Ozark review – Jason Bateman and Laura Linney could teach Lady Macbeth a thing or two

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Poor Janet McTeer. Not since the Pacific breeze blew Steve Buscemi’s ashes into the Dude’s beard in The Big Lebowski have a character’s remains been so disrespectfully treated. At the start of the fourth series of Ozark (Netflix), Wendy and Marty Byrde, like a pair of Lady Macbeths, are washing the remains of cartel lawyer Helen Pierce (McTeer) out of their clothes in the bathroom of Mexican drug lord Omar Navarro’s palatial compound.

At the end of series three, Navarro’s hitman offed Helen, because she was working an angle contrary to the cartel’s interest (trying to take over the Byrdes’ money-laundering casinos). “They blow her brains out two feet from us,” Wendy tells her children later. “We had to wash pieces out of our hair.”

The long-awaited, Covid-delayed final season – with one tranche of seven episodes being dropped now and the final seven to come later this year – rejoins Wendy and Marty on the journey they started three series ago. They left Chicago for a resort in the Ozarks, laundering money through a bar and strip club to fund the nonprofit Byrde Family Foundation into which they could funnel heroin money to do good things, such as bankroll rehab centres for addicts.

Instead of going straight, though, they sunk ever deeper into evil. By the end of series three, they were laundering drug money for the Navarro cartel through multiple casinos, partnering with the Kansas City mob to deal heroin, and luring the US army to raid and eliminate a rival cartel. Wendy kills her own brother to prove her loyalty to Navarro, helps his thuggish brother Javi dispose of the local sheriff who asks too many questions, and now plans to offer up her traitorous son Jonah to the FBI. Say what you like about Lady Macbeth: at least she didn’t have siblings to swell the body count nor sons to betray to the feds.

Laura Linney’s performance as Wendy is all the more chilling because her face says apple pie, but everything she does curdles into evil. Meanwhile, Jason Bateman’s Marty is a study in how far a pragmatic accountant can go into the depths of wickedness without the strain showing on his face.

If one of the great pleasures of Ozark is that strong women motor the storyline – not just Wendy, but hillbilly heroin farmer Darlene Snell and trailer-trash business whizz Ruth Langmore, not to mention daughter Charlotte Byrde, who dreams of whisking herself and brother Jonah to the Pacific north-west beyond their parents’ and the mob’s clutches – none of them is a role model. Even Ruth, who is Ozark’s token moral conscience, her every compunction subtly registered in Julia Garner’s impressive performance, is like everyone else: pursuing Ozark’s version of the degraded American dream – profiting from evil without consequence, then blowing town with a bank account swollen by drug money.

Once the Byrdes have washed McTeer out of their hair, they go to Navarro’s gaudy party (the crab alone cost $10,000), where Omar tells them he too dreams of going straight, without having to do jail time or be assassinated by his upstart nephew Javi. “I’m sorry,” says Wendy. “That’s impossible.” “Isn’t this exactly what you were doing with your foundation?” Omar asks reasonably. “You can transform yourselves into a pillar of society, but you won’t do the same for me.” “I’m sorry. It’s not doable.” The temperature drops several degrees. “OK, why are you still alive?” The scene is set for the final season: the Byrdes must help one of the world’s most wanted drug kingpins to walk free or they will go the way of McTeer.

The series premiere, The Beginning of the End, actually opens with one of those tantalising foreshadowing scenes that Ozark does so well. The Byrde family are driving to the soundtrack of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come – as if their troubles are behind them. It recalls the last scene of The Sopranos, in which the mob family are dining at Artie Bucco’s restaurant. We await some terrible denouement – machine gun splattering, ziti stuffed with explosives – but it never arrives. There was, rather, the realised possibility that against the odds, crime, indeed, can pay.

Ozark ironically inverts that Sopranos ending. A juggernaut barrels down the wrong lane of the Missouri black top towards the Byrdes, forcing Marty to swerve and crash. Was it an accident? Was Navarro’s hitman at the wheel of the oncoming truck? Do the Byrdes survive to do what the Macbeths failed to – escape their bloody pasts? Nothing seems more unlikely, but I’ve been wrong before.

Julia Garner’s Net Worth Reveals How Much She Makes Compared to Her ‘Ozark’ Co-Stars

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If you’ve watched her in shows like Ozark and Inventing Anna, you may be wondering about Julia Garner’s net worth and how much she makes compared to her characters.

