Season one of Ozark introduces us to Marty Byrde, a financial advisor who, alongside his business
partner Bruce, launders money for the Navarro drug cartel. When the cartel discovers that Bruce stole
eight million dollars from them, they kill him. To save his own life, Marty promises he can launder
half a billion dollars within five years in the Ozarks. Why the Ozarks? Well, Marty had a flier
for the Ozarks and panicked in the heat of the moment. Cartel leader Del is suspicious of Marty’s
claims, but agrees to give Marty three months to launder eight millions dollars as a trial run. If
Marty succeeded, he’d be in deep with the cartel. If he failed, he and his family would be killed.
And so, Marty Byrde and his family move to the Ozarks! There’s his wife, Wendy,
who he has a strained relationship with after discovering she was having an affair.
Also along for the ride are the Byrdes’ children Charlotte, who resents her father for moving them
from Chicago, and Jonah, who is much more interested in his family’s new business.
The Byrde family moves into a new home in the Ozarks, but a condition of the sale required
its former owner Buddy, who was elderly and terminally ill, to live in the basement.
At first, Wendy takes on a job working with real estate agent Sam Dermody,
but after his mother dies and leaves him a large fortune, Wendy starts being more
hands on with Marty’s cartel dealings and manipulates Sam into doing her bidding.
As Marty searches for a business to buy in the Ozarks to help launder money, the eight million
dollars given to him by the cartel is stolen by the Langmore family. The Langmores are a family
of broke criminals who aren’t the smartest thieves around. The head of the Langmore family was Cade,
who was currently serving time in prison. His brothers are Russ and Boyd. Russ has two sons,
Wyatt and Three. And Cade has a daughter, Ruth, who is the only member of the family to possess
any sort of savvy or intellect. Marty retrieves the cartel money back from the Langmores, but
Ruth manages to persuade him to take her under his wing and teach her his ways. Unbeknownst to Marty,
her ultimate goal is to learn his tricks of the trade, then kill him and steal all of his money.
For Marty’s money laundering venture he takes over two local businesses. First,
he invests in the Blue Cat Inn and enters into a bit of a relationship with its owner, Rachel.
Although that relationship doesn’t last long when Rachel discovers Marty’s laundering scheme and
takes off with a stack of cash. Then, with the help of Ruth, Marty pushes out the owner of the
Lickety Splitz strip club to buy it for himself. Marty entrusts Ruth to run the strip club,
which she does expertly, and the two forge a genuine bond. Unfortunately,
Marty was unaware that the former owner of Lickety Splitz was already laundering money
for local heroin dealers Jacob and Darlene Snell. So now the Snells needed Marty to work for them.
And the complications don’t stop there! Marty realizes that a church would make for another
great laundering system and offers to help build one for Pastor Mason Young,
who currently preached to boats on a lake. Unbeknownst to both Mason and Marty,
the Snells used these boat gatherings to distribute heroin on the open water.
Taking Mason’s preaching to land would be another massive hit to the Snell business, and so they
threaten to cut the baby out of Mason’s pregnant wife’s stomach if the church building wasn’t
scrapped. And though the church isn’t built, Mason can’t bring himself to return to preaching on the
lake if it was being used for heroin distribution. And so, upon his refusal to preach, the Snells
make good on their threat and kill Mason’s wife and deliver to him his newborn baby, Zeke.
And if all of that wasn’t enough drama for Marty and his family, the FBI was looking
into his ties to the Navarro drug cartel due to Marty’s old business partner Bruce secretly
being an informant. Agent Roy Petty heads to the Ozarks to find enough evidence to catch Marty,
going undercover as a tourist who starts paying Russ Langmore to be his fishing guide.
Throughout their time together, Petty initiates a romantic relationship with
Russ that at first is strictly for the case, but grows into something genuine.
Under the instruction of Cade, Ruth and her uncles conspire to kill Marty by electrocuting him.
When Russ confesses this to Petty, the FBI agent secretly intervenes to save Marty’s life.
Petty then blows his cover to Russ and explains that he recorded Russ’ confession
on the Marty Byrde murder attempt. But instead of turning into an informant like Petty hoped,
Russ and Boyd plan to rob and kill Marty, then run away. Ruth discovers her uncles’
plan and sabotages them, killing them both before they can kill Marty.
Marty then successfully launders the full eight million dollars for the cartel, and
in return they give him another fifty million to launder. When Del arrives in the Ozarks,
Marty tries to broker a deal between the cartel and the Snells. The cartel would now handle the
heroin distribution for the Snells, and the Snells would allow a casino to be built on
their land to launder cartel money. It was a deal that seemed to make everyone happy,
but after some harsh words are exchanged, the erratic Darlene Snell shoots and kills
Del. And just like that, things just got even more complicated for Marty.
