Just finished this, and here’s my impressions:
Overall I give it 7.5/10. Enjoyable, engaging, occasionally engrossing.
The Good: the entire cast overall, with special mention to Jason Bateman, Julia Garner (Ruth Langmore), Lisa Emery (Darlene Snell), and Peter Mullan (Jacob Snell). I had a bit of a hard time wrapping my mind around Jason Bateman in a serious, dramatic role, as 'til now I’ve always associated him with comedic ones. But he rose magnificently to the occasion.
His performance in earlier episodes comes across as emotionally detached, practically robotic, but as the series progresses, we see that Marty Byrde is trying desperately to keep the lid screwed on his increasingly frantic and desperate emotional state, while still maintaining the clear-minded, rational intellect necessary to accomplish the near impossible task before him, and save his family, and Jason Bateman nails it.
Julia Garner’s “Ruth Langmore” is, at first, a greedy, violently opportunistic piece of white-trash, and then morphs into a more complex, conflicted (emotionally, and in terms of motives, desires, and goals) character.
Lisa Emery’s and Peter Mullan’s “Darlene & Jacob Snell” are chillingly effective, practically picture-perfect poster-people for Faux Affably Evil and Soft-Spoken Sadists.
The Bad: isn’t really all that bad, IMO. “Fall” came way too early for Missouri; yes, we can get the occasional “early Fall” in mid/late September, but it’s very rare. More likely, any mid-September “cool spell” is quickly followed by a month-plus of “Indian Summer” through most of October and early November. The weather change depicted is more like going from Labor Day (late Summer, still hot as Hell) to late November or even early December (potentially chill and damp) in the space of a few weeks.
As far as money-laundering goes, I have only a Hollywood 101 idea of how it works, in theory, so I can’t (and won’t) comment on the realism of the financial shenanigans of Marty Byrde. From my perspective, the mechanisms/machinations of money laundering. as depicted, work well enough for the narrative to easily sustain my willing suspension of disbelief.
The Ugly: stereotypes exist for a reason, and here, they work for the narrative well enough, but still, the show is fraught with them, and they’re generally ugly. Fortunately, the various characters occasionally play against type just often enough to, (generally, somewhat) mitigate the damage. Still, it does bring the overall tone and quality of thew show down.
Tuck’s purchase of the rifle for Jonah was so misleading as to be blatant lie(s). No big-name retailer (the SuperMegaStore was clearly an expy of Wal-Mart) would risk the fines, the lawsuits, the law enforcement scrutiny (State and Federal), on an obviously iffy gun sale; they catch enough grief over completely legit ones as is.
The paperwork process is a bit more involved than was depicted, and a fully-automatic rifle cannot be purchased “over-the-counter” by just anyone who wanders in off of the street like that.
The price-point on even lower end fully-automatic firearms is so high (thank you, Hughes Amendment, “Firearm Owner’s Protection Act!”) that Jonah would literally have to be skimming thousands of dollars off of his Dad’s money laundering operation to even afford one, were he (or, more accurately, his adult proxy) even able to find one, and attempt to purchase it.
And the purchase process on fully-automatic firearms is considerably more involved than for ordinary (non-fully-automatic) firearms.
It’s already established that Buddy (Harris Yulin) has an extensive firearms collection, in an easily accessed, usually unlocked, glass-fronted gun cabinet; so why couldn’t Jonah have simply grabbed one of Buddy’s rifle’s or shotguns when he felt he needed it? Why did the producers have to insert a series of blatant lies with regards to firearms purchasing, when it wasn’t necessary to the narrative of the story?