Garner, who was born in The Bronx, New York, started acting when she was 15 years old as a way to overcome her shyness. “I had a hard time talking,” she told The Cut in 2017. “That’s why I liked acting. Because I could say other people’s words.” When she was 17, she made her movie debut as Sarah in 2011’s Martha May Marlene. She went on to star in movies like Not Fade Away, Electrick Children (which was her first lead role in a film), The Last Exorcism Part II, We Are What We Are, Sin City: A Dame to Kill, Grandma and HBO’s Girls before her scene-stealing role in Netflix’s Ozark, which won her two Emmy awards.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2020, Garner revealed that a casting director was skeptical of her success as an actor when she was a teenager because of how she looked. “[The casting director] is like, ‘You should do independent films,’” Garner said. “I was too natural maybe in terms of acting. I was just too weird-looking. When you think about teen actors, you think of them having this gorgeous, luscious hair and being so pretty that you’re like, ‘You would never be the shy girl in high school.’ I was definitely not [the luscious hair girl]. My style, it’s still the same. It’s been the same since I was 6 years old, which is a black turtleneck.”

So what is Julia Garner’s net worth? Read on for what we know about Julia Garner’s net worth and how much she could make from shows like Ozark and Inventing Anna.

What does Julia Garner make from Ozark?

What does Julia Garner make from Ozark? Garner starred as Ruth Langmore, a young woman who is part of a local criminal family, in Netflix’s Ozark for four seasons from 2017 to 2022. She won two Emmys for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for the role in 2019 and 2020. “I love playing Ruth so much, and every single day I just feel so lucky to be doing this,” Garner said during her Emmys speech in 2019. “This is so special. I’ll remember this forever.”

How much does Julia Garner make from Ozark? Garner’s Ozark salary hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s assumed that she makes around the same amount as her co-stars, Jason Bateman, who plays Marty Byrde, and Laura Linney, who plays Wendy Byrde. According to Variety, both Bateman and Linney made $300,000 per episode on Ozark as of 2017. If their salary remained the same, the rate would’ve paid them $3 million for 10 episodes in season one, $3 million for 10 episodes in season two, $3 million for 10 episodes in season 3 and $4.2 million for 10 episodes in season four, the final season. In total, Bateman and Linney would’ve made at least $13.2 million for all four seasons of Ozark though it’s assumed they made even more after the show’s success and Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series in 2019 and 2020. Bateman has also been nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series from 2018 to 2020, while Linney has been nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2019 and 2020. Given that Garner is a supporting actor for Bateman and Linney’s lead characters in Ozark, it’s assumed that she makes close to what her co-stars earn but not the exact same amount. Considering that she’s the only cast member to win an Emmy—let alone two—for her role in Ozark, we estimate that Garner’s salary is at least six figures per episode of Ozark, which would’ve paid her millions of dollars by the time the series ended in 2022.

Garner told The Los Angeles Times in 2020 that she was cast as Ruth in Ozark after she became “obsessed” with the role. “I had an obsession with Ruth the moment I saw the mock sides for the audition and I don’t get obsession with characters and parts. I’m very good,” she said. “If I have to audition for something, I’m like, ‘One bus comes, one bus goes kind of thing.’ That’s the business we’re in. But I remember I kept thinking, ‘I have to get this part. I will have a hard time watching this show, seeing someone else doing this part.’ And I never think like that. “So, I remember thinking I had to get this part. I just did. There was something, I just understood her for some reason. Even though she’s so different from me.”

She continued, “I went to the audition. I prepared the lines with the accent. So, I memorised my lines with the accent. I did a movie the year before with an accent. So I had the Missouri accent down. There were 15 girls going for the role in the casting office which was the size of a ‘biggish closet’ with ‘paper-thin walls.’”

She revealed that she was the only actress to audition with a Missouri accent. “Every single girl that went in the room was saying the lines that I was going to say, none of them had accents and I was like, ‘Oh my god. I’m going to look like one of those actors who are like I’m an actor, I’m in theatre,’” she said. “Those over-the-top actors that overact. I’m going to look like that actor.” When she tried to audition without an accent, Garner forgot her lines. She said, “I only remembered it with an accent.” Garner didn’t hear back about her audition for a few days and assumed she had lost the role. “Well, I’m going to forget about this. I’m not going to hear from this project. It’s just not happening,” she said. Then, a week after her audition, she received the call that she had booked the part of Ruth. “It worked out for me. I thought there was no chance,” she said.

