'Ozark' Showrunner Teases the Netflix Series' Thrilling End - The Daily Beast

With the first half of his Netflix hit’s fourth and final season, showrunner Chris Mundy has initiated Ozark’s endgame, setting the stage for a last-ditch attempt by Marty (Jason Bateman) and Wendy Byrde (Laura Linney) to escape their money-laundering entanglements with the Navarro cartel while keeping their (and their kids’) heads on their shoulders.

It really was a product of, I was talking to Netflix a fair amount about wanting to know whenever we were going to end.

The one question I asked was to please let us know when we were writing the finale, so you’re not in that position of writing an ending that could be an ending if you don’t do more, and yet you could still keep going on if you’re going to do another season after it.

At the same time, when people go back and watch the 14 episodes together, it needed to feel like it’s one continuum.

That was the real challenge: trying to make it all feel whole at 14, and at the same time making it feel like it began and ended in the first seven, and began and ended in the back seven too?

I’m kind of approaching it more or less like you are, which is just a gut feel, because we haven’t talked about it that much.

And knowing where we wanted to end it—at least emotionally; we didn’t know all the mechanics of it—it felt like somewhere in that four-five season range was kind of perfect.

Luckily, 14 episodes was really a good number, as it turned out?

You think you have it right, but a lot of the time what happens is, stuff that was going to happen in episode five actually happens in episode three, and it screws everything up, and you’re re-outlining.

But this was such a natural ending point—especially for Ruth, emotionally, and then her making a choice about what happens next, and what path she’s going to go on.

It felt like a really good midpoint, and then we just needed to break everything around it to see if the balance felt right, and we hadn’t burned through so much story through episode four that we’d screwed ourselves up [laughs]?

From the beginning, it just naturally looked like this, almost geometrically?

And for Marty to kind of look at his marriage with Wendy and say, when is unconditional love healthy, and when is it really not healthy?

I think Wendy is very smart but she’s immature in a ton of ways, and rash because of it.

I think Marty truly wants it to be over, but I think Marty has also, for whatever reason—whether it’s fear, or loyalty to Wendy, or whatever—never done it?

One of the most fascinating aspects of Wendy this season is her decision to make Ben a component of her PR narrative—and to almost willfully pretend he’s alive—which is far from a predictable response to his murder.

The line between whether she’s really losing her mind, or whether it’s all very studied, is something we toy with a bunch in the back seven.

She’s so good, and she’s so good at portraying really complex things.

Like I was just saying: This incredible grief at what Wendy did to her brother, and yet also using it in the most cold-blooded way to further things; and wanting to go off and do things through the foundation, but not even blinking at the terrible things she’ll do in order to do that; and then, still parenting her kids.

The little way that, if she’s in a scene with her brother last season, or if she’s in a conversation with her dad, the accent comes out just the littlest bit?

Jason Bateman as Marty Byrde and Laura Linney as Wendy Byrde in Ozark.

And when you’ve got Laura and Julia and Jordana [Spiro] in the first two seasons, and then Janet [McTeer] when she came on in season two—you see all that, and it’s just interesting watching these women dominate this macho male world.

I think to whatever degree we deserve credit, it’s just for not being dumb enough to mute it in some way [laughs].

We said there should be a drinking game for every time they say something like, “We’re so close to being out.” Everyone would be bombed by the end of the season