Cindy Mollo, ACE (Book of Eli, Mad Men, House of Cards), has edited 19 of Ozark’s 44 episodes across four seasons of a drama which has established itself as one of the top-performing originals in Netflix history. Ozark centers on Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney), a seemingly normal couple with two teenage kids who are forced to break bad and relocate to the Ozarks, after a money-laundering scheme goes awry.

Mollo had the honor of putting together both the show’s pilot and series finale, the latter titled “A Hard Way to Go.” “I said to [showrunner Chris Mundy] I wanted to do the finale but I’d not realized how much it would mean to me when we did it,” says Mollo, who earned two Emmy nominations for the series (2019, 2020) and is also a three-time ACE Eddie nominee, winning for Ozark in 2021. “The best thing was the feeling of ‘wewere right from the beginning.’ The pacing never changed, nor did the style of the show, which we nailed in the Season 1 pilot.”  The climactic half of Ozark’s final season debuted on April 29, chalked up 3.3 billion minutes of streaming or a massive 40 percent of the week May 2 – 8 Top 10 on Nielsen’s weekly streaming chart.

In addition to the series finale, Mollo edited the fourth, fifth, eighth and ninth episodes of the 14-episode final season alternating multiple episodes with Vikash (Viks) Patel (who won an Emmy for the series in 2020) just as they have since Season 1. Back in 2016 even before taking on the job, Mollo recalls talking with Mundy about tone. “You need to tell me if you want a comedy or a single-camera drama,” she told him. “We can put in the snarky Jason Bateman performance and we have a funny black comedy but I was also aware from Jason’s work in Bad Words and The Gift that he was interested in playing against type.”

She relates that Bateman told her, ‘If you think something’s funny, you’re wrong. We are telling a dramatic story.’ She continues, “As I was nailing tempo and cutting patterns in early scenes of Season 1, one of my organizing principals was.to check myself not to lean into comedy too much. That tonal decision is validated after the reaction to Season 4. What we did worked for the audience. We did allow a bit more humor in subsequent episodes but we were still never cutting for comedy.” Bateman, also an executive producer and director on the show, guided Mollo not to spoon feed the audience every detail.

“We treat our audience as really smart – which they are – so we had them leaning in, waiting for the next thing to unravel right down to the end,” she says. “We’re letting people figure things out for themselves, trusting in the quieter moments for them to process what has been said before we give them another scene.”

There are a number of shocks in Season 4, notably in  Episode 7 when Ruth (Julia Garner) discovers her cousin and best friend Wyatt’s body. This led to a singular narrative style in the following episode as she resolves to take revenge on Javi (Alfonso Herrera).

“The script for Episode 8, ‘The Cousin of Death,’ was selfcontained about one character’s journey and was a [really] fun thing to work on,” Mollo explains. “There is a Wendy and Marty story, but it all comes together in Ruth’s mission to kill Javi. “Episode 7 [See Patel’s Q&A] ends with Ruth’s scream so the first challenge was how to begin Episode 8. It flows directly from the end of Episode 7, so we know Ruth is in a heightened emotional state. We tossed a few ideas around and settled on a quiet moment in the truck as she contemplates what to do next.”

She has to drive a long distance to Chicago to find Javi and does so listening to ‘Illmatic,’ the debut album by rapper Nas. “Watching someone having all these interior thoughts about what she’s about to do and how she’s been betrayed might not be that exciting for the audience so the challenge is to do that and not be boring.

The music helped convey this as did the editorial idea of stripping away anything we didn’t need just to keep Ruth on her mission.” Ruth misses her first chance to kill Javi after which she has a phone conversation with Marty. He can’t see her but she can see him.

“Marty is telling her to go home but she’s still wonderingwhether he really does care about her or whether he is moreconcerned with protecting his family. At this point she is wavering but the conversation makes up her mind. So, in the final scene, Ruth says exactly what she thinks of them both. She tells Marty that he may say he does things for good reasons but that she sees through this – that essentially Marty is not a good person.

“Marty has always been quick with an explanation and a rationale for why others should do something. When Ruth calls him out I think the audience can relate to that.” The show’s distinctive use of score harks back to early episodes when for certain scenes, notably montages, Mollo would temp with percussion and no melody from the score library by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans.

“Even if there was a pattern I would edit to another cue and change it,” she says. “I am not a musician but I think I have a good rhythm and these non-melodic motifs to my mind drove the score in Season 1. “So often when you start a new show the music becomes a big bone of contention but Chris said it was working and I guess it did. We got a bit more melodic in later seasons because we had characters we were relating to who were dying but early on it was the more percussive sound then that drove sequences.”

The final scene of the entire series is juicily ambiguous. In it, the Byrdes return home to find that PI Mel (Adam Rothenberg) has broken into their house and recovered the cookie jar containing Wendy’s late brother’s ashes. If Mel takes them away the evidence would incriminate the family but instead Byrdes’ son Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) emerges with a shotgun. At this point there’s a cut to black and the credits with just a shot heard but we don’t know whom or what he shoots.

“The scene was shot on two separate nights so I constructed the scene from coverage of Marty and Wendy first before getting the reverse shots at which point we discussed in earnest exactly where it should end. Should we show the gun shot? Do we hear the shot and then fade out? “It became about articulating the beats so that we let the audience in on what Jonah was thinking,” she continues. “He has been estranged from his parents in a number of episodes preceding this and also he’d never killed anyone so this would be crossing a line that he can never walk back from. “

Jason’s notes were that we have to give people time to process what is happening. The family is about to get away, so is the son going to sacrifice himself for the good of the family? That can resonate with the audience. Ultimately, you are left feeling that whatever had happened the story of the Byrdes can never be over, they will always be trapped in this cycle.”

Due to the work-from-home rules under COVID-19 in the final season there was never the full oppportunity for Mollo and Patel to collaborate together as they had since Season 1. “We can see each other’s episodes on Pix to keep up with what is going on in story but the storytelling has always worked so that the episodes exist independently,” says Mollo.

Heather Goodwin Floyd, Mollo’s assistant on early episodes,was promoted to solo editor on 6 episodes including two in Season 4. Aside from Bateman (director of nine episodes), other regular directors include Alik Sakharov, Andrew Bernstein and Amanda Marsalis. “One of the reasons the show is so coherent in style is that it has by and large been created by the same writers, directors and editorial team,” she adds.

“I’ve never been on a show from beginning to end and the feeling of completion is really wonderful. I will miss the characters, as people whose moral compass doesn’t point due north. They want to do a good thing but they choose to do another thing and that causes trouble. Wendy wanted more than being a wife and mother. She sees power and the opportunity to be at the center of things so why should she have to give up marriage and kids when she can have it all?”