like I spent 10 hours watching a show where two things happened. You watch a season of Breaking Bad and a million things happen.
I don’t get it. Sorry. I had to get this out of my system.
Curious to hear your reaction. :)