In season two of Ozark, the Mexican cartel sends its American attorney Helen Pierce to sort out
all of the drama from season one. Helen agrees to Marty’s plan of the cartel working with the Snell
family to distribute heroin in exchange for land for a money laundering casino,
but following the death of Del, the Snells would need to kill one of their own. And so,
Jacob kills his trusted employee, Ash. And now that the cartel and the Snells were in agreement,
Marty just had to go about ensuring that the State Senator would allow the construction of
the casino. And that was easier said than done, as the Kansas City Mafia had their own plans for the
area and violently opposed the casino. In turn, Wendy Byrde teams up with political donor Charles
Wilkes to blackmail the senators and ensure that legislation goes through to build the casino.
As the Byrdes and Ruth shift their focus to the casino plans,
they entrust Wendy’s old gullible pal Sam Dermody to manage the Lickety Splitz strip club.
And then there’s Agent Petty, who is still trying to take down Marty Byrde. First,
he pressures a drug addicted Rachel into returning to Ozark to spy on Marty. Rachel betrays Petty and
alerts Marty that he was being watched, and in return Marty pays for Rachel to go to rehab.
Next Petty publicly interrogates Ruth to make Helen and the cartel think
she’s an FBI informant. Helen has her goons waterboard Ruth, who maintains her innocence.
This results in Helen remarking to Marty how impressed she was in Ruth’s toughness.
Then Petty sets his sights on the Snell heroin farm. Helen implores the Snells to burn the crops,
but Darlene resists. So, the Byrdes send Buddy to burn the crop before the FBI can investigate.
Unfortunately for Buddy, his heart gives out after successfully saving the day.
After his many failed attempts to take down the Byrdes,
Petty leaves Ozark and becomes a joke to the FBI.
Darlene Snell is furious about her crops being burned and starts lacing the heroin they supply
to the cartel with fentanyl, causing many users to OD. Marty and Helen then threaten Jacob with
eminent domain, claiming the government could seize the Snell land if they didn’t want to sell.
Jacob agrees to cooperate with Marty and the cartel, and resolves to kill Darlene to keep
the peace. But Darlene discovers Jacob’s plan and poisons her husband before he can kill her.
Elsewhere in season two, Wendy Byrde runs into Mason Young who is now homeless and
preaching on the street with his baby Zeke in tow. When the police take Zeke into custody,
a distraught Mason holds Wendy at gunpoint and demands that Marty bring Zeke back to him. Marty
and Wilkes manage to secure the release of Zeke to bring him back to Mason, but in the confrontation,
Marty is forced to kill the pastor to save his wife. Marty and Wendy then take Zeke in as their
own. When the complete wild card Darlene comes around wanting to take Zeke for herself, the
Byrdes have no choice but to hand the child over in the hopes of calming the heroin producer down.
Also in season two, Cade Langmore is paroled from his prison sentence to look after Wyatt and
Three following the death of their father, Russ. Cade’s freedom creates a lot of problems for Ruth,
who is on a successful path following Marty, but her father is constantly trying to get her
to betray her employer and steal his millions. Ruth has proved herself valuable to the cartel,
and when Marty makes plans to get out of the money laundering game and flee
to Australia with his family, it’s Ruth he plans to leave his empire with. This
spurns Ruth to finally tell her father off to officially side with Marty. In retaliation,
Cade seeks out Agent Petty to offer his assistance in taking down the Byrde family.
When Petty refuses, Cade snaps and kills the FBI agent. Cade is then forced to flee the Ozarks,
but before he leaves he tries to blackmail Ruth into giving him some money by threatening to
tell Wyatt and Three that she was responsible for their father’s death. Ruth balks at her father’s
extortion attempt and mournfully confesses to her cousins herself. And so, Cade leaves town,
but on the way out he is ambushed and killed by the cartel at the request of Wendy. And then
Wendy informs Marty that the family would not be fleeing to Australia, but would instead be
staying put in the Ozarks. This shakes Marty, who begins to fear that his wife has gone too far. And
to make matters worse, Kansas City Mafia leader Frank Cosgrove arrives and blows up Marty’s office
as a warning to Marty that their dissatisfaction with the casino development was far from resolved.
In season 3 of Ozark, Marty Byrde is doing everything he can to keep his affairs in order and
his family safe. He pays off the Cosgrove family and the KC Mafia and even offers them a percentage
stake in the newly opened Missouri Belle casino. FBI Agent Maya Miller begins looking into the
Byrde’s financial records in order to prove they were laundering money, so Marty has to navigate a
vigorous investigation. And Marty agrees to enter couple’s therapy with his wife Wendy,
but secretly pays off their therapist Sue for her to sway their sessions in Marty’s favor.
But for all of Marty’s efforts, the Byrde family find themselves in constantly escalating dangers.
To solve the problem of FBI Agent Miller looking into the casinos finances,
the Byrdes and Ruth must come up with new ways to launder money. First they try “smurfing”,
hiring teams of people to make bets and lose small amounts every day,
and eventually they escalate to having Wendy’s old gullible pal Sam Dermody,
now engaged to a stripper, to bet big and lose large sums of his fortune with the promise of
being reimbursed by the Byrdes. When Agent Miller catches on to the scheme, she has Sam arrested.
