Netflix · created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams
Where was Ozark filmed?
The Blue Cat Lodge was a set, and you can have dinner in it. The lodge on the water in the first season was built at a working marina in Canton, Georgia, and when the production had no further use for it the marina kept it standing and opened it as a restaurant. It trades as J.D.'s on the Lake, with the production's signs and props still in place. The resort it was modelled on sits 860 kilometres away in Missouri, on the real Lake of the Ozarks, and nothing was filmed there.
30
places on the route
Georgia stood in for the Ozarks; Missouri got one afternoon. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where was Ozark filmed? In Georgia, over four seasons between 2017 and 2022. The lake in the title is Lake of the Ozarks, in Missouri, and the water on screen is two federal reservoirs north of Atlanta: Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier. So was Ozark filmed in the Ozarks? Netflix answers that in its own first line: the series was not filmed in the Ozarks, some shots of the real lake are used, and most of the work happened in Georgia. Which shots, it does not say.
Over four seasons the production moved away from its own premise. The first season is on water: two reservoirs, two marinas, a road of lakeside houses, a park on a river, a barbecue place on a highway. By the fourth it is filming Mexico in a shopping centre in Chamblee, Chicago in a city park, Kansas City in a bar on Howell Mill Road, and a casino on a riverboat that has not sailed in years. All of that is metro Atlanta. Almost all of the Ozark filming locations are in Georgia; the show reached the real Lake of the Ozarks for a single day, a Wednesday in August 2016.
Plenty of the Ozark filming locations are places you can walk into: the lodge serves food, the drive-in runs four screens, the dive bar has a band most nights. The house the Byrdes live in is somebody's home, on a road where the neighbours have already sat through a week of film trucks.
filmed herewhere the story is set
The lake is two lakes
Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier
Lake Allatoona in November. On screen this water is the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri.
Cherokee, Bartow and Cobb Counties; Hall, Forsyth, Gwinnett and Dawson Counties, Georgia
Two reservoirs 65 kilometres apart do the work of one lake. Lake Allatoona carried the first season, the marinas and the Blue Cat. Lake Lanier carried the house and a good deal of the rest, and the production was still working around it in the summer of 2021, on the last season.
Both are US Army Corps of Engineers water, which means each is a river with a dam across it. So is the lake they stand in for: the row of shops at Lake Ozark, Missouri is named after the dam at the end of it. That is the closest thing to a family resemblance these three bodies of water have.
Allatoona is about 49 square kilometres of water with more than 320 kilometres of shoreline around it, which is a lot of edge for the size of it. The shore and the boat ramps are open to anyone.
Lanier is the one with the house on it. Hall County took much of the filming, and several houses on that shore went into the series.
The first season also used a second marina on Allatoona. Victoria Harbour is four kilometres from the Blue Cat, by road or by boat, and it has a restaurant out on the dock called the Sunset Grille, open to whoever walks up.
Little River Marina, and the set that stayed
Floating walkways on the Little River arm of Lake Allatoona, 260 metres from the marina that carried the Blue Cat Lodge.
Marty Byrde and his family turn up at the Blue Cat in the opening episodes and start getting the measure of it. The inside of the lodge is this marina too, not just the outside of it.
Then the substitution ran backwards. The Blue Cat Lodge set was left standing when the production finished with it, and it reopened as a working restaurant with the show's signs on the walls. Everywhere else the production dressed a real place as a fictional one. Here a fictional one was undressed into a real place, and it is the one you can order from.
J.D.'s on the Lake is seasonal, so a visit in February may find the door shut.
The house
Gaines Ferry Road
Van Pugh Park on Lake Lanier, the nearest public shore to the private houses on Gaines Ferry Road.
Flowery Branch, South Hall County. Private houses.
The Ozark house filming location is a road. The houses along it are private and lived in; the road is the public part.
For four years the production worked at properties along Gaines Ferry Road. By the end of February 2017 there were ruts in the tarmac where cars had swung round a lift left standing half in the roadway for a week, and Hall County was drafting an ordinance to cover what film crews do to a neighbourhood.
These are lived-in houses with families in them. Which driveway the Byrdes turn into, nobody has published.
