Abstract: Since the time of legal slavery, Missouri has been a site of conflict and geographic uncertainty. The Missouri Compromise (1820) designated Missouri as a slave state, thus aligning it with the American South. During the Civil War, though, Missourians fought on both sides, suggesting a space fully attached to neither the North nor the South. Now, Missouri is most often grouped into the Middle West. Ozark—a Netflix series that ran from 2017 to 2022—refigures this conflict by juxtaposing a White nuclear family with a distorted colonial space: the Ozarks, which are ripe with certain types of resources. This space contains the raw materials that make colonization profitable, from heroin-producing poppies to a dual population (local and tourist) that can sustain criminal activity. But, if the Ozarks stand as a pseudo-colonial space, who is the colonizer and who/what is being colonized? And what does the show say about the nature of midwestern spaces and people?