Ozark’s America and the Rise of the Longform

“Why do I have this feeling that it’d be better off if you were dead?”

Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) says this to Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) in their first encounter inside a public-park washroom in Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams’ longform series, . As one of the notorious Langmores—a clan of (mostly) criminals going back to their early bootlegging days in the Ozarks, and close cousins to the ruthless, raucous Crowe family in Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens sagas (which were adapted into the series , of which is a direct descendant)—Ruth was born with larceny in her heart and a keen instinct for sniffing out a fellow crook when she sees one. Marty, a Chicago investment advisor in flight from the law, has boldly barged in on the Langmores as they’re figuring how to handle the dough they’ve just stolen from Marty. What they don’t know is that the dough doesn’t belong to Marty, but to the Michoacan-based cartel lord Omar Navarro (Felix Solis), who has assigned his lieutenant Camino Del Rio (Esai Morales) to ensure that Marty launders $500,000 in (already clean) cash in the Lake of the Ozarks resort region in Missouri as a test of Marty’s self-declared skills. Marty, displaying his top three talents—1) numbers, 2) selling others on an idea, and 3) wiggling out of a bad jam—puts the hillbilly Langmores in their place by Don Winslow, as “the cartel.”