Television has been through a huge number of changes over the past four decades — and Jason Bateman has been there for almost all of them.
Getting his start as a child on the multicamera ’80s sitcom Silver Spoons, Bateman, now 57, helped kick off the single-camera comedy boom of the 2000s with Arrested Development and defined Netflix’s elevated drama approach with Ozark, which debuted in 2017.
What you might not realize is that he’s also been behind the scenes for all of those transformations, working as a sitcom director in the ’90s (Bateman directed Steve Urkel actor Jaleel White and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen!) and taking on an episode of Arrested Development before moving on to directing the features Bad Words and The Family Fang. When television called him back with Ozark, he tells me it was because the medium had evolved to the point where the New York-born, L.A.-raised multihyphenate could direct a series the same way he’d been making movies.
“As streaming stuff started to become a bit more cinematic, they started looking for feature directors,” Bateman says on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “By the time we got to Ozark, that was the type of director they were looking for.” Bateman knows they weren’t looking for him specifically. “They were shooting for people considerably bigger and better than me, with oodles of experience,” he says. “But I managed to talk my way into that.”
Directing nine episodes of Ozark, including the first two episodes of the first three seasons and, later, the series finale, allowed Bateman to direct television with “the kind of escalation and responsibility and challenge that I was looking for in the feature world as a director.” Bateman won an Emmy for directing Ozark in 2019, and when the series ended in 2022, he was ready for the next challenge — which was when Black Rabbit came calling.
Created by Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, Black Rabbit shares some similarities with Ozark as it depicts seemingly ordinary people drawn into a world of organized crime. This time it’s a pair of New York brothers, played by Bateman and Jude Law, whose investment in a restaurant housed in a historic South Street Seaport gets complicated, and eventually bloody. Bateman directs the first two episodes of the eight-episode limited series, once again setting the tone and visual of the world before handing it over to other directors (including his Ozark co-star Laura Linney, who directs episodes three and four).
“You can teach the audience how to watch the show with the decisions that you make aesthetically and narratively,” Bateman tells me when I asked about what he learned on Ozark that he brought to Black Rabbit. “With Netflix you have this opportunity to have your audience watch a bunch in one sitting, which allows you to be a bit more economical with your expositional moments in the script. You don’t need to repeat as many things.”
He also brings the moody, low lighting that’s familiar to fans of Ozark, and he has a solution for people who think his shows are too dark: “The audience learns, ‘Well, I can’t watch this show during the day ’cause I can’t see shit.’”
Listening to Bateman go deep on the details of directing — from location scouting to key lights to anticipating audience reactions — makes it clear that the nitty-gritty is what he loves about the job. “Creating fake life is a really fun challenge,” as he puts it. “It’s sneaky tough.”
Hear much more from him on today’s episode of the podcast, which also includes a conversation between Vulture TV critic Kathryn van Arendonk and me about what we’re really rooting for this Emmy season, our favorite Gotham TV Award winners and how Netflix’s hit Hunting Wives might be poised to become an Emmy season surprise. And in case you missed our latest bonus episodes, make sure to catch Colman Domingo on his own directing efforts on The Four Seasons, as well as Dakota Fanning on the twist of All Her Fault that made her want to jump on board. There’s one last bonus episode of the podcast coming this Saturday as this round of Emmy season finally comes to a close — stick with us!