In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2021, Garner opened up about how she relates to Ruth. “I feel like, when a child goes through something, the first heartbreak, they lose their innocence, and they’re stuck at that age,” she said. “To me, trauma is trauma. With Ruth, her main thing is she doesn’t have women. She only knows how to be with men. But she’s not with men who respect women, or they’re not good men.” She continued, “Ruth doesn’t know what a normal and healthy relationship is. She doesn’t know what unconditional love is.”

What did Julia Garner make from Inventing Anna?

What did Julia Garner make from Inventing Anna? Garner played Anna Delvey (also known as Anna Sorokin) in Netflix’s Inventing Anna, which premieres on February 4, 2022. The show, which was created by Shonda Rhimes, is based on New York Magazine writer Jessica Pressler’s 2018 article, “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People,” which investigated how a Russian woman named Anna Sorokin pretended to be a wealthy German heiress under the name Anna Delvey to defraud banks, hotels and wealthy friends between 2013 to 2017. Sorokin was convicted of multiple counts of attempted grand larceny, larceny in the 2nd degree and theft of services in 2019.

While Garner’s salary for Inventing Anna hasn’t been confirmed, Insider reported in 2021 that Sorokin was paid $320,000 by Netflix for the rights to adapt her life into Inventing Anna. According to court records obtained by Insider, Sorokin used $199,000 of the money to pay restitution to the banks she defrauded and used another $24,000 to settle state fines. She also used $75,000 in attorney fees and will owe more once her case is concluded. Sorokin was released from prison in February 2021 and was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whee she awaits deportation to Germany. After what she paid in restitution, fines and attorney fees, Sorokin will have little left from the $320,000 Netflix paid her.

Rhimes told Town & Country in 2022 about why she cast Garner as Sorokin. “Julia approaches her roles from an intellectual place that allows for the precision and dexterity needed to delve into the mind and spirit of a character,” she said.“Anna Delvey is a person who goes through many transformations to reach her goals. Given Julia’s range, we knew this was something she could deliver on.” She also revealed to The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 that she met Sorokin at the Albion Correctional Facility in New York, where Sorokin asked Garner to re-create her accent. “She might be the hardest character I’ve ever played,” Garner said. “It got super meta because she’s like, ‘So how are you playing me?’” She continued, “I said, ‘Well, you’re very complex. Your accent’s really hard.’ She’s like, ‘Oh my God, how do you sound like me? You have to do it.’ She just was freaking out,” she said.

What is Julia Garner’s net worth

What is Julia Garner’s net worth? Julia Garner’s net worth is $3 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. Garner’s net worth is $7 million less than her Ozark co-star Laura Linney (who is worth $10 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth) and $27 million less than Jason Bateman (who is worth $30 million.) Along with what she made from Ozark and Inventing Anna, Julia Garner’s net worth also includes her pay for shows like The Americans, Maniac, Dirty John, and movies such as Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, We Are What We Are, Grandma and The Assistant.

In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar Singapore in 2022, Garner revealed that her “I made it” moment was when she was watching a episode of Jeopardy in a yellow cab and saw a question about herself. “The words ‘Who is Jason Bateman and Julia Garner?’ were blaring from a rerun of Jeopardy on Taxi TV,” she said. “That was when I thought to myself, ‘Oh, I made it! My name’s on Jeopardy. That’s cool.’” She also told Town & Country in 2022 about why she relates to Sorokin. “She’s a big dreamer, and I would consider myself a dreamer,” Garner said. “In the business that we’re in, you have to be.” As for what else she wants to accomplish in her career, Garner told the magazine: “I want to continue playing strong, complex women. I love switching people’s minds when they’re going back and forth about a character.”

Ozark is available to stream on Netflix.

10 things to watch on TV to make it easier to avoid cold weather and COVID-19

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Temperatures are plunging. The omicron variant is still spreading. Given what’s going on outside your home, staying away from the cold and COVID-19 — and curling up inside in front of the TV — seems like a safe bet for yet another winter.

