Netflix's 4-Part Crime Thriller That Won 4 Emmys Has One Of Its Best Casts

While Netflix has a lot of shows with great casts, one crime drama used this quality to great advantage with its sprawling, unpredictable story. Unfortunately for TV producers, a great cast does not necessarily make for a great TV show. Seasoned screen performers can no doubt elevate a series and give it a veneer of professionalism and legitimacy, and big-name actors can often bring an otherwise small project to more viewers through their public profile.

However, plenty of shows have boasted incredible casts and still turned out incredibly bad. 2025’s woeful political thriller Zero Day starred Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Bill Camp, Angela Bassett, Joan Allen, Dan Stevens, Jesse Plemons, Connie Britton, and Matthew Modine, and it was a sodden, silly mess that wasn’t fun enough to qualify as escapism, but lacked anything resembling the realism or grit required to have real stakes.

Similarly, while Prime Video’s Scarpetta season 1 boasted the talents of Ariana DeBose, Bobby Cannavale, Jamie Lee Curtis, Simon Baker, and an A-list star in the form of Nicole Kidman in the lead role, the crime procedural was still a disaster. Too many characters, too many soapy storylines, and too many disconcerting tonal shifts doomed that psychological thriller, which is what made the successful run of Netflix’s ensemble crime thriller Ozark so notably impressive a few years earlier.

Netflix’s Ozark Needed Its Killer Cast To Save The Show’s Familiar Premise

When the series began, Ozark bore a lot of the hallmarks of so many post-Breaking Bad crime drama shows. Like Breaking Bad, the show followed a seemingly ordinary suburban father, financial advisor Marty Byrde, as he became increasingly involved with an illegal business to keep his family in the lifestyle to which they were accustomed. Like Breaking Bad, the show took a leading man best known for his work in a cult sitcom and cast him as a morally ambiguous, thoroughly unfunny antihero.

However, any fears that Ozark was nothing more than Jason Bateman’s attempt to replicate Bryan Cranston’s post-Malcolm in the Middle success with Breaking Bad evaporated thanks to the Netflix hit’s superb cast. As Marty relocated his family to the titular Missouri tourist destination so that he could continue to launder money for a drug cartel, he soon ran afoul of local criminal elements, and the show’s story expanded to grant these characters an increasingly large role in the plot.

Ozark’s Success Saw The Show Expand Beyond Its Original Scope

Ozark’s breakout star, Julie Garner, was a huge part of the show’s success, as her petty criminal Ruth Langmore became just as pivotal to the story of the series as Marty or any member of his family. Similarly, Lisa Emery’s Darlene Snell, Janet McTeer’s Helen Pierce, and Jordana Spiro’s reluctant criminal accessory Rachel Garrison all brought unique shades of grey to what could otherwise have been a disappointingly black and white character study.

Breaking Bad was singularly great, but the show’s outsized critical success meant it would be tough for any later series about a mild-mannered dad taking on a life of crime to hit the same highs. As such, it was a welcome surprise when Ozark instead felt like HBO’s cult classic The Sopranos, with the show’s cast of memorable characters expanding with each season and the scope of its story growing wider to accommodate these figures.

Where its most obvious inspiration, Breaking Bad, lasered in on one character's moral breakdown, Ozark took the opposite approach and illustrated an entire interlinked community’s involvement in Marty’s ambitious criminal enterprise. This made Ozark feel fundamentally original despite the debt the show owed to earlier crime dramas, but the approach only worked because the show’s peerless cast proved to be uniformly excellent in a range of consistently compelling roles.