Breaking Bad

Ozark runs Breaking Bad's premise with a financial adviser instead of a chemistry teacher: a competent, unremarkable middle-class professional launders money for a cartel, moves his family somewhere remote, and turns out to be good at it. The shared engine is the marriage, and the variation is where each show starts it. Skyler spends a season and a half working out what Walt is doing; Wendy is inside it from the first episode and the question is how far she will go rather than when she will find out. Both series end up with a wife who is the more capable criminal of the two, and both move the audience's sympathy across five seasons and four respectively.

The show puts it on screen. In one of the episodes, Walt watches the end of Scarface with his infant daughter on his lap and says "everyone dies in this movie", which is the series telling the audience what it is and where it is going. Vince Gilligan has named it as a reference point throughout: the arc of a man who acquires everything he said he wanted and is destroyed by the acquiring, the point at which the money stops being a means, and the refusal to let the audience keep liking him. The difference is the pacing. De Palma's rise takes two hours; Gilligan's takes five seasons, which is what lets the audience be complicit in it.