Hibernating is easier when there is top-quality escapist viewing like HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” which arrives Monday. One of winter’s most eagerly awaited dramas, it boasts an all-star cast, lavish simulations of Manhattan in the 1880s and simmering battles between turn-of-the-century robber barons and old-money families for control of New York’s high society. Who needs a real vacation when such luxurious time travel is available?

Women Are the Ones Who Knock on ‘Ozark’

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As Netflix continued expanding its library of original programming, the 2017 debut of Ozark followed in the footsteps of House of Cards and checked off an essential box for the streamer: the antihero drama. The series premiere finds mild-mannered accountant Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) staring down the barrel of a gun after his business partner is caught skimming money off a Mexican drug cartel, and then saving his own life by proposing a money laundering operation in the Lake of the Ozarks. And so Marty uproots his family from Chicago to Missouri, where he soons discovers that an act borne out of self-preservation might actually be a secret calling: Turns out, he enjoys breaking bad—pun very much intended.

In the Mount Rushmore of television’s male antiheroes—Tony Soprano, Walter White, Omar Little, Don Draper—Marty’s amoral trajectory most closely resembles that of Heisenberg. But while Ozark shares plenty of surface-level similarities with Breaking Bad, the show adds its own unique touches. For starters, Marty’s wife Wendy (Laura Linney) becomes complicit to the money laundering scheme from the jump, and it takes all but three episodes before their kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), are let in on the secret. It’s not exactly smooth sailing, but the Byrdes adjust to their new normal. The family that launders money together, stays together.

But one other tweak to the formula is what truly separates Ozark from Breaking Bad, and the antihero subgenre as a whole. Even though Marty proves to be resourceful, he’s mostly content to just run the numbers. The Byrde patriarch isn’t anyone’s idea of a good person, but he also isn’t getting his own hands dirty. Instead, the compellingly corrupted soul of Ozark is Wendy, whose Lady Macbeth act becomes more gripping—and reprehensible—with each season.

Far from being horrified by Marty’s actions in working for a cartel, Wendy becomes the public face of their operation and all that it entails. With a background in Chicago politics, she transforms the legitimate side of the business, including a riverboat casino, into a reputable local institution before forming a political foundation in the family’s name. Wendy’s big-picture view is using the capital from money laundering to influence national politics, but the character’s justification that doing the wrong thing now will lead to the right outcome down the road conceals an insatiable craving for power at any cost. Wendy has signed off on multiple assassinations in the series—including against her own brother, Ben (Tom Pelphrey), marking a harrowing point of no return. Ozark might’ve begun with Marty as its Walter White analogue, but heading into its endgame, Wendy is the one who knocks.

Subversion has long been a characteristic of the antihero drama, and by giving female characters like Wendy a spotlight historically reserved for men, Ozark is subverting the genre itself. That storytelling choice extends to the series’ answer to Jesse Pinkman. Upon arriving in the Ozarks, the Byrdes cross paths with Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner), a local whose family is routinely mixed up in petty crimes. But Marty sees potential in Ruth, taking her under his wing and showing her, if not a better way of living, then a more forward-thinking life of crime. The series’ X factor and undisputed MVP, Ruth’s unassuming appearance—she’s short, baby-faced, and sports curly blonde hair—belies an explosive temper and arguably the foulest mouth on television. But what has made the character truly resonate is the fact that beneath her profane bark, Ruth is extremely intelligent—her anger stems in part from knowing that she’s been dealt a poor hand in life—and in her own way, full of empathy. Ruth is fiercely protective of her comparatively innocent cousins and sees the good in people even if they can’t see it themselves—including Ben, whom she falls in love with in Season 3 before Wendy has him killed. Of Ozark’s three Primetime Emmy wins, two belong to Garner for her breakout performance, and it wouldn’t be surprising if she added a third for herself later in the year.

While Marty remains a central figure in Ozark’s final season, Wendy and Ruth continue to occupy the show’s most fascinating real estate. Following the revelation of Ben’s death—and Ruth, iconically, referring to Wendy as a “fucking bitch wolf”—Marty’s former protégé has decided to forge her own path by teaming up with local heroin producer Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery). (Darlene is yet another example of Ozark’s uniting philosophy—a secondary villain also happens to be a woman, and who seizes control of a drug empire by poisoning her husband for being too soft.) But switching jobs isn’t liable to end well when your old employer is a cartel, and one of the people standing in your way was willing to kill her own brother.

