Truest statement of the week

On the new Netflix show Ozark, financial adviser Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is forced to launder millions of dollars in a rural red state, under threat of death from a Mexican drug cartel. In Billions, which finished its second season in May, viewers are meant to envy and respect mega–hedge-funder “Axe” (Damian Lewis), despite his evident criminality. And then there is the wildly popular Empire, about a hip-hop dynasty ruled by the ridiculously wealthy and brutal Lyon family.
Welcome to the new aspirational television, about a 1% that lives with impunity. These series center on brilliant, albeit extremely violent entrepreneurs. Our antiheroes have technical specialties they managed to turn into criminal know-how: on Ozark, money management becomes money laundering, and on Breaking Bad, high-school chemistry instruction becomes meth production.
These shows subtly argue that their protagonists have been forced to become criminals to avoid falling out of the upper-middle class. They are, after all, self-made: there aren’t even rich grandparents or parents to bail them out. And while these series are far from real, they do rest on the bedrock American reality of income inequality – the huge gap between the Axes of the world, or even the Marty Byrdes, and the “little people”.

-- Alissa Quart, "Our new TV antiheroes are just like us: they don’t want to fall out of the middle class" (GUARDIAN).  (For more on the topic of the economy and its impact on TV, see Ava and C.I.'s "TV: The meanings of OZARK" and "TV: Conventions ingrained").