At the beginning of “Ozark,” debuting Friday, July 21, on Netflix, Jason Bateman’s Marty Byrde is a money manager sleepwalking through life in the Chicago suburbs — his children are disinterested in him, and his wife, played by Laura Linney, is plainly dissatisfied.

By the end of the first episode, he is wide-awake — he has witnessed multiple murders and is moving his family to Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks in a last-ditch effort to placate the drug lord he has been laundering money for in secret. His new mission: “Clean” $8 million by the end of the summer, or everyone dies. Also, parry the F.B.I. officers, local cops and crime clans that plague him along the way.

This primary narrative makes for a thriller that checks many boxes of the genre: Marty, an Everyman dropped into a fraught situation, negotiates mortal jeopardy and an inexorably ticking clock as he wriggles out of one perilous situation after another (after another, after another).

“There are no tricks to it,” said Mr. Bateman, who also directed four episodes and is an executive producer of this show. “It’s going to rely on our ability to make it feel authentic and raw, and to get the audience into that vicarious place.”