Ozark

A show about an American heartland scourged by black-market drugs, vice, politics, and bureaucratic power

In Netflix's Ozark, no one is ever too far from government power. The show tells the story of the Byrdes, an ordinary Chicago family that ends up laundering money for a drug cartel. It bears all the hallmarks of post-Sopranos prestige TV, refracting the pedestrian concerns of America's semi-privileged upper-middle class through the lens of violent genre television. The result is a kaleidoscopic look at the breakdown of American institutions.

It's not just that the Byrde family works for a drug lord. They also work for and against the FBI, and are embroiled in local politics via dealings with an eccentric political kingmaker and in national politics via their Chicago connections to the Obama campaign. They scheme to overcome regulatory burdens and corruption to open a riverboat casino—the better to launder drug money.

In the fourth and final season, the family sets up a political foundation using money from a struggling drugmaker guilted into backing them out of concern for the opioid crisis. This same drugmaker is also reliant on drug-cartel poppy.

It's a show, in other words, about an American heartland scourged by black-market drugs, vice, politics, and bureaucratic power, in which the family is the only institution with any chance of holding together.