Battle of the Blondes: Why “Ozark” is More Interesting than “Breaking Bad”

The Netflix crime drama gives its female characters much more complexity than its predecessor.

Now that it’s been announced that Netflix’s Ozark has been nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, I’d like to make what will no doubt be a controversial statement: I think that this series is significantly more interesting than Breaking Bad.

It’s not that I don’t like Breaking Bad. In fact, I was a devoted watcher when it was on the air and I, like so many other viewers found myself utterly transfixed by Bryan Cranston’s performance as Walter White, the school teacher who turns to cooking high-grade meth to help pay his medical bills and begins a slide into absolute monstrosity and moral depravity. And it has to be said that in some important ways Ozark is a bit derivative of Breaking Bad (though it’s also fair to point out that Breaking Bad was itself derivative of a number of other crime dramas that preceded it). Like its predecessor, it focuses on a mild-mannered man who gets increasingly caught up in the world of drug cartels and money laundering. He flees to the Ozarks with his wife and their two children to set up a new series of money laundering operations for his drug cartel overlords, and the three seasons of the…