Four kilometres east, on the Atlanta Highway, is Moonie's Texas Barbecue. A scene was due to be shot there in the last week of October 2016, and the restaurant became one of the show's main locations around Lake Lanier, along with the houses on Gaines Ferry Road. It is still serving barbecue.
What else the first season could reach
A river park, a barbecue joint, a diner and a resort
Jones Bridge Park on the Chattahoochee, which is River Light Rapids in season one, episode four.
Peachtree Corners, Marietta, Midtown Atlanta and Braselton
Season one, episode four, wants white water, and gets it at Jones Bridge Park, a twelve-hectare county park on the Chattahoochee that stands in for River Light Rapids. It is free to walk into. The same episode puts a restaurant on screen, and the restaurant is Williamson Bros. Bar-B-Q in Marietta, trading since 1990, along the same road as the Big Chicken, Marietta's landmark Kentucky Fried Chicken sign.
Episode eight has a diner and a resort. The diner is the Silver Skillet, which has been on 14th Street for more than fifty years and has also been in Remember the Titans, The Founder and Anchorman 2. The resort is Château Élan, 60 kilometres out in the north Georgia foothills, where the production used a guest room, a cabana by the pool, the restaurant and the bar. All of it inside. The winery on its hill is not the part that was filmed. The estate runs tours and tastings every day.
A county park on the Chattahoochee, a barbecue room in Marietta, a Midtown breakfast counter and a hotel corridor sixty kilometres out of town: that is the width of the first season's Missouri.
Lawrenceville, Duluth and Technology Parkway
Downtown Lawrenceville. The production worked here in February 2017; what it shot is not recorded.
Lawrenceville, Duluth and Peachtree Corners, Gwinnett County
The production was working in downtown Lawrenceville in the first week of February 2017. Parts of the series were shot in Duluth and Canton in 2016: Canton is the marina, and Duluth is another Gwinnett town, fifteen kilometres north-west of Lawrenceville.
Two days of second-season filming went into 25 Technology Parkway, on Monday 29 and Tuesday 30 January 2018. That work was indoors, and the street outside it is offices and light industry.
Off the water
Season one is playing the Ozarks. Seasons three and four are playing everywhere else: Mexico twice, Chicago, Kansas City, and a casino floating on a boat that no longer goes anywhere.
The Missouri Belle is two places
A paddle-wheeler under way on Stone Mountain Lake in 2005, when the park's riverboats were still working.
Stone Mountain, DeKalb County, and River Street, Savannah
The boat is a retired riverboat at Stone Mountain Park, dressed with Missouri Belle signs. There is more than one former riverboat there. The park charges admission, and visitors are asked to take their photograph from the shore and not to go aboard.
A white paddle-wheeler was working the park's lake in 2005. By the summer of 2024 a decommissioned paddle steamer was sitting among the trees at the edge of the same water, with no sign on it at all.
The interiors are another matter: the casino rooms were not shot on the boat at all.
The water outside the casino is in a third place again. The Big Muddy's waterfront is River Street in Savannah, about 360 kilometres south-east of Atlanta, and some of those shots were finished digitally. What is genuinely there is the cobbled riverfront and the cruise boats that work it.
Two Mexicos
The front of Westview Abbey in Atlanta. In the show this is the Navarro estate in Mexico.
1680 Westview Drive SW, Atlanta, and Chamblee, DeKalb County
The Navarro estate, the grand Mexican house at the top of the cartel, is the mausoleum of a working cemetery in the West End of Atlanta. Westview has been burying people since 1884 and is open to visitors. It has made nothing of the series: its own website does not mention it, and the copyright line at the foot of the page reads 2014, three years before the first episode.
The other Mexico is a shopping centre. In the third season Plaza Fiesta in Chamblee stands in for the country itself, and it is open, free to walk into and eighteen kilometres from the mausoleum. Between them, a cemetery and a mall do the work of a foreign country.
Chicago, Kansas City and a campus in Brookhaven
The meadow at Piedmont Park, standing in for Chicago's Great Lawn in the fourth season.
Chicago's Great Lawn in the fourth season is the open meadow at Piedmont Park. The same grass has been in Avengers: Infinity War, Anchorman 2 and What to Expect When You're Expecting.
