A fine crime and action series top to bottom: Ozark

The Netflix/Bill Dubuque series Ozark, starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney in a terrific against-type casting as the unfaithful wife, seemed to me somewhat preposterous - a Chicago business analyst and investment advisor (Bateman) runs afoul of a Mexican drug ring and gets ordered to the Lake of the Ozarks resort area w/ the mission of "laundering" $8M in drug money in a span of a few months - but despite the improbabilities of this set-up the series gets going right out of the blocks and far exceeded my expectations. Over the 10 episodes of the first season - and I'm sure more are to follow - the plot takes numerous strange twists and turns, and Bateman emerges as a great character - a smart and ruthless guy who can talk himself out of almost any jam by appealing to the basest interests of his antagonist. He's completely brazen about buying or muscling his way into any business that will give him access to a ledger of expenditures that he can vastly inflate to clean the bills he's stashed. Of course there's a scary, rival drug gang already entrenched in the region - that's one problem - plus an FBI team on his trail. His family, of course, is not totally keen on this sudden uprooting and the move to Missouri, and both teenage daughter and preteen son act out in strange but credible ways; Linney in particular is great, trying to protect the family, which of course forces her ever deeper into the money laundering schemes that Bateman (and later she herself) devise. Of particular note is the terrific Episode 8: Kaleidoscope, which gives us - late in the season, by the way - the back stories of all of the major characters. In short, Ozark is top to bottom is a fine crime and action series with in my view not a single weak link, stretching credibility to the breaking point but never beyond.