Wendy Byrde believes the best way to further protect her family is to grow even more powerful,
so throughout season 3, she teams up with Navarro lawyer Helen Pierce to rapidly expand Navarro’s
empire in America. Marty, fearing the expansion plans would put the family at greater risk,
constantly tries to thwart his wife’s power moves. But when Navarro hears of
the Byrde family dysfunction from Helen, he kidnaps Marty and brings
him to Mexico for some torturing. The only way for Marty to save himself is
by promising Navarro that he could turn Agent Miller to the cartel’s side. And so,
Marty returns to America and is more amenable to Wendy’s expansion plans and also begins
working on flipping Agent Miller’s allegiance by confessing his crimes to her to gain her trust.
Part of the Navarro expansion plans include buying a Kentucky horse farm,
but that turns out to be a ploy by Navarro to castrate the prize stud horse housed there by
his cartel rival Lagunas. This escalates a drug war that had started in Mexico
between the rivals and brings it to America where the Byrdes were now in the crossfire.
The strain of the escalating drug war, the FBI investigation, and the conflicting business
plans further fractures the marriage of Marty and Wendy, who accidentally explode on each other in a
therapy session, revealing all of their criminal secrets to their therapist, Sue. Marty pays Sue
off to stay quiet, but Helen has Navarro enforcer Nelson kill the therapist to ensure her silence.
Making things even harder for the Byrde family to navigate is the arrival of Wendy’s brother
Ben. Ben discovers the truth about Marty and Wendy’s various criminal affiliations and
ingratiates himself into the family business. When he strikes up a romantic relationship with Ruth,
he stops taking his bipolar medication and his erratic behavior begins to become a liability.
Meanwhile, the KC Mafia head Frank Cosgrove has his men transporting money for the Byrdes.
At a money drop off between Ruth and some Cosgrove men, the Lagunas cartel shows up and opens fire,
killing the mafia members while Ruth narrowly escapes thanks to some help from Ben and Jonah,
who were observing the meeting with Jonah’s drone. The business partnership between the
mafia and the Byrdes becomes increasingly strained due to Cosgrove’s hotheaded son,
Frank Jr., constantly creating conflict with Ruth. He starts a scene at the casino
and needs to be thrown out by Ruth, his men are constantly disobeying Ruth’s money drop protocols,
and he even begins loan sharking at the Missouri Belle against Marty and Ruth’s wishes. Eventually,
this escalates to Frank and his men beating Ruth to near death. This causes the Byrdes to payout
and cut ties with the KC mafia, but Ruth wants them to go even further and have Frank Jr. killed.
When they refuse, Ruth begins to feel betrayed by the Byrdes.
Ben encourages Ruth to turn on Marty and Wendy due to their seeming disloyalty.
And let’s not forget about another enemy of the Byrdes, Darlene Snell. She’s still bitter over the
burning of her poppy fields, but now that they’ve begun to regrow, she’s planning her own moves.
When Wyatt Langmore is arrested for breaking and entering, Darlene pays his bail and employs him
on the heroin farm. The two even enter into a bit of an inappropriate romantic relationship. Darlene
then makes moves to bring Ruth over to her side, and to prove her loyalty, she confronts Frank
Jr. and shoots his genitals off as revenge for his attack on Ruth. And then to top things off,
Darlene pays a visit to Frank Sr. and offers him a 50-50 business partnership as an apology.
She’d supply the heroin, the KC mafia would distribute it.
As the season nears its finale, Ben is becoming too far gone.
He publicly confronts and attacks Marty at a charity event they were throwing at the
Missouri Belle and then goes to the home of Helen Pierce and tells her teenage daughter
Erin that Helen and the Byrdes worked for a Mexican drug cartel and were responsible for
several murders. In response, Helen tells Navarro that the Byrde family had become
too big of a liability and was given the go ahead to do whatever seemed necessary.
With their backs against the wall and the threat of death imposed against their entire family,
Wendy is forced to make her toughest decision yet and gives up her own brother to the cartel,
who sends Nelson to kill Ben. This decision causes Ruth to officially cut ties with the Byrdes.
Still fearing that Navarro would view the Byrdes as too big a liability,
Marty and Wendy devise a plan to prove themselves more valuable to the cartel than Helen. And so,
Marty takes Jonah’s drone footage of the Lagunas attack to Agent Miller in order to secure the
arrest of the Lagunas men, a small victory in the ongoing drug war. Navarro then calls Marty,
Wendy, and Helen to Mexico to attend his son’s baptism. Fearing for their lives,
the Byrdes arrive in Mexico via private jet where Helen is shockingly executed by Nelson
and Navarro welcomes the Byrdes, celebrating an increased cooperation between the three of them.