Season four's Kansas City dive bar is a dive bar on Howell Mill Road. Northside Tavern was a grocery in the 1940s and has live music in it most nights of the week. The show needed a dive bar and rented a dive bar. The only fiction is the city.
Oglethorpe's Gothic stone buildings went into the fourth season, Lupton Hall among them. The university is private; the art museum on the campus is free to walk into.
Midtown, West Midtown, Buckhead and Peachtree Corners
By the third season the Byrdes are eating in rooms that cost money, and the production went out and rented real ones.
Ecco plays Arrowhead Tavern in season three, and there are three Eccos in Atlanta: Midtown, Buckhead and one inside the airport. Bacchanalia, open since 1993, plays a restaurant called Oak & Sage in season four. Chops Lobster Bar in Buckhead plays an upmarket cigar club in the same season, and the thing to recognise there is the tiled ceiling. In early 2022 it was shut for repairs.
J.R.'s Log House in Peachtree Corners is the odd one out. It is a log building that has been serving barbecue since 1983, and in season three it plays a barbecue place called JR's BBQ. The production rented a restaurant, changed one letter in the name and pointed the camera.
2000 Moreland Avenue SE, Atlanta, and Norcross, Gwinnett County
Ruth drives to a drive-in with a bag of cash and does not notice that she is being followed. Season three, episode six, the Starlight Drive-In on Moreland Avenue. Four screens, still running, with a flea market on the lot at weekends.
Netflix's own travel guide then does something odd with it. Having explained that the scene was shot in Atlanta, it turns to readers who are actually standing at the Lake of the Ozarks and sends them to the 19 Drive-In at Cuba, Missouri, which is not in the show. It is simply a drive-in near the right lake. The official guide to the series, in other words, ends up recommending a substitute for a substitute.
The other outdoor errand of those seasons is at Best Friend Park in Norcross, sixteen hectares of municipal grass, where Wendy's fight at the farmers market was filmed in the third season and the production came back for the fourth.
Missouri, 860 kilometres west
The lake, the town and the dock
The Community Bridge over the real Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. No source we read puts this bridge in the series.
Photo: Federal Highway Administration · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Camden, Miller and Morgan Counties, Missouri. The setting, not the location.
This is the lake the series is named after, set on, and almost never filmed on. Which bridge, which water tower, which stretch of shore made the cut — nobody has published that.
Osage Beach is the town the Byrdes move to. Its year-round population is a little under 5,000; on a holiday weekend it takes tens of thousands of visitors. A small town in the winter, and not one in July.
Ten kilometres up the lake from the dam is Alhonna Resort & Marina, the resort the Blue Cat Lodge was built from. Bill Dubuque, who created the series, once worked this dock as a dockhand. Nothing was filmed here. The man who worked this dock wrote a show set on this water, the lodge in it went up 860 kilometres away in Georgia, and the copy is the one with the show's signs on the wall.
Ozark Law is a different show
If that is the one you were after: Ozark Law was filmed on the real Lake of the Ozarks, in Osage Beach and Lake Ozark, Missouri. It is a ten-part documentary series made by Lucky 8 for A&E, it went out from 8 January 2025, and it follows the two towns' police departments. The city of Osage Beach announced it in December 2024, after a summer of camera crews riding with officers from both lake towns.
So the show with Ozark in its title that actually filmed at the Lake of the Ozarks is the one about the police.
The Bagnell Dam Strip
The Bagnell Dam Strip at dusk in May 1973, shot for a federal photographic survey. A crew worked this street forty-three years later.
Except once. On Wednesday 31 August 2016 half of Bagnell Dam Boulevard was shut, police were waving traffic round it, and a camera crew was set up outside Richard's Relic Shack on the Bagnell Dam Strip. For a week the lake had been passing round the word that a Netflix crew was in town, on a series Jason Bateman was producing.
The Strip is the mile of shops and arcades that runs down to the dam. In May 1973 Bill Kuykendall photographed it at dusk for the federal government, cars and lights the whole length of it. Forty-three years later a crew stood in the same stretch for a day and went home to Georgia.
Four years along one road in Hall County. Four seasons and forty-four episodes out of two Georgia reservoirs. One Wednesday on the lake the show is named after.