The ongoing tension between Wendy and Ruth—and the other characters needing to choose their allegiances—has propelled Ozark to thrilling new heights as it enters the first half of its fourth and final season. Without future seasons to worry about, it feels like anybody could end up in a body bag—or, more likely given that the Byrdes own a funeral home, tossed in a crematorium to avoid an evidence trail. (This is not a joke: For the second year in a row, the only spoiler note Netflix gave out for press was to not reveal “all character deaths.”)

Marty’s passive attitude—or at best, apathy—to the ugliest aspects of his family’s line of work underlines the series’ uniqueness. Historically, audiences have had a prickly (and at times toxic) relationship with certain female characters in antihero dramas, primarily for the “crime” of reacting like any rational person would after discovering that their husband was, say, cooking meth. But Ozark flips the script by not just making sure that female characters aren’t overlooked, but by largely having them be responsible for the shocking narrative developments that make these kinds of dramas so irresistible to watch.

Of course, the life-or-death stakes in Ozark’s final season will seem quite familiar for television viewers with even a passing knowledge of The Sopranos or The Wire. But by embracing complex, morally conflicted female characters in various positions of power, Ozark has forced the antihero drama to evolve. There’s no reason why breaking bad should be a boy’s club—not when standout characters like Wendy Byrde and Ruth Langmore are just as willing to scheme, shout, and kill their way to the top.

The week in TV: Ozark; Stacey Dooley: Stalkers; As We See It; Dancing on Ice

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Ozark (Netflix)

Stacey Dooley: Stalkers (BBC One/Three) | iPlayer

As We See It (Amazon Prime)

Dancing on Ice (ITV) | ITV Hub

If there is such a thing as a mild-mannered bloodbath, then Netflix’s Ozark, created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, with Chris Mundy as showrunner, delivered it over the course of three series. Jason Bateman (also co-executive producer and co-director) plays Marty Byrde, the accountant who placates a Mexican drug cartel by transplanting his family – wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and children (Sofia Hublitz and Skylar Gaertner) – to the Lake of the Ozarks, central Missouri, to launder money in floating casinos and the like. By the close of series three – spoilers ahead! – Wendy’s unstable, inconvenient brother was dead and cartel-fixer Helen (Janet McTeer) had her brains shot out by drug lord Omar (Felix Solis), all over the Byrdes, whom he’d decided were more useful.

This fourth and final series will be delivered in two parts, with the first seven episodes available now. It follows the Byrdes as they scrape bits of “Helen” out of their hair, then deal with the aftermath. Omar wants to live legitimately, but FBI deals don’t come easily. A PI is digging for dirt. Omar’s nephew, Javi (Alfonso Herrera), arrives as a trigger-happy playboy-gangster. Then there are the Ozark locals, including fiery hustler Ruth (Julia Garner), once Marty’s protege, now bereaved, betrayed and in league with heroin poppy grower Darlene (Lisa Emery), a hillbilly sociopath so petrifying and unpredictable, I find myself watching her scenes in full fight-or-flight mode.

When Ozark first appeared – another middle-class family dragged into the underworld – it was dismissed by some as a mere Breaking Bad rehash. Give over. Ozark is its own beast: a chilling, slow-churning opera of frayed loyalties, burnt bridges and familial decay. Bateman saved himself from a career path of playing endless benign dads with the grimly urbane Marty. Linney’s Wendy has evolved into a scheming lakeside Lady Macbeth who has sold her soul so many times it’s virtually on eBay. Immersed in this slurry of ethical bin juice, it’s little surprise that their children coolly ponder their parents’ deaths as though discussing unreliable wifi. By the half-season finale, only Ruth – raging, broken, eyes blazing like hot coals – retains any semblance of moral core. Garner has already won two Emmys for this role; another should be on the way.

Holly Willoughby does her gorgeous but accessible thing (the Asos Marilyn Monroe)

In the week the government threatened the BBC, please remember that Channel 4 also remains endangered. How long before terrestrial British television is reduced to a series of test cards, with Boris Johnson, Rupert Murdoch and Nadine Dorries taking it in turns to be the little girl chalking on the blackboard?

On BBC One and Three there was the two-part docuseries Stacey Dooley: Stalkers, directed by Alana McVerry. Far from being a rare celebrity phenomenon, one in five women are stalked and one in 10 men. Dooley embedded herself with Cheshire police’s specialist stalking unit, interviewing understandably distraught victims. Sabrina, a single mother, spends her life looking over her shoulder. Dancer Abby’s stalker hid in her shed and is revealed – conflictingly for her and Dooley – to be autistic. Katie’s stalker tried to claim that she was harassing him. His Google searches were found to include: “How do you get a black eye without pain?”

Stacey Dooley with a member of Cheshire police’s stalking unit in Stacey Dooley: Stalkers. Photograph: Alana McVerry/BBC/Screen Dog Productions

In the second episode (both available to stream), Dooley examines the less prevalent stranger-stalking. Along the way she interviews (disguised) former offenders and considers ways to help stalkers: could psychotherapy be effective? Still, Dooley reserves her empathy and hugs for the victims, and rightly so. Stalking is shown to be a grotesque matrix of mind games, fixation, narcissism, entitlement, threats and worse. Half of convicted stalkers reoffend, and restraining orders make little difference. Such scrutiny is good, but with stalking victims stuck in what amounts to a hellish, hyper-vigilant Groundhog Day, what’s clearly needed is action.

Amazon Prime’s new eight-part dramedy about autistic flatmates, As We See It, was created by Jason Katims (Parenthood), who himself has an autistic child. The main characters are played by people on the spectrum: Rick Glassman is Jack, a computer programmer who is abrupt and outspoken: “Harrison smells. It’s probably because he’s so fat.” Albert Rutecki plays Harrison, who’s scared of the outside world. Sue Ann Pien is Violet, who yearns to be in love and “normal”. Sosie Bacon (Mare of Easttown) is their aide, who’s offered a career opportunity but can’t bear to leave them.

This is an intriguing, inventive project, based on an Israeli show, with a strong message. The first three episodes, directed by Jesse Peretz (Girls) and Jaffar Mahmood, have an offbeat tone but address real issues: Jack’s father (Joe Mantegna) dying of cancer (“I need to know you’re OK, Jack”); Violet’s brother, Van (Chris Pang), exploding with anxiety: “You’re not fucking normal!”. Glassman, Rutecki and Pien should be commended for giving such distinct portrayals of autistic personalities. As We See It isn’t merely instructive – it’s a genuinely engaging watch.

Last, I thought I should take an in-depth look at the opening instalment of ITV’s Dancing on Ice, so that the world could be made aware of the atrocities being committed there.

At first, all was calm and strangely beautiful. A dreamy opening sequence showed celebrity contestants staring up at the main judges, fabled Olympians Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, skating in the heavens. Next came the presenters: Holly Willoughby, doing her gorgeous but accessible thing (the Asos Marilyn Monroe), and Phillip Schofield, sporting a suit made from carpet underlay.

Celebrity skaters included former Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt (good) and Sally Dynevor from Coronation Street (nervous). Bez from Happy Mondays (hopeless) was lowered on to the ice atop a gigantic pair of maracas; now there’s a man who knows how to give the public what they want.

‘Hopeless’: Bez, right, with Angela Egan in Dancing on Ice. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

DOI isn’t Strictly Come Dancing, even though two people from it are involved: past and present professional dancers Brendan Cole, as a contestant, and Oti Mabuse, as a judge. The ambience is 1970s Butlin’s if the weather turned chilly. It doesn’t even have an orchestra; it sounds as though a radio has been left on in a giant fridge-freezer. But what DOI does have is glorious unstuffiness and real lurking danger. Good luck, ice-bound celebrities, you’ll need it.

What else I’m watching

Why Ships Crash

(BBC Two)

A documentary about the running aground last year of the Ever Given cargo vessel in the Suez Canal. There’s no mystery as to how it got stuck (it’s as long as the Empire State Building), but how could it affect so many global supply chains?

Dolly Parton: Here I Am

(BBC Two)

This 2019 documentary, previously aired on Netflix, is included in a night of programmes paying homage to the Nashville goddess, LGBTQ advocate and so much more. Interviewees include 9 to 5 co-stars Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda.

Keeping Up With the Aristocrats

(ITV)

This three-part docuseries explores hard-up British aristocratic families so cash-strapped they’re considering supper clubs with Jean-Christophe Novelli and starting up vineyards. Do you end up feeling sorry for them? No, you